Rural Family Makers

Family Makers empowers rural children and caregivers to become problem solvers by immersing them in doing and seeing culturally-relevant engineering. Family Makers is designed to leverage families' everyday making practices, turning them into valuable learning resources for engineering. Our programming further grounds engineering in the lived experiences of engineers who grew up in rural communities to help families see the relevance of engineering.  Family Makers takes Research-Practice Partnership approach to co-design the curriculum with rural library staff and embeds learning supports for rural library staff to facilitate the Family Makers online programming. Together, we aim to lift barriers that a high population of rural children experiences in engaging with engineering learning and to position rural libraries as key institutions to democratize engineering learning opportunities.