Participative evaluation with children in educational maker projects: Experiences from a pilot action

The European project DOIT follows the maker pedagogy approach to develop an early entrepreneurial education program for children between the age of six and sixteen. In this program, children work collaboratively on solutions for challenges that they know from their personal environments with the aim to aspire to the entrepreneurial spirit and social innovation at the same time. The DOIT program involves 1,000 children in two pilot phases at 11 pilot sites in ten different European countries. A comprising evaluation design has been set-up that comprises not only conventional evaluation tools such as questionnaires and tests but also participative instruments. Being aware of that conventional evaluation tools are somewhat in contrast with the innovative setting of a maker project where children are the agents for change, we tried to incorporate participative evaluation instruments where possible. The latter ones have an empowering function as children are not only the 'object' of research but they themselves take over the role of co-researchers. The paper describes some of these instruments and shares some first-hand experiences with the tools and preliminary results, as the project will still be ongoing at the time.