A Series of Fortunate Accidents: Lessons Learned When Things Go Sideways in Making Projects with Children

Maker culture celebrates mistakes as an essential part of the process - reflecting on our failures promotes learning and understanding of the processes we work with. As researchers and practitioners organizing digital fabrication and making activities with children, we all know even the best laid plans can fail, or at least there is a chance that things do not go as expected. However, when reporting our activities, we tend to focus on success stories. As success is often built on learning from our mistakes, it is important to embrace and reflect on them as a community. In this workshop we invite researchers and practitioners to discuss the fortunate accidents made when working with children in digital fabrication and making projects, and to compile a set of short papers including lessons learned that are geared towards the researcher or practitioner entering the FabLearn community.