What maker skills do you have? What maker skills would you like to acquire? Steph Piper has been thinking about upskilling, and inspired by video games, she began to identify sets of skills as tiles that form trees. She created an online repository of maker skill trees, at:
github.com/sjpiper145/MakerSkillTree
Her insight is that upskilling is a process of adding new skills, one at a time, but not necessarily in any sequential order. In addition, if you are part of a group of people, learning more about what skills makes it easier to find people who can teach you new skills.
Steph is a creative technologist who is passionate about maker culture, hardware development, and edutech. Her day job is managing the Library Makerspace at University of Southern Queensland in Australia. Her side business is Maker Queen, where she sells colorful electronics kits for young kids. In her introduction to her book, Steph asks: “What if every skill we learn could be visualized on a video game dashboard, with a path to future goals revealed?” At Make:, we are excited to publish her new book, Skill Seeker Maker Edition.
About the book
You can order the book through Makershed.com or through other bookstores.
Back Cover
Fireside Chat with Steph Piper on December 3
Join Steph Piper and me for a live Fireside Chat on December 3. We welcome your questions and ideas about how you might use maker skill trees.
We will also be joined by two guests who contributed skill trees:
- Billie Ruben: A maker of many kinds, Billie loves blending digital fabrication with traditional crafts, and trading skills in the online maker communities she has helped to lead. Billie currently works for Lightburn Laser and put together the Laser Cutting Skill tree.
- Luke Henderson: Luke is an edutech expert with an international career from M5 Stack in Shenzhen to Vex Robotics and now Maker’s Empire in Australia. Luke created the Robotics Skill Tree.
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