STEAM in Oulu: Scaffolding the development of a Community of Practice for local educators around STEAM and digital fabrication

There is an increased interest to integrate STEAM methodologies and digital fabrication processes into formal education. However, teachers have repeatedly reported a set of impediments that hampers them to succeed. This integration requires a set of changes in the school organization, resourcing and a proper teacher training. A Community of Practice formed by different stakeholders of a local educational community might provide the necessary grounds to lead to this transition. In this paper, we report our experience of creating and scaffolding a local Community of Practice for a period of ten months. We present the different activities we carried out during this period, emphasizing a digital fabrication training that we conducted, at our university Fab Lab premises, for teachers and school principals separately. We also explore the influence of this training on scaffolding of the development of the Community of Practice. We expect the training structure, discussion and insights presented in this paper would inspire other researchers and practitioners trying to bring digital fabrication to formal education.