Conference Program

Between 2016 and 2026, school makerspaces in Italy shifted from policy-driven equipment rollouts to contested, pedagogically uneven learning environments. Their institutional entry point is traceable to the National Digital School Plan (PNSD) and INDIRE’s Maker@Scuola research, active since 2014, which translated international maker discourses into school-relevant questions of architecture, curriculum integration, and teacher professional learning (Guasti & Nulli, 2021; INDIRE–EUN, 2020; Martinez & Stager, 2021). The decade’s most enduring lesson is civic as much as pedagogical: the makerspace, when it works, is not a room full of machines but a threshold space between school and community.

The INDIRE Makerspace Manifesto (2019) made this explicit: the school makerspace is a place where the institution “opens towards the outside, connects with an extra-scholastic reality, and renews its structures” — with separate external access and deliberate involvement of local institutions, civic associations, and economic actors. This directly anticipates the school-as-community-hub paradigm. As INDIRE’s research on learning environments argues, schools have become “spaces for dialogue between public administration and citizens, service centres for the territory, and reference points for the archipelago of associations operating in urban settings” (Tosi, 2019). The makerspace is the most concrete operational expression of this vision.

Yet this openness also creates fragility. Sustainability remains the field’s central unsolved problem. Equipment — laser cutters, 3D printers, robotics kits — is typically funded through short-term ministerial calls (PON/FESR) or European structural funds, with no provision for lifecycle costs: consumables, repairs, and the technical expertise required to keep shared tools operational. The Manifesto itself foregrounds this, identifying maintenance and technical development as one of the four core contributions a maker-partner must provide. When partnerships dissolve and funding cycles end, spaces fall into disuse.

Equally critical is teacher professional development. Research documents that teachers lack training not in machine operation, but in maker pedagogy: facilitating open-ended inquiry, assessing process over product, and positioning making as connective tissue between disciplines and community problems (Walan & Gericke, 2023; Quintana-Ordorika et al., 2024). The Manifesto draws a sharp distinction: technical formation can be outsourced to machine vendors, but pedagogical design competence must remain with teachers. Schools that conflate the two produce spaces that are neither effective nor genuinely community-facing.

The 2026 context adds urgency. Generative AI has intensified debate about hands-on learning, but this paper argues the opposite of obsolescence: physical making — rooted in Papert’s constructionism (Harel & Papert, 1991; Levin, Semenov & Gorsky, 2025) — becomes more valuable precisely because AI cannot replicate material agency, spatial reasoning, or collaborative production rooted in local context. A community-open makerspace is a site where students build with neighbours, and where AI augments ideation without displacing the cognitive work of making. Three priorities emerge: funding models covering full lifecycle costs; teacher learning focused on facilitation and community co-production; and making-with-AI curricula positioning fabrication and generative tools as complementary practices. The Italian school makerspace, where it has thrived, demonstrates that schools can be genuine community hubs — places where making together is a democratic act.