Tinkering with Music: Designing a Maker Curriculum for an After School Youth Club

In recent years, researchers have focused on the design and implementation of maker activities across formal and informal settings. As a result, the research community is gradually articulating the challenges and design considerations relating to these settings. These include: tools, facilitation, and curricular requirements. In this paper we present the design and implementation of Tinkering with Music, a 10-week youth club curriculum around popular music appreciation and instrument building with electronics. Reflecting on our design and implementation, we report on: (1) our curricular activities; (2) design challenges which we had to overcome throughout implementation, and (3) a failure to engender long term engagement with tools and practices from the curriculum.