From Makers to Mentors

Building STEM Learner and Teacher Identities

By Isabella Lorena Contreras, Boa Sarabia, Claire Gillaspie, Jess Jensen, & Jasmine Nation

Makerspace activities and creative science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) projects in afterschool environments can help youth develop academic content and problem-solving skills while expanding what it means to do STEM (Peppler et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2025). These opportunities support students in developing a “STEM identity,” defined by Chiu (2024) as “how individuals know and name themselves, who one is or wants to be, as well as to how one is recognized by others” (p. 90).