With the increasing interest of integrating Making into formal settings, like public school classrooms, questions have emerged on how to sustain Making as a practice in these environments. Mentors, who can guide students’ development of Making knowledge and skills, are needed in these classrooms to facilitate Making activities. In rural areas, the need for experienced mentors is often exacerbated by distance of experienced Maker-mentors from the classroom. In this research we studied how distance mentoring can help a group of high-school students in a rural school to Make and manufacture learning materials for an elementary school in their community. Grounded in literature from Lave and Wenger’s communities of practice and Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, the work presented in this paper investigates how mentorship develops in this classroom, becoming less dependent on researchers for guidance and thus becoming more self-sustaining. We discuss how distance-mentors can better train and sustain expertise in Making classrooms, and how our approach may support this mentorship process by aiming mentors and mentees towards a communal goal. © 2019 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM.
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