M4I is an European Project between the cities of Barcelona, Toulouse, Naples, Bucharest and Ghent. Makerspaces are gathering points where communities of new and experienced makers connect to work on real and personally meaningful projects, informed by helpful mentors and expertise, using new technologies and traditional tools.
The objective of this partnership is to promote makerspace-like environments and educational making activities as means to foster social inclusion of young people.
In particular, educators and youth workers should be made aware of the potential of makerspace-like environments to :

- give young people opportunities to learn to do new things, especially through hands-on DIY interactions

- transform young people into agents of change in their communities

- develop their feelings of self-worth

- enable participation in activities, gatherings, exchanges, all this in a safe, secure, comfortable and non-judgmental environment

- produce a sense of belongingness to a community of makers (local, national, international)

- encourage young people to become powerful, resilient an empowered citizens

The project aims to produce a number of deliverables to encourage and guide youth organizations, youth practitioners and makerspaces to embrace the maker attitude and develop educational making activities targeting youth from 9 to 17 years of age, experiencing, or at risk of, social exclusion (ex. early school dropper, minorities, migrants, individuals affected by learning difficulties). The project deliverables will consist of 4 modules:

a) a MOOC (massive online open course) to encourage any actor from the youth sector to set up makerspace-like environments and/or educational making activities;
b) A methodology to run practical making workshops;
c) a set of tools to recognize and validate learning outcomes of youth engaging in making activities;
d) a guide on open source tools and equipments for running making workshop.

Another tangible result will be a dissemination campaign of project’s results that will reach several hundreds individuals active in the youth work sector, and that will offer them avenues to improve their work and enhance the offer for educational activities targeting young people. The campaign will include, notably, the production and dissemination of communication supports relating to the tools produced, to the pilot test sessions, to exploitation activities relying on the project’s output. In addition to this, the dissemination campaign will include videos and photos of pilot tests and of exploitation activities, social media posts (facebook, twitter, etc.) relating, once again, to all practical workshops that participating organization will engage in over the life of the partnership.