Level Up

These Maker Skill Trees are awesome. They cover a mix of life (cleaning, cooking, travel), “classic” (knitting, woodworking, automotive), and tech (3D printing, Linux, mobile app development) skills and give a nice visual map of how you might progress in developing your skills through increasingly more advanced projects.

For example, get started baking by making something with a packet mix or making brownies, moving towards making homemade marshmallow or cheesecake and eventually up to a wedding cake or croquembouche. The civics and community tree ranges from registering to vote through running for mayor. It could be fun to have my programming students fill out the coding one; I love the “Fix errors in your code without using Stack Overflow” item though some of it (“Write a MacOS Hello World program using Cocoa”) is very specific and “Document your program” should be much lower on the tree (though I suppose there’s some reason to having it come after “Get confused by reading your own code”).

It’s an open source project and there’s opportunities to make your own skill tree or peer review one that’s posted to prepare it for translation into other languages. You can also see what skills there’s interest in adding but haven’t been built yet and suggest your own.

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