The CONSTRUIT! project promotes making construals as a new digital skill for creating interactive open educational resources (OERs). The rationale for studying construals is that it can be seen (indeed, construed!) as bringing a new vision, and a new technology, to a well-established pedagogical tradition: that of learning through making things-to-think-with. In the course of the project, we have identified several communities with a strong interest in this topic from whom we have much to learn and to whom we in turn may have much to offer. They include students, teachers, learning technologists and researchers interested both in broad pedagogical approaches, such as constructionist, experiential, inquiry-based and collaborative learning, and in more specific areas of application, such as computer science education, the psychology of programming, educational robotics and interactive technologies and games. In these communities, three themes set out in the Call for the forthcoming CONSTRUIT 2017 conference are represented: principles and practices for making things-to-think-with; open educational resources (OERs) based on things-to-think-with; learning-through-making in the broader educational context.

• Principles and practice of making things-to-think-with
  • Construals as objects/things-to-think-with
  • Environments that support learning-through-making
  • Understanding making in relation to programming and computational thinking

• Open educational resources for the classroom
  • Primary, secondary and tertiary education
  • Science: e.g. Computing, Mathematics, Educational Robotics
  • Humanities: e.g. Languages, History, Music

• Open educational resources beyond the classroom
  • Subject areas: engineering, software development, experimental science, history of science, astronomy, medicine
  • Applications: mechanism, musical instruments, geometric modelling, design, geographical information systems
  • Management: spreadsheets, timetabling, financial modelling

• The broader educational context / perspective
  • Pedagogy: experiential learning, inquiry-based learning, conceptual modelling
  • Integrating making and modelling into the school curriculum
  • Pedagogical characteristics of construals

The aspiration for CONSTRUIT! is to show that learning-through-making in all its different manifestations can benefit from the conceptual and practical framework that has been developed in the course of the project. In preparation for the CONSTRUIT 2017 conference, and with a view to future developments that we hope can spring from CONSTRUIT!, we are recruiting specialists to help us to evaluate this thesis. To this end, we invite anyone interested in the learning-through-making agenda to engage with the embryonic resources we have developed to address the wide range of topics listed below and give us their feedback by way of review and critique. With each of these topics we shall associate exemplars by way of construal-related resources created in the online "environment for making construals" (MCE). Developing and refining such exemplars is ongoing work-in-progress to which all are invited to contribute.

Former graduates from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick (since the 1980s) may well have participated through coursework, project work, or research, in using the software tools of the Empirical Modelling Project (the EDEN family of notations for example). If you have memories of this experience (good or bad!) and retain an interest in computer-based modelling we would be delighted to hear from you again and hope that you would also want to join the CONSTRUIT 2017 Interest Group. We may have forgotten your name so please mention your Warwick experience in the space available when you join the Interest Group.