When makers meet the metaverse: Effects of creating NFT metaverse exhibition in maker education

The main purpose of this paper is to conduct empirical research on the effectiveness of application of a metaverse in maker education. While the control group of students participate in a general maker class that encourages making digital content for relevant contest participation, the experimental group was treated to register their digital artwork as an NFT certified by blockchain technology and display them in the metaverse as a form of a virtual exhibition. The study findings show that while there was a significant statistical difference in terms of creative problem-solving and creative curiosity for both groups, only experimental participants showed improvement in creative cognition. In addition, following the addition of the metaverse treatment, a significant statistical improvement was found in terms of a sense of achievement towards their making process as well as ownership of their making products. Furthermore, the sentiment analysis collected from students' reflection papers reveals that the compounding result of their opinions, appraisals, complaints, emotions, or attitudes towards the metaverse exhibition was generally positive. Based on the findings, this paper suggests a new maker education model by expanding the previous one, TMSI (Thinkering, Making, Sharing, Improving), to a concept of TMIOS (Thinkering, Making, Improving, Ownering, Sharing).