The purpose of a makerspace in public schools cannot be separated from the demands of standardized testing. Therefore, the best approach for creating a sustainable makerspace is to integrate activities into core curriculum areas, like English Language Arts, Science, Social Studies and Math.

In the book, Maker-centered Learning, Clapp et al. describe primary and secondary benefits for makerspaces. The primary benefit is to help students develop agency (a confidence in learning) and character (empathy for others through making meaningful artifacts that benefit someone else). Secondary benefits include skill development and a deeper understanding of content knowledge.

For public schools, these benefits need to be flipped if a makerspace is to be sustainable. The primary benefit should be for students to develop deeper content knowledge, while improving basic skills in those areas. Examples might include engagement with reading through creating physical representations of characters or scenes from books and stories. Students could also gain number sense and mathematical reasoning by working out solutions to engineering designs for objects they want to create. And, students can develop explanations to scientific phenomena by exploring concepts like circuits.