As a teacher I have become more skeptical about whole maker movement

If everything on show at open sauce were those stupid 3D printed dragons I'd agree with you. But the maker movement is massive and interesting and goes very very deep. You can self-learn as much about engineering as you'd learn at university. Most kids eventually pivot from wanting to be astronauts/influencers to something more realistic. IMO tinkering is an amazing hobby which will benefit you in whatever direction your career ends up going in.

I would argue that it does turn more people onto engineering paths and will result in more engineers. But it could just be a cool hobby! Does every person who is interested in cooking become a chef? Every person who is into sports become an athlete? Music a musician? With tech becoming more prevalent, people making more things and people repairing more things, I think it's an overall good thing. Also if they become content creators, then so what?

> But the problem is that while kids like it a lot, it doesn't translate to engineering careers. I think there has always been that though. When having a guitar was cool and people thought they'd be famous doing it. Of course 0.00001% actually managed it, but some craft out a career in music or related areas such as being studio engineers etc. (I did) And for some it shows that it is possible, that people like them can be enabled and make their own stuff. It might be that they're are organisations needed to bridge this new gap and get people into more formal engineering, but they'll also hopefully realise that people like them might work one day at top tier engineering companies.

I don't think the fact that you can make fairly serious mechatronic devices with pocket money can conceivably be a bad thing for engineering as a discipline. However this does mean there are a lot of people that own a 3d printer that will never be good engineers.

> Even rather good students with a lot of potential see all this engineering stuff more as a media career or a fun hobby. This seems positive, no? I love the idea that young people want to make stuff and tinker in their free time.

If they really like building stuff like this they can get a career that does it, like Embedded Engineer or Firmware Engineer type roles. And if it's just a hobby that's great too. I'm not sure about the media part, is it because of Youtubers? If so that sounds like wanting to become the modern version of a movie star. In that situation maybe encourage them to do a multimedia class at school and see if they like it.

> they want to become content creators, tinkerers etc. Because there's no incentive alignment in the market to cooperate on larger works. I've been grinding away to solve this exact problem. https://prizeforge.com/vision (don't log in yet. deploying things and everything will be deleted)

I encourage people to learn to program especially if they aren't pursuing a software engineering career. Someone that knows a specific domain that can see it through the lens of an expert at another will understand their domain in a way many others cannot. They will be able to break down problems into a collection of manageable chunks. They will learn valuable lessons that show up when you begin to intimately think your way through specific problems. People may start out with the idea that they can be content creators. They'll have to go through several steps from planning, iteration, implementation, analyzing success or failure, etc. I wanted to make video games as a kid. Then it was being a pro gamer. And then it was physics. And then it was linguistics. And now I'm rounding out the end of a software engineering career. I didn't know how to program, and I wasn't particularly mathematic…