The primacy of in-person schooling is the first principle in our CHENINE charter. My own advocacy for this charter principle emerges, certainly, from my decade-long career as a classroom teacher but also from the research that I have been privileged to lead in a Makerspace program situated in a French-language school school board in Canada’s National Capital Region. Through this work, I have seen how in-person collaborations and interactions support meaning making. Whether children are making physical objects such as musical instruments or digital objects such as videos or slide show presentations, the in-person interactions, discussions, negotiations and sharing of ideas both explicitly and tacitly through peer-to-peer observation are all rich opportunities for the development of language and problem-solving skills. Plus, as learners seek out ideas online, and create traces of their thinking with digital documents such as Google Slides, they practice foundational digital literacies skills too. They practice meaning making with multiple, multimodal information sources and also learn to create their own multimodal texts for a range of communicative purposes. In this article, published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy (2017) I show how grade 6 students practiced disciplinary, digital and maker literacies as they explored the functions and applications of the popular Makey Makey microcontroller. Importantly, the pedagogical moves documented in this research also offer an important point of reference for middle-grades teachers looking to integrate maker-oriented projects into their Science instruction.