Making & Science

Making & Science is a Google education initiative website built to inspire the next generation of makers and scientists. Announced at Bay Area Maker Faire in May 2016, the initiative centers around Science Journal — a free digital science notebook app that turns Android phones and Chromebooks into scientific tools capable of measuring light, sound, and motion. The website at makingscience.withgoogle.com serves as the primary digital hub, hosting interactive teaching tools, lesson plans, and hands-on science activities for educators and students.

Google partnered with the Exploratorium in San Francisco to develop the educational content. Together they created a suite of activities covering topics including light, sound, motion, graphs, and conductivity — each designed as 15-30 minute sessions suitable for classroom use. The Exploratorium helped shape both the app's features and the companion website, while also providing professional development resources around inquiry-based learning.

The site was built at Toaster using Polymer, Google's open-source web components library. Polymer was widely adopted across Google properties at the time, powering YouTube, Google Play Music, and the Google I/O conference websites. The broader Making & Science initiative also encompasses a YouTube channel and partnerships with organizations working in science education.

The Science Journal app ran successfully for several years under Google before graduating to Arduino in September 2020, with Arduino taking over stewardship of the free, open-source app on both Android and iOS. The makingscience.withgoogle.com website remains live, continuing to serve as an educational resource through Google for Education.