I think part of the irony of this situation is that Make Magazine publishes tutorials and features white American childrens' projects who have almost certainly

I think part of the irony of this situation is that Make Magazine publishes tutorials and features white American childrens' projects who have almost certainly received extreme hand-holding help from parents. If the standard is truly "without external help", are people following tutorials in Make magazine not 'real' makers? If the standard is "represent as doing all the work", to what extent does Make verify that the (often privileged) children it features are doing all of the work themselves? Has the CEO ever called out a child for getting too much help? Children is certainly a bit of a straw man, but I suspect they feature many young-20-something white male Americans whose parents have taught them technical things from young age, can afford maker equipment to experiment with at home, can ask their parents for technical help when they get stuck, have mentors in their family's social network that are experts in the field, etc. I guess my point is EVERYONE in the maker movement needs lots of help if they are not from the highest levels of privilege. There is a ton of info to learn, and nobody has the time to trial-and-error brute force their way to expertise. Implicit standards that everything must be done and figured out yourself creates a bias to only feature people who "need" the exposure least and are most privileged. Anyone working 'alone' has likely received enough help on previous projects that they were able to build off those skills to self-teach the rest of the way. Obviously, Make magazine appreciates the value of help and instruction within the maker community: that is their reason for existence. Thus, I believe Dale is holding Naomi to a higher standard than he does for most male American makers because of his own biases.