Makercosmos is a four-year maker education programme in Arnhem, the Netherlands, which comprises the development of series of maker education lessons and participatory action research about learning in maker education, among other activities. This study reports findings from the first pilot of this series, with a particular focus on how the research part was designed, developed, and delivered. Practice showed, that in our context asking teachers to teach and to carry out data collection for research simultaneously produced only meagre results when using a conventional notebook approach. Design principles are suggested to remodel the research approach.