I teach an introductory physical programming course in curricular classes at a public school in São Paulo for middle school students who have never programmed before. In my classes, I try to propose activities suited for iteration and that provide possibilities for multiple pathways in the creation process through a tinkering approach.

In this post I would like to share the experience I had with seventh grade students working on a pinball machine project. 

The materials included pegboards to be used as the support base, screws and nuts, rubber bands, clothespins, cardboard tubes and the beta kit for physical programming (a kit I created to allow tinkering explorations in physical programming). The kit is composed of an Arduino with a shield that converts the pins to audio jacks, servo motors, buzzers, LEDs, lasers, light sensors, switches and potentiometers – that can be connected to the Arduino through audio cables. In our classrooms, we use the S4A for programming because of its easy way to monitor the sensor values.

In the future, I would like to integrate more crafts materials for kids to decorate their machines in artistic ways. Springs are also great materials to this activity and can be used, among other things, to make the ball launcher. Since we didn’t have them, most groups used tubes to launch the ball, and didn’t explore too much other possibilities that could have been fun too.

Why pinball?

I’m a big fan of creating pinball machines as a learning activity.  I love how they can be explored in diverse ways, incorporating different materials, technologies and features. That is why I like to introduce this theme in starter activities to kids who don’t have fluency yet in physical programming: they get really excited about building their machines and this creates a high level of engagement.

Three different 7th grade classes worked on this activity earlier, but in previous experiences I had determined that the project would last only 2 weeks (1.5 hour/week ), since it was part of a research project and I had some time constraints. This time, kids were really engaged in the first two classes and I could see their projects getting better and better – so I let them have more time to keep working on it instead of moving on to the next programmed activity. They worked on the project during 4 weeks, and the outcome of more time was impressive for me, both in the high level of engagement and in the complex development of their creations.

Using learning resources for programming

One thing that added more engagement was the use of  some new learning resources that I’ve created based on Scratch Cards. In previous experiences, students needed to find out by themselves how to program their machines, or ask either for my help or colleagues’ help.  Hence, much energy was spent on trying to get the code right to do what they wanted – sometimes with high levels of frustration that would make them want to give up on some features, keeping it simpler. Using these resources was a great experience not only  for students, who could have more autonomy to develop ideas and explore more diverse pathways, but also for me as a teacher, since I had more time to reflect with the groups about other aspects of their machines and about their ideas and processes.

It was also great to see kids learning about variables in a contextualized way. Many groups wanted to find a way to score points in their games, and the need to learn about variables emerged from their own interests.

I could see students effectively engaged in testing, refining, and changing their paths along the process, and that made me reflect on the importance of having appropriate time to create, develop and complexify ideas, shift to other directions, fail and try again. It was a valuable learning process for me as a teacher to have the freedom to try out new approaches and to be open to what comes up during the development of the classroom activities.

Another point that made me happy was the emotional climate during the last class, when kids had some time to play with other groups’ machines and a free time enjoy their our creations. Although some groups just kept improving their machines and testing it over and over again, it was nice to have this hands-on sharing experience, where students were not only showing their creations to others, but actually providing a playful interaction with them.

Other possibilities for pinball activities

During my trip to the FabLearn Conference  in 2016, I had the opportunity to  work on pinball machines in the Educators Meet Up at the San Francisco Exploratorium (thanks Ryan Jenkins for inviting me to that!). It was great to try out new techniques and materials, like working with wood and integrating copper tape to make some circuits.

Also, in the Cardboard Arcade Workshop at the FabLearn Conference, I worked together with my group (Holly and Jessica) on a cardboard pinball connected to Scratch through a Makey Makey to make sounds and scores points. The materials were very simple, and the outcomes were great.

It’s amazing to see the diversity of materials and technologies that can be used to create pinball machines, and the high level of motivation of kids (and adults!) to make them work, integrating construction and programming. Since pinballs can have so diverse features, it’s a great activity for tinkering, allowing people to focus on different types of things in their creation process, based on the resources available and on the things that they find more interesting and fun.

* Special thanks to the teachers Rodrigo Nogueira and Cida Godinho, for giving me the freedom and the time to test out ideas in their classrooms and for all the help during this year.

CoderDojo Bologna is a group of volunteers helping kids from 8 to 18 to express their creativity through digital technologies.  We organize a free coding club almost twice a month on Saturday for 20-40 kids, according of the capacity of the space that hosts us ( public libraries, makerspaces, co-working, research centers..).

Since 2013 we have offered  our ninjas (that’s how we call our participants) a creative learning environment where they can experiment with the fun of  sharing ideas and helping each other while creating with technologies.

The club is open to everyone, so our kids are different ages, backgrounds and experiences. To design a learning environment that can be useful for everyone, we always try to focus on what we wish them to experience during our club:

• have fun
• discover new things
• feel free to create
• work on something meaningful
• talk to each other and share ideas

It is a major goal that our ninjas will flow through the experience with their own style. Each of them will experience fun, discovering, creating, expressing and collaborating in a way completely different from everyone else. For the mentors it’s always fun to discover each kid’s special way and to go along with them in the creative learning process!!

For example, in November 2016 CoderDojo Bologna was hosted by a Social Service Community Center in a district of Bologna with an high number of immigrant families, most from North Africa and Eastern Europe. We choose to set up a “Tinkering with Circuits” experience with low-cost materials, so they can replicate the experience at home without the need of expensive technology like laptops or robots.

It was the first time that kids from the Community Center had the chance to attend a Dojo with other ninjas from all over town.

It was the first Dojo for Isabel and her brother Mark (not their real names). They arrived with two different attitudes: she was very happy and curious, while he was very upset because the other kids were younger than him.

The first part of the Dojo was a “getting started” activity, which is useful to explore how a circuit  works.

In our Dojo we call this activity “My First Paper Circuit”. Kids use tinfoil and a battery to light up an LED.

The second part of the dojo was designed to facilitate tinkering with the notion of circuit. With tinkering I mean to play and experiment with materials and elements of knowledge without boundaries or clear goals.

The space was set up with a huge collection of different kind of materials and tools and a few examples of circuitry creations that kids could disassemble. Kids can take anything they want,  play with the materials, and follow their inspiration.

 It’s amazing to see how many different ways kids construct their creative learning experience. Some of them try multiple paths and ideas, while others fall in love with an idea and try until success.

Ninjas have different styles in the interaction with mentors too. Some kids want to work alone, others choose to work with peers, while some don’t feel comfortable creating without the help of an adult.

Are you curious to see Isabel and Mark’s creations? Click here

In CoderDojo Bologna we truly believe in Papert’s idea of Epistemological Pluralism, every kid (and every adult too) has a personal way of construing and  flowing into experience, that depends on a constellation of elements like family background, previous experiences, self-esteem, interests, boundaries and social interaction patterns elicited by the context.

The best we can do is offering a learning environment that supports wide diversity of pathways and projects, so that anyone can express creatively in his own special way.

At the end of the Dojo, during the show & tell moment, it’s amazing to see how kids embody this idea with each of their own light creations!

References

Turkle & Papert (1990): Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture 

Resnick (2016): Designing for Wide Walls

Resnick & Rosenbaum (2013): Designing for Tinkerability

A big THANK YOU to CoderDojo Bologna for letting me share this story and for the passion that every mentor puts in our Dojo. It’s an honour to be a part of this wonderful community!

“Steam” for a well-educated German speaking science teacher is an invisible form of water which is around us all of the time but nobody takes notice of. “STEAM” is the same thing in a capital letter headline – any drunk graphic designer may have thought this would be funny like Comic Sans. Just a few people know that STEAM is the smarter cousin of STEM, the acronym for the school subjects Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. The new addition of the A in STEAM is for Art.

Why?

First, there’s no need for such knowledge in the German school system. Ha ha! School subjects mostly are separated in the same manner as 100 years before. Actually, there’s a synonym to STEM – this is spelled MINT (Mathematik, Informatik, Naturwissenschaft, Technik, in English,  math, computer sciences, [natural] sciences, engineering). But, there’s no school subject like MINT at all! Just a few schools (e.g. FASW – Freie Aktive Schule Wülfrath) decided to integrate the classical subjects biology, geography, chemistry, and physics for younger students into one subject called Nawi (short form of “Naturwissenschaften” – natural sciences) and to focus on the connections between all these sciences. Most curricula and gradings insist on the conventional classification. So, even a comprehensive MINT approach is not easy to establish, not to mention something like this plus something further.

Second, typically there are no additional resources available for special activities in a German public school. It’s hard enough for a principal or an eager teacher to initiate and establish a STEM program, so go away with this weird “A”! If the schedule is tight and personal resources are subject to be cut, guess what subjects regularly are first to be reduced? Arts, music, sports and other subjects  are often seen as “nice to have” but not essential. This is not an easy environment for art teachers: they feel bound to honor the fine arts, so they won’t easily support designing e.g. Raspberry Pi enclosures with students for their tech colleagues STEM project instead of analyzing an oil painting by Rembrandt.

Third, schools are the recipients of a MINT overload by politicians, organizations, companies, and lobbyists. Many teachers roll their eyes when the next MINT wave reaches their mailbox. Originally, MINT was an initiative from the mathematician Prof. Gudrun Kalmbach H.E. for supporting talented youth and especially girls in math and science fields. And, funny enough, it’s more than ten years older than the STEM acronym in the US. The initiative spread out to student competitions, and later was grabbed by politicians and representatives of different organizations for their own purposes. So, today every teacher knows the abbreviation MINT – it has become a buzzword. But nobody in the target group of the teachers exactly knows the actual goals of the different MINT programs funders. More or less all of the funders try to get access to talented young boys and girls and to engage them in their programs – the earlier, the better.

Nothing to say against that, but: MINT is just math, computer sciences, natural sciences, and engineering – nothing more! Where’s the “A” here? Where’s a concept for free development of kids which isn’t guided by the numbers, facts and figures of politicians or by companies interests? Where’s creative boredom, leisure, play, where’s the Kunst (art in German) as a motor for creative solutions?

It is in the air, in the steam around us! But we have to recognize the limitations as well as the possibilities. It’s an impossible mission to establish an extra letter into MINT – nobody would use something like MINKT or KMINT. Maybe it could become an interesting challenge to raise awareness for this steamy issue during the next months as a fablearn fellow…

Fig.: What’s this? Students are creating nativity sets for their homes in advent. To which subjects does it belong – religion, engineering, arts? We don’t care about that question in our makerspace at FASW: they make things, and nobody asked them to do so – just that is important! One thing is obvious: This is not MINT in the limited sense of most of the official MINT initiatives but it works.

Rooted in legacies of struggle and resistance, the story of the Fruitvale district in Oakland, California exposes the historical displacement and disenfranchisement for intersectional communities of race, class, and gender.  The Fruitvale was named after its beautiful fruit orchards and most poignantly after experiencing the first wave of refugees displaced by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.

Most recently, this story of displacement and disenfranchisement is retold through the tragedy of the Ghost Ship fire.  The Ghost Ship was a converted warehouse into an artist live/work space.  The residents of the Ghost Ship as well as the party-goers on that fatal night embodied the maker culture as empowered, inclusive, and conscious not only DIYers but creative beacons for their respective communities. Nonetheless, survivors of the Ghost Ship tragedy have to mourn their loss amidst a public stoning.  

From progressive¹ to more reactive² critics, the Ghost Ship tragedy exposes the ugly tax intersectional communities pay for whom making culture is not always just a  choice.  Progressives prematurely point out that the narrative of displacement has not taken center stage until now that we see the deaths of poor and marginalized white artists.  Reactives complain about not understanding why these people would put themselves in the position of being trapped and killed in a fire.

All this heat (no pun intended) make me wonder about just how wide the disconnect really is between K12 Maker Education and the rest of the world?  Is making in the context of living in real poverty here in America getting enough attention?  How is making in poverty here in America different from making in poverty in Africa, for instance?  Does our American society really value makers if it’s so willing to crucify them as soon as something goes wrong for their innovation at problem-solving? How will my students’ maker identity formation ³be impacted going to school just 2 blocks away from the Ghost Ship? Will they internalize the critics of these maker artists or will they learn to value what these makers added to a community torn in its own geopolitical battle?

1 “Gentrification and its impact on Community | KPFA.” 7 Jan. 2016, https://kpfa.org/episode/hard-knock-radio-january-7-2016/. Accessed 11 Dec. 2016.

2 “Evictions post Ghost Ship: Artists’ fears of displacement coming to fruition.” 7 Dec. 2016, http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/12/07/evictions-in-ghost-ships-wake-artists-worst-fears-coming-true/. Accessed 11 Dec. 2016.

3 “Making through the lens of Culture and Power: Toward Transformative Visions for Educational Equity.”2016, Harvard Educational Review Vol. 86 No. 2.

One of the best makers I teach hardly ever shows up for class.  Of course I can’t use his real name, so let’s call him Andres.  When Andres does come to class, he finishes the project we’re doing in a single class.  For context, it often takes many of the other students weeks to finish a project.  If you’re thinking to yourself “you need to give this student more challenges”, I’m right there with you.

I teach at a few different locations in the Bronx.  One is at an art center open to all young people in the Bronx.  It’s a beautiful center with amazing programs that incorporate social justice, the arts and making.  I also work at a middle school and a high school.  The high school grew out of the art center, but is now completely operated by the New York City Department of Education.  Art and social justice are heavily promoted and discussed in the school and it’s created an interesting array of cliques and identities within the school culture.  I love teaching in such a diverse place, and teaching in this school has given me an opportunity to witness and reflect on the many types of diversity out there – including diversity in learning styles and educational needs.

One class I teach is completely made up of students with Individualized Educational Plans (IEP), so students have an array of different learning, emotional and behavioral support needs.  Many students in this class also have significant attendance problems.

This brings me back to Andres.  Andres is labeled with an intellectual disability, and has attendance problems.  I’m not a psychologist and I haven’t done any assessments, but I believe he has been wrongly labeled.  There are many things that can go wrong when students are evaluated for intellectual, learning and emotional disabilities.  For example, there are cultural competency issues both in regards to the evaluation tools and the person giving the evaluation.  Furthermore, there are too few school psychologists (especially in New York City), so they are generally overworked and not able to consult with teachers and parents when doing evaluations. Additionally, sometimes people giving the diagnosis are not psychologists and not fully trained and qualified to be labeling students in ways that will seriously impact the rest of their educational careers. In sum, there are many roads that can lead to a misdiagnosis.

Not only will a misdiagnosis affect the services and educational experience of a student, in the case of New York, it also often prevents students from graduating with the same type of diploma as other students.  In New York, many students with IEPs are not prepared to take the Regents exams (New York state’s standardized examinations), which disqualifies them for a Regents diploma (the “normal” high school diploma).  As a means to address this issue, policy-makers changed the requirements for receiving what is called a local diploma.  Students now just need to pass the math and English exams to receive the local diploma, as opposed to three additional exams to receive the Regents diploma.  While this policy shift is a huge improvement from the previous offering of IEP diplomas, it’s likely that employers and colleges will discriminate against applicants with local diplomas.

Let’s examine Andres’ situation again.  He was diagnosed with an intellectual disability, which unfortunately carries a lot of stigma.  He does not come to school regularly and is thus not emotionally engaged with what happens there. However, in my maker classes, he demonstrates a level of talent that strikes me as in the gifted range. For example, when he entered my class, Andres had no prior exposure to programming of any kind. With almost no instruction and seemingly lightening speed, Andres was able to develop a digital instrument on Scratch (with no prior experience) and fabricate a physical controller linked by a MaKey MaKey. As this was happening, most other students were still at the very beginning of figuring out scratch basics. The other teacher and I were stunned.

Andres’ situation points to the limitations of standardized assessments and diagnostic labels, and how they can not only construct a negative relationship to learning and school but completely miss areas of intellectual talent.  On a systemic level, the message being communicated to Andres and other students with IEPs is that people don’t expect him to achieve at the same level as his peers. Thus, he will be getting a different, “inferior” type of diploma from them.

To clarify, my intention is not to critique individual teachers and school leaders; there are a great many working hard to increase student expectations and push low performing students to reach greater levels of potential. I’m calling into question a message that is communicated at the systemic level through the (often) sole use of standardized testing, previously given diagnostic labels and a lack of learning opportunities that address different learning needs (such as kinesthetic or visual/spatial learners). Andres is a junior right now and the school is doing its best to prepare him for passing the math and English Regents exams, so that he can earn a local diploma.  The low expectations placed on him along with what seems like a misdiagnosis have a created a situation where he doesn’t feel the need to show up to school.

This may be an oversimplification of a very complex issue, and I’m not at all advocating for the elimination of IEPs.  However, I think that Maker has something very significant to contribute in the quest for a solution.  Former FabLearn Fellow Christa Flores wrote a lot about the use of self-assessments in MakerEd. They’re a great alternative, or at least supplement to the current system of standardized testing.  I think for students with IEPs, especially students like Andres, self-assessments could be a life-changing tool.  Given that IEPs already incorporate goals and measures to evaluate progress, self-assessments would be easy to incorporate.

What exactly would this look like?  First, maker teachers could be part of the student’s IEP team.  Incorporated into the goals of the IEP, the student could list projects/interests she would like to pursue.  Let’s call it the Individualized Education Plan + Project (IEP+P).  The Maker teacher would support the student in completing the project and related self-assessments. This data would then be added to the student’s portfolio of academic work and progress.  This process would empower a student like Andres to take more ownership and thus initiative in his learning process. This, in turn, could transform his relationship with school and learning.  He would have a seat at the table that is attempting to guide his future, he’d be able experience and demonstrate his own strengths and be more empowered as a self-directed learner.

Andres is goal-oriented.  He has plans to join the military when he completes high school, although he needs to receive a diploma first.  The military can provide a lot of opportunities for students who don’t want to or are not ready to pursue college.  But what if Andres had the opportunity to pursue those opportunities first in school?  Wouldn’t that given him greater confidence and prepare him more for what comes next?