Them: “What are you up to this weekend?”
Me: “Going to San Francisco for a conference.”
Them: “For the weekend? What conference?”
Me: “Fablearn, at Stanford.”
Them: “What’s ‘Fablearn’?”
Me: “Well, it’s…”

And so went many conversations as Fablearn 2016 approached. It would be my second time attending, but the first as a newly-minted Fablearn Fellow. So, while I had some idea what to expect, this was going to be an extra special trip.

Image credit: @chapmansar

Fablearn 2016 did not disappoint. My top 10:

1. Watching world-class students present their work. (Here’s another. And another. And perhaps best of all, another.) I was also imagining my Northfield students on that stage some day.
2. Listening to Edith Ackerman deliver a masterclass in educational theory in response to my comment about the importance of human centered design. (Fast forward the recorded livestream to about the 54 minute mark for the entire conversation.)
3. Meeting and making friends with like-minded educators from around the world; also, trying (and failing) to find something low-carb to eat at a Chinese restaurant during dinner with the other Fellows.
4. The multiple often accidental, but so inspiring, connections.
5. Erica and Rich Halverson’s powerful closing keynote, a delightful and at times sobering back-and-forth between two incredibly smart, passionate, funny and thought-provoking speakers with often different perspectives on the same topic.
6. Listening to researchers exploring assessment in makerspaces, including Ole Sejer Iverson, Professor at Aarhus University (Denmark), whose paper, Towards a formal assessment of design literacy: Analyzing K-12 students’ stance towards inquiry, was just published. Download it here.
7. Seeing simple but powerful innovations that can make life as a maker-educator better, like, sewable, conductive lycra coin cell battery holders. You’re welcome.
8. Learning how debugging an intentionally faulty e-textile is a great way to teach problem solving while you see what kids know about electronics.
9. Moderating a panel on Innovation and Entrepreneurship and digging deep into their approaches, techniques and practices.
10. Exploring the FabLab.

There were however some not-so-great parts…

• Missing a fabulous workshop I was registered to attend – due to #9. (I at least got the laser-cut materials and can assemble my own lamp when I have time.)
• Liquid Sunshine! It rained much of the weekend. California desperately needs it, so, I didn’t mind really, but, walking back to my car in a torrential downpour on the way to dinner, getting soaked nearly to the skin in the process, was not fun.
• The food. To their credit, conference organizers asked for dietary requirements [I should have requested a delivery from In-N-Out], and the lunches were California-healthy, so, not really to my taste. (Not shown: my lunch, a CarbRite Diet Bar. Chocolate Brownie, of course.)
• Information overload. Where’s my Matrix Headjack? Oh that’s right, DARPA’s not done with it yet.
• The Red-Eye home wasn’t actually that bad. The flight was smooth; we landed almost 40 minutes early, allowing me to drive straight to work from Philly International, walking into my classroom at 7:00 am like any other day. Piece of cake…

All in all, it was an utterly fantastic weekend of learning, sharing and networking with hundreds of passionate educators and researchers from around the world doing cutting-edge work with kids and all sorts of maker technology.

I’d like to thank many people – but most of all Paulo Blikstein and Sylvia Martinez – for the opportunity to attend this conference on a scholarship, especially as a Fablearn Fellow. I’m very excited about the year ahead and the work we will all do together.

I’ll close with this provocation from Edith Ackerman:

Image credit: @McLargeH

How, indeed.

Let’s get to work.

-kj-

During the FabLearn Conference at Stanford University this fall, Dr. Edith Ackermann, presented a captivating and inspiring presentation to her audience. In her keynote, she briefed the audience about the Maker Movement, she spoke on the importance and essence of play, and spoke in high regards about the founding members who helped shape and transform Maker Education as we know today. Dr. Ackermann referred to the maker movement as “Papert’s Perestroika.” This phrase refers to Seymour Papert, the innovative mathematician and educator who developed constructionism and brought technology to life for children by teaching them programming and robotics in ways never before seen. The term Perestroika, refers to the restructuring of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Coined together in reference to Maker Education, “Papert’s Perestroika” refers to the rapid restructuring of the educational system. A transformation from traditional learning to an approach that focuses on design and innovation, which allows for creative collaboration, problem solving, and discovery.

With the growing emphasis on educational standards, testing, and funding a direct result of student “achievement,” the role of making can get lost in a sea of traditional educational practices. Despite this, those who engage in meaningful making, human-centered design, and constructionism quickly see the deep and lasting impressions it has on students. Just recently, a student in my middle school class reflected on her experience learning to use hand tools to design and build a wooden bridge. While she could have reflected on her newly- acquired skills with a saw or how she learned about architectural engineering in the process, she instead focused on how challenging yet rewarding it was to teach herself these skills. In a world where she and many students are used to having direct instruction, this approach to learning was new. While she found it challenging, as she continues to practice skills of utilizing resources such as communicating with peers, reading instruction guides online, watching tutorial videos, using a teacher as a mentor, and trying, failing, and trying again, her confidence will grow and it will become easier. She is not just learning about bridge design and hand tools. She is learning that she has control of her own learning. She is understanding the importance of collaboration. She is learning persistence. She is learning that she is a creative problem solver. And, eventually, she will learn and believe that she has the ability to change the world.

Maker Education is in fact a rapid revolution and one that squashes traditional educational theories and approaches. But when traditional educational theories have the goal of developing individuals who perform well academically in very specific categories, measured in distinct and rigid ways, the maker movement brings a breath of fresh air. It allows our students to understand the value of growing both academic and social-emotional realms. It teaches our youth that as a community, we value their ability to recognize problems in the world and respect their bravery, confidence, and creativity to design and test solutions. Our children are our future, and what is better than to raise young makers who will grow up knowing they can leave a lasting and positive impact on the world?

Ask…. and ye shall answer your own questions

“I hope to apply a strong focus on place-based making and science while here in Atlanta…I also noticed that this year’s research panel was very program and project focused, or more practical in nature. This gives me hope that higher education is stepping up to the plate to support and study best practice around making in community programs in ways it has not in the past.”

The above is a reflection from FabLearn 2016 from a prompt given to the FabLearn fellows by our mentor Sylvia Martinez. How would I apply FabLearn lessons to my new role as a K-8 outreach manager at Georgia Tech within the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC)? CEISMC is a self-contained K-12 STEM education research and design hub that has been around for twenty years. Lately, CEISMC has caught the MakerEd bug and I was hired to bring my experience to their partner K-12 schools wishing to start maker programs or makerspaces. I no longer have a makerspace of my own. I am answering my own call to arms post Fablearn. I have shifted from being a teacher/researcher or makerspace coordinator to a curriculum and learning space co-designer, working with multiple educators in multiple disciplines, at multiple public schools, one in an “up and coming” or gentrified neighborhood, and one within an area of concentrated poverty and segregation. This blog is focused on the latter school.

The school for inventors

Named after black entrepreneur Michael R. Hollis and founder of Atlanta Air, Hollis Innovation Academy is a Title I public school. It opened its doors to its PreK-5th grade students this past August, 2016. Hollis Innovation Academy was the product of a process called “Turnaround”, the exercise of closing failing public schools and sending their displaced users to a new building, with a new name, leaving behind any and all conglomerated failing track records. Turnaround offers a fresh start to envision a school’s mission and often entails new leadership. Hollis has that leadership with Doctor Diamond Jack, former science teacher and a firm believer that Hollis is poised to be a model for what quality STEM education can be in a Title I school.

Hollis is located deep in the westside of Atlanta, a neighborhood where many of its houses are boarded up or missing windows all together. The walkable resources available to residents include liquor and discount stores. Despite Hollis’ proximity to many universities and midtown, you can purchase a home on the westside for as low as $30,000. Arguably, the westside neighborhood where Hollis children walk to school each day, is a place that would benefit from empowerment and hope, not development and gentrification.

How might focusing on innovation literacy at this local public elementary school fulfill its leadership and grant funders’ vision of STEM education in an underserved area? To begin with, Hollis has three dedicated STEM teachers with their own classrooms (future makerspaces) and students (K-5th) meet for 90 minutes a week in STEM class. Add to this equation, Hollis’ partnership with CEISMC to design three makerspaces in hopes of bringing innovation to life for these elementary school children. Currently, Hollis is a very traditional, teacher led classroom environment focused on discipline (for safety sake) that makes my progressive teacher a little uncomfortable, but I am patient and hopeful that the maker mindset will flourish in this new school.

A LEVEL 4 problem

In short order working at CEISMC connected me to Atlanta’s local Maker Movement network such as Lew Lefton of Georgia Tech’s math department, founder of the Decatur Makers  a community makerspace and organizer of Atlanta’s Maker Faire. I met the impressive STEAM program director Courtney Bryant of Drew Charter School and the co-creator of the TinkerYard, a playground designed by kids for kids. I also met the team of entrepreneurial educators behind STEAM Truck, Atlanta’s first not for profit mobile makerlab, while at a design thinking workshop facilitated by the Mount Vernon Institute for Innovation.

Despite these positive experiences, I had been losing sleep at night, worried that I wasn’t connecting to the three STEM teachers I was assigned to work with, or the students at Hollis. My role as an outreach manager seemed ill defined, flaccid, too open for interpretation, AKA prone to failure. Ironically, I had been placed in the same position I try to stick young learners, in the realm of the unknown, so they are emotionally engaged and encouraged to foster resilience when problem solving. Some of my frustration was coming from news I received soon after returning from FabLearn. I assumed that my makerspace planning and PBL lesson co-designing would be derailed for months due to a district wide edict to promote STEM.

The STEM MONSTER rears its head

When I arrived on the Hollis scene it was already mid October, months into the school year. Lesson planning had been done early and more importantly a new edict came down from the district saying that all K-5th grade students must participate in a Science and Engineering Fair in December. This kind of artificial and obsolete form of learning seemed like a backwards way to introduce a Kindergartener to the amazing worlds of science, engineering, math and technology, but then a friend shared her experience with an elementary science fair.  “It’s the only time I got to do science, I loved the science fair as a kid!”  My friend reminded me that there is room in the world for science and engineering fairs, but we should still ask what other modes of sharing work in invention and inquiry we can expose learners to, competitive and collaborative, on a frequent and authentic basis.

Back to the Hollis Science Fair…because this edict felt like a new and unknown responsibility, the STEM teachers I am meant to co-design with, took understandable measures to help secure their students’ success, such as choosing topics for them to study and pre-ordering all supplies for the predetermined experiments. Up front, it seemed as though there was no student voice built into the enterprise. Because the fair is in a few weeks, every STEM class block of time would be devoted to the science fair projects. My attention shifted from makerspace design to asking how might we instill the maker mindset in adults, in order to protect the spirit of a learner-centered space such as a makerspace? In other words, how was I going to fight the STEM monster (approaching STEM as a drill and kill approach) and design more student voice into STEM classes?

Go slowly, but GO!

Part of my CEISMC role is to have deep partnerships with our public schools. I spend three days a week at Hollis where I have been working with 3rd graders in Ms. Battle’s STEM class on Friday mornings. This particular section of 3rd graders was assigned to create squishy circuit frogs as part of a larger frog study for their science and engineering fair project. While waiting for supplies for the science fair projects to arrive we introduced students to electricity in three lessons (4.5 hrs). The remainder of this blog is an account of these lessons and how we slowly introduced the idea of a makerspace and self-direction into one STEM class.

In our first lesson students were given three materials; one alligator clip, one C battery, and one small flashlight bulb. The prompt? Get the lightbulb to light. Perseverance is one of the Habits of Hollis and so we used that word a lot in the first 15 minutes when no one had figured out how to light the bulb. “I give up,” said one girl. Then her partner tosses her chin into her palm and followed suit saying, “This is too hard.” I shared with the frustrated students that it sometimes takes 5th graders an hour to figure the same problem out. I assured them they were tackling a real problem. The discouraged team turned out to be the first to find the solution, demonstrating beautifully for their peers what perseverance looks and feels like.

In the second lesson students rotated through stations, some made playdough for squishy circuits with Ms. Battle. Some used computers to review some digital media on frogs Ms. Battle had curated for them, some were on a rug building with LEGOS and some explored making series, parallel and short circuits with me. It was great having two adults in the room, one to facilitate the very messy and measurement sensitive math lessons of making dough, and one to probe students and notice when they discovered a science concept like a short circuit, or open and closed circuit while playing/exploring. These days were fun and kids seemed to really engage with the material, but they were 100% teacher directed.

The above signs were the idea of the creator, I only asked for the words, they added images and their own definitions.

The third lesson came spontaneously as I texted Ms. Battle on a Thursday night to see what she had planned for our Friday 3rd grade STEM class at 8:30am. I was in the ACE hardware parking lot when I thought of Ms. Battle. When supplies for the fair had still not arrived on time, we seized the opportunity to design a follow up lesson to the past two sessions on exploring electronics. It was an opportunity to have the 3rd graders start using real tools and making something real, like circuit blocks (inspired by Lighthouse Community Charter School and the Tinkering Studio). Before students arrived, we set up the classroom as a makeshift makerspace. We pulled the tables and chairs out of rows facing the teacher focused front of the room. This made an open square of work stations with a class reflection rug in the middle of the space to sit together at and review our experience together. We had a wood measuring station, a wood cutting station, a sanding station, an electric component assembling/testing/experimenting station, and a station where artists could work on making signs for our stations.

At the completion of a successful cut, this young man shares his gratification in the form of a huge smile.

Without instructions in the assembly area, students innovated on working circuits, some worked some failed.

If STEM is a monster, can it be a cuddly one?

In the third lesson student choice was built into the option to do art or the digital media station and at that assembly station as learners decided what electronic component they attached to their block. It was a small window into their individuality, but it is a window with a great view.

In deference to frustrated art teachers and non STEM educators who feel the oppressive weight of STEM initiatives that consume grant funding and champion obsolete career readiness arguments – I have a different view of the STEM monster. I am very grateful that my STEM monster allows me to be in a school that has three talented teachers dedicated to exposing the Hollis students to science, technology, engineering and math through invention AND inquiry. I even hope to embrace the constraints of the science and engineering fair to promote more student voice and choice. I might be collaborating with a STEM monster, but I am a firm believer that Maker Education has the ability to rebrand old ideas about college and career readiness as a vehicle for innovation literacy in younger and younger innovators.

I started this post in May. I worked on it a bit in June. Then I abandoned it, lonely on my computer, until I stumbled on it this morning.  So I finished it off (just a little proofreading) and I share it now, even though we are far from the end of the year, and I don’t know if it will resonate with anyone here in the middle of the crazy beginning of the year season.

Thinking about making and history at the end of the year.

I get it. I really do. My feet are tired too. And I am happy to say the end is in sight. The grades are almost done. The classroom is closer to clean, and my checklist for the end of the year now fits on one page.

It is already the next page I am looking forward to. I am thinking about making I will do this summer, things I want to try for myself, things I need to make to make my life easier, fun projects I have been putting off, and most of all, ideas I have for the classroom next year.  I don’t know which ones will work. I don’t know really until I try them in the classroom, but I have ideas I will try myself, and then maybe with students. I have modifications I want to make to existing projects.  What can make it better? How can it be more them and less me? What are the fundamental skills for research, history, and life that I can help my 8th grade girls find next year?

I think about these changes and improvements, and I can see at least one way in which making in the classroom brings me to my best place as an educator. When we make together, or even alone, we revise, rethink, and revisit almost all the time, and we have to go back to the fundamental questions of what we are doing. Why does this work the way it does? What can we do to make it better? What do we know now that we did not know before we engaged in this process?  I think more about lesson planning as making now, and it helps me do it more effectively.  I also think more about assessment construction as a making process too. If this document exercise is something I am making for my students to bring out their skills and knowledge, to let them show themselves what they can do, then I can think through what I construct differently, and I hope they can get more out of it when they engage with the voices from the past and my instructions.

So what am I thinking about for next year? I have a long list, including a re-imagined writing assignment to go with the innovation of the telegraph (we build the telegraph machines, then imagine the historical experience), a different way to look at architecture (we will continue to explore 3d printing of 18th century Williamsburg buildings, but we will also take a look at more modern architecture later in the year), and perhaps a more open ended set of questions for the research project at the end of the year.   I also am looking forward to the projects that have become part of the yearly fabric of my class: the silhouettes, the monuments, and National History Day.

Maybe when I get there, next year will spring some new idea on me and my class. I look forward to it.

Hi all,

I wanted to share a cool museum experience from my travels. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England was one of the most interesting museums I’ve visited in a long time. It’s organized so differenty than anywhere else – by theme, rather than by time, culture, or other more common organizing principles. So when you walk in, you see massive glass cases with titles like, “Treatment of the Dead” with items from all around the world, different time periods, etc. Then the next case was “Treatment of Dead Enemies”! It’s a middle school dream 😉

In a compact area there were arts, tools, dolls and toys, games, weapons, jewelry, and more. It was like a “cabinet of wonders” taken to the next level. Here’s the history of the museum and collection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitt_Rivers_Museum

You might think this would be confusing or just a big mess, but it’s remarkably interesting. It immediately brings up questions of similarities and differences, and I found myself thinking of all sorts of follow on questions and things I really needed to look up – unfortunately no data roaming in England, so it had to wait!

When you see a case full of objects collected together as “Geometry in Art” and see similarities in Hawaiin gourd vases, Native American weaving, and Islamic tiles, it makes you wonder what the connection is? Material? Technique? Cultural restrctions or beliefs?

Here’s a few photos of the exhibits – we ran out of time and had to be shooed out the door! https://www.flickr.com/photos/sylviamartinez/sets/72157647508564411/

Introduction

In previous blogs I have written about my students engaging in a spring hard problem each year.  After learning new tools, material science and the basics of patterns and  structures, these projects are a deep design challenge that students engage in for an entire semester in teams of four to five. The level of cooperation that this work involves is intense and can result in a team breaking up and reforming, though this is infrequent. The value of this work is that students are able to tackle problems and design challenges that they would not be able to complete if working alone. This summer, I have had the fortune of spending a week at Beam Camp, a three week session of summer camp in the woods of New Hampshire where ten to seventeen year olds work with graduate level architects and designers to construct massive installations on their one hundred acre campus with two lakes. This blog is a reflection on my time at Beam Camp and the overall value of allowing young learners to work together to build projects that would be impossible for any single person to accomplish alone in only a few weeks.

Building Together, a Philosophical Rationale

To help explain what I was seeing at Beam Camp, founders Brian Cohen and Danny Kahn brought up the work of Richard Sennett, and Neil Postman as their “role models” for the design of Beam’s programming. Sennet is the author of Craftsman, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation and a philosopher known for speaking out about the role of cooperation in urban settings. In a talk entitled the Architecture of Cooperation Sennett defines cooperation is working with others to do what you can not do for yourself. He goes on to define hard cooperation as a form of making human connections when people do not know each other or have little in common. Encountering difference to engage in creative work is at the core of this camp’s ethos. Postman on the other hand was an outspoken critique of public education, see his work entitled The End of Education: Redefining the value of school. According to Postman, “The idea of public education depends absolutely on the existence of shared narratives and the exclusion of narratives that lead to alienation and divisiveness. What makes public schools public is not so much that the schools have common goals but that the students have common gods. The reason for this is that public education does not serve a public. It creates a public.”

These philosophers seem to lend their ideas to the creation of accessible educational experiences that work outside of the public school system to redefine collaboration, self-identity and society. Indeed, one can not spend time at Beam Camp without feeling this community generated sense of place and belonging, where everyone’s personal narrative matters.

Building a Foundation

In the first two weeks of each three week summer session, each camper, grouped by age and experience level, takes workshops in four areas called the fundamentals. The fundamentals included the following:

• Project & Building: construction, carpentry, metal work, project planning

• Computing/Electronics: circuitry, physical computing, coding

• Design/Prototyping: model-making, design thinking, digital fabrication

• Craft & Materials: textiles, knitting, sewing, ceramics

Exposure to the workshop tools and principles arms the camper with the skills and confidence to then contribute to the larger camp wide project.

Selecting the Big Project

Each session, or twice a summer, campers undertake a major art installation that will live in the woods of New Hampshire on their summer campus. The projects are selected from various submissions from artists, designers and architects from all over the world. The project that I got to watch being fabricated during the first of the two summer sessions was called The Universal Play Machine Project, designed by two London based architects from The Mobile Studio. The project consisted of welding five metal frames that could support one hundred cards each, all traced and colored by hand, that would be flipped using a series of metal gears and a crank. The effect? Five giant flip books, all with a theme centered on birds. The steel frames were finished with a reflective acrylic wall and strips of LED’s to illuminate the gearing and mechanisms that help to turn the massive animations.

Below: Architects Chee-Kit Lai, Director of The Mobile Studio architecture group and William Atkins, architectural designer

Orchestrating Big Projects with 90+ Campers

Taking big project ideas from a set of architectural drawings and creating step by step work plans that camp staff could build with nine to seventeen year olds was the job of project director Morgan Street and program director Zena Pesta. Street and Pesta orchestrated a very talented and hardworking staff of fundamentalist teachers, camp counselors and camp fellows (older campers that wish to add leadership to their portfolios) in the day to day building tasks that added to the overall fabrication of the Universal Play Machine.

Campers were placed into mixed age groups called waves and would rotate through the wood shop, the metal shop and a new maker space called the “Slab Lab” to either weld and grind the frames, cut and paint the wooden structure that supported the animated cards, or trace and color the cards. Daily tasks were organized using a challenge (see image) that shop managers, fundamentalists and fellows would then have to solve with their wave.

Welders of all ages contributed to the fabrication of the steel frames. Here an eleven year old girl takes her turn forming a joint in the frame.

The central structure in the mechanism was made of wood. Fabrication of this larger than life spool was done in the wood shop. Metal rods (bottom left) hold the white PVC cards that would be hand drawn to create the moving animation effect.

Over five hundred cards were eventually created to make the giant flip books. The original drawings were made by hand by the designers, then scanned into digital format. The digital images were then projected onto a wall where the PVC cards hung so campers could trace the drawings in graphite. Tracings were then meticulously numbered by color and then hand drawn to recreate the drawings at over 100% their original size.

Every learner deserves a space to go to every day that will expose them to the beauty of the world and the intrepid explorer that they truly are. How can learning spaces cultivate this goal while encouraging constructive autonomy in the youngest of learners? Two spaces that I have had the pleasure of visiting have shed some light on that question. The first stop was San Francisco Brightworks and the second the Beam Center in Brooklyn, NY.

What is constructive autonomy?

The ability to work on passionate projects, with very little adult or mentor guidance, is a sweet spot in all creative pursuits. When working in a state of constructive autonomy we get lost in the flow of joyful work. Time slips away effortlessly. We may even forget to eat or rest. Unfortunately this kind of passionate flow is not cultivated in our current school system. While school schedules are regular, predictable, and easily managed (just the characteristics you would want in an industrial production line) when students seek out autonomy in this system, it can be perceived as a negative or behavioral issue. Thanks to the work being done in makerspaces now found in libraries, schools, urban enrichment programs and museums, constructive autonomy is no longer the exception to the rule. In this blog I will describe three components that allow for constrictive autonomy for young learners when using a makerspace.

Trusting Kids

A kid should lose autonomy only as a last resort, such as when they may inadvertently harm themselves. Lets face it, most of us have read Lord of the Flies, so constructive autonomy, still has an adult in the room to monitor emotional and physical safety. Adults also have a need for autonomy, but not at the expense of safety. Most of us choose to live in a society with law and law enforcement rather than none. Practicing constructionism in the school setting, therefore is a balance of safety and responsibility that adults and children agree upon for the system to work. This builds an essential foundation of trust that must prevail any excitement around any particular tool. I believe Gever Tulley, author or 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do, is definitely onto something when he states that autonomy has to feel like just the right amount of scary to feel genuine.

My visits with Tulley at SF Brightworks taught me a lot about the “language” of trusting kids. Offering true autonomy to a student might sound a little like this, “hey I see that you can handle this, I trust you. You are competent, and even if you make mistakes, I expect you to learn from them.” The act of showing a child how to safely use a cordless power tool involves allowing children to experience the kinetic feedback of holding tools and manipulating materials. Sometimes it just means sitting with learners until the excitement of turning on a noisy or powerful tool dissipates to the point of boredom. Tool training can be followed by the adult turning their back to the new tool user as a sign of trust rather than disinterest. Turning your back shows the learner that they are now the master of their own work and safety. While the adult is still present in case of an emergency, the right and responsibility for bodily safety is ultimately in the hands of the tool user.

Note, triggers on power tools can be hard work for small hands, and if using the trigger distracts young brains from their real work, then the tool may be too difficult or unsafe for their size. High voltage plug in power tools should always be monitored by an adult with younger users.

Access and Inspiration

Designing spaces for constructionism and autonomy begins with allowing all users equal access to tools and materials. This is best accomplished by having clearly labeled areas for tools to be taken from and returned. I have seen lots of great versions of creating access for all learners that include providing building and scientific tools (microscopes, hand lenses, etc.) as well as computers, how to books and inspirational natural artifacts.

A makerspace should feel like a shared home away from home for learners. Something as simple as cleaning up and replacing tools to their proper home can give a sense of ownership to a makerspace visitor. When visiting the Beam Center in Brooklyn, even brooms were on display as a sign of shared stewardship.

Make clean up easy after a productive and messy day of making with protocols and well labeled tool storage using visual, as well as text signage for non readers.

Hand drawn labels let artists, makers and inventors seek out and discover. 

Tracing the shapes of tools, al a Julia Childs helps everyone return tools where they belong for the next user.

Design Experiences

When visiting the Beam Center in Brooklyn, I was fortunate to visit on a day when their week long summer camp was just beginning a new session. The theme for the week was “Color,” a very fitting topic for learning about scientific principles, art techniques and stewardship for a shared makerspace. Many Beam summer workshops are targeted for a mixed age group of six to thirteen, allowing young mentors to work with younger or less experienced learners lending to a sense of authority and helpfulness.

Above, “Mr. Tim” begins his introduction on screen printing with an informal disscusion with learners about what happens when you mix color. 

The workshop I witnessed was designed by artist and all around Beam Center superstar Tim Fite. The project of the day was to make a painting machine from a plank of wood, two screws and a rubber band. The rubber band works as a surface to apply paint. When pulled and released with differing force or direction, the vibration smacks and splatters paint onto a piece of paper creating unique prints, worthy of a modern art museum exhibit. The design of the machine was simple enough for any age level to construct and asked summer schoolers to learn a range of tool use and makerspace protocol, setting norms for using the workshop the remainder of the week.

What I loved about this workshop is how summer campers were exposed to the world of making tools for the purpose of making art, a message about being a maker, artist and scientist that is very empowering. Tools employed during this project included measurement tools, cordless drills, screws, and rubber bands. Once made, the paint machines were an open-ended tool for little makers to use over and over at home. Using only four materials, a wood plank, two screws, a rubber band and art paper, you can create the conditions for creativity, focus and individualized learning.

See below for step by step instructions for making the paint machine.

Getting to know your tool, takes patience and practice. This one tool helps learners as young as six practice focus, iteration and self-reflection on process.

My kids make stuff.  They’re not geeks, they’re girls.  Sure they know how to make an LED light up, run a laser cutter job, yep.  Yet, even with all of this, their go-to material is still paper, and tape –lots of tape.

I think we may be making making too complex.

For years I taught a middle school Technology class I had my student’s memorize my preferred definition of technology, “Technology: A man-made object that solves a problem”.  Yes, a computer is technology.  Yes, a 3D printer is an amazing piece of technology… however, a toothbrush is technology too.  And so is tape. And paper, lots of paper.  Our student’s projects don’t have to flash, or be flashy all the time.  They just need to solve a problem and get our kids learning by doing, by creating.

Now don’t get me a wrong, it definitely is an exciting time if you are a self-proclaimed maker.  I can now precisely laser-cut with the click of a button, I can 3D print previously impossible-to-mill parts, I can code (formerly called programming) a new app and hook it back up to the physical world in ways I could only dream of when I was a kid.  But the fact is that I did dream.  I did create.  I did build very unsafe tree house forts out of reclaimed wood and rusty nails –even before reclaimed was a hip term.

So let’s not take the dreaming out of making.  Let’s not make making feel so complicated that our students feel that they aren’t geeky enough to try it.  Instead let’s create.

Here’s some of projects that my kids have made.  I’ve put captions and what I think was learned in the process.  So lets not be scared of complex makes, of failing… instead lets get kids making.

These are projects that my girls came up with them using only their imagination and yes, a lot of tape.

Here’s a few examples of their builds:

Paper Bridges-

Flying Critters-  Used a balloon and found the proper weight to make their critters fly.

They also started to lighten the load over the days to keep the critter flying as the helium balloon started to loose lift.

Sushi Go Round-  What can I say, they love sushi.

And more precision paper-sushi crafting skills

Pet City- Need houses for your plastic kitties?  Come on over, we have a whole neighborhood!

Paper and Tape:  The basement maker space needs a little bit of cleaning up. But it’s all worth it to me!

In response to a literal call for #HELP on Twitter, I pulled together  three blogs from various resources. This is blog 3 of 3 to help construct my own knowledge on the topics of making in schools and the two learning theories constructivism and constructionism. 

Constructionism, a Learning Theory Centuries in the Making

Standing on a foundation of Pestalozzi, Montessori, Dewey and Piaget, we begin now in the 1960’s in Brazil, where another revolutionary thinker named Paulo Freire was inventing his own theories. Frustrated by the poverty he was seeing throughout the depression, Freire showed through experimentation that literacy was the key to achieving freedom and self-actualization. He coined a new learning model called critical pedagogy, where education was a tool to question any system of oppression, namely that of our current economic and educational systems. Friere was laying the groundwork for what we now call the “maker mindset” before the term existed, a sentiment that would resonate in Piaget’s work as well.

Piaget was not only a learning theorist, he was also an early advocate for the mindsets we now cherish in the current maker movement such as agency and inventiveness. Piaget advocated that learners be allowed to employ a bottom up, or user generated learning model that would challenge traditional schooling, such as passively receiving canonized ideas from adults and teachers. Piaget saw school as a venue for raising innovative thinkers instead of well trained consumers, much in the same way Freire saw education as a tool to enlighten not oppress.

While working at the University of Geneva (1958 to 1963), Piaget would inspire the work of protoget Seymour Papert. Seymour Papert’s seminal work entitled Mindstorms; Children Computers, and Powerful Ideas (1980) states that children should use computers as powerful tools to create their own educational experience. What we now call constructionism, is the term Papert created as a play on the theory of constructivism as well as the words “to construct,” or “making.” Papert’s constructionism assumes constructing one’s own knowledge, just like constructivism, using code as a language to invent or to inquire. By inventing constructionism, Papert successfully predicted the use of technology, as seen in the current maker movement and increased use of programming in science labs to collect and analyze data. Papert’s constructionsim would allow young learners to construct their knowledge of various subjects through personal inquiry and creativity. The tool Scratch and its various outlets for exploration is a fine example of this reality.

A Model for MakerEd

When we expand Papert’s constructionism to include the rest of our human history making and designing with materials such as paper, tape, wood, fabric, etc., we not only invent the “maker movement”, we see a concrete mode for identifying a learner’s personal schema, as well a diverse playground of tangible documentation of a learner’s growth. As a model for how we learn, constructionism has the potential to disrupt the status quo while ushering us into a more optimistic and coopertive future.

When actively creating our own education from first hand experiences through play, testing, and exploring, we learn by doing, or constructivism. When we make models of ideas, tools for inquiry, or invent to learn, this is constructionism. Most proponents of progressive education would deem the effective use, effective defined as having some structure for safety and sustainable growth, of both constructivism and constructionism in school as necessary. Constructionism assumes not only Piaget’s constructivism, but also Friere’s ideas on self-determination and Papert’s prediction about the role of technology to foster a more innovative and truly democratic society.

The last pieces of the puzzle are now in our hands. Learning through the making of things is constructionism in action. This is what happens everyday in a makerspace, therefore makerspaces are learning “ecologies” designed for constructionism. If you are working with learners in a makerspace, you are a facilitator of constructionism. Welcome to the club, now lets learn from critical pedagogy and constructionism to cultivate a society of inventive, empathic, skeptics.

Nullius in Verba!

References:

1. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

2. Holmes, R. (2009). The Age of Wonder: How the romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science. Vintage.

3. Papert, Seymour. (1980). Mindstorms; Children Computers, and Powerful Ideas.

4. Porter, T. M., Meadows, J., & Morrell, J. (2006). The Victorian Scientist: The Growth of a Profession.

5. Pulaski, M. A. S. (1971). Understanding Piaget: an introduction to children’s cognitive development. New York: Harper & Row.

6. Soëtard, M. (1994). Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. Prospects: the quarterly review of comparative education, 24(1-2).

7. Vygotsky, L. (1987). Zone of proximal development. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes, 5291.