I have been making plans for student reflection and group self-assessment in an end-of the year project.

For two years, I have ended 8th grade history with a project that brings together two things we have looked at through the year: individuals who make a difference and historical monuments. The students have finished their research and class presentations on the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The pick one of the important women, or women’s issues, from their group research projects and design and build a model of a monument they would like to see to that person on the National Mall in Washington DC. And for the past two years I have only graded the presentation of that monument to the class. The students needed to be able to explain how the parts of the monument would make a visitor feel and learn, how the monument reflected the life and values of the person, and how their design and building process had worked.

These presentations, on the last day of school, are a fantastic way to hear from the students, and they enjoy the quick chance to show off their work. We don’t do a peer critique at that point, because the year is over, they couldn’t change anything.

This year I want to teach them how to be more self-reflective about their process and how the work unfolds during the two weeks of the project. I plan to set up an electronic project journal, probably on Padlet, since the school has an account and it works on both laptops and iPads.  I am tinkering around with the model for these journals, but I am thinking that each project team should have one, and each student should post every day we meet in class. I am thinking of having a list of prompts, such as “Today I/we used _______ to make _________ (and then explain in a sentence or two how it worked). and have everyone include a sentence for “next steps” which should prompt them to know what to start on when they arrive in class the next period.

The idea is to create a space to 1) record their progress, and 2) allow me to comment and add suggestions as they go. I do this in class informally, but I have noticed that some groups are good at knowing what they need help with, and they call me over, while other groups, even when I stand and watch them work, still hide the struggles and questions they are having, and don’t bring me into those conversations.

I hope asking students to reflect with a series of prompts will allow me to help them more, and will challenge them to stretch their thinking and planning process a little bit.

And yes, I will have to give these things a grade, I teach at a school that gives grades. But in this case a low-point completion grade will probably work.

I will run this group self-reflection this year with a nightly check in, and some feedback from me, and then include a question about the value of this process in the things they need to report on at the end of the project. I won’t have any results until the end of May, but I continue to think about how to implement this system without making more crazy homework for them, and allowing each group to build a record of their work and their thinking as they go.

Background

When I first started using a problem based curriculum in science I admit that I had no idea what to expect. Moreover, I had only a vague idea of how I was going to assess my students. As an academic teacher, I am required to give my students a letter grade twice a year. While I am moving more strongly towards the use of portfolios and self-assessment in my classes, I still work within a system that strives to have letter grades accurately reflect a student’s level of understanding and or effort in a discipline, in my case 5th and 6th grade science. I work within a system (pre-school through graduate school) that still values grades as an indicator of how to rank children. Ideally this ranking is used so they can be better served, classified and counseled towards the goal of attending college and possibly future career choices. In this system the easy to mass produce and analyze discrete quality offered by tests, makes for a more valued form of assessment. As a result, 5% of the letter grade that I award my students is still the result of paper style tests and quizzes, or what I refer to as, “check-ins.”

Beginning with the role of peer assessment, I hope to describe the role of alternative forms of assessment (the other 95%) that I have been using in my problem based approach to science. The other forms of assessment that I use, include self-assessment and assessment by a mentor or adult expert. A fourth form of assessment that I hope to learn more about this year (one which I was first introduced to by Dave Otten of the Athenian School) is the role of authentic assessment in the form of published, or open-source sharing of work. These forms of assessment may be used in conjunction with assigning letter grades, as any are easily adaptable to a rubric, or they can be used in a less formal/grade-less setting. Regardless, they stand alone in value, as they bring a rare opportunity for the following student resume to evolve over time:

·   leadership, through setting higher quality standards of how to do work, the presentation of work and risk-taking by taking on hard problems

·   collaboration, through the sharing of ideas and constructive criticism

·   the ability to defend an argument

·   the ability to describe a problem

·   developing self-awareness as learner

·   practicing informed iteration while working towards a solution

Why peer assessment? Can you trust a 10-14 year old to guide another 10-14 year old?

Forgetting for a minute that my students are ages 10 and 11 (as I must to begin to learn their strengths), I researched forms of assessment. I sought ought assessment that would be most authentic to a maker classroom. For me, that looked like behaviors (assessment tools) that led to methods (feedback) for offering new ideas, and collaboration on the growth process of designing a product. Peer critique was something that I began last year and I felt it was working with the previously stated goals in mind, but I had no measure to back up my claim. My fear of the image of the blind leading the blind, over a cliff of failure existed at the beginning of the year, as it would for most teachers. I also know that peer review is crucial in science and it works in various design fields, so why not in a classroom? Using peer critique to give rapid feedback on the design process seemed better than trying to filter all student work through the lens of one teacher. Peer feedback was not only useful it was necessary in an open-ended project scenario.

Having taught middle school for fourteen years, I also knew that the role of peer opinion, as it affects some beliefs and some behaviors, begins to supersede the role of parents and other adults at this developmental age (Berndt 1979). Lastly, due to the democratic nature in which knowledge will be accessed in this century, as well as our location in the heart of the technology world, many of my students come to the classroom with valuable insights, experiences and opinions that could inform the whole group. Why not capitalize on these last two assets?

In the end, the blind leading the blind is often how we all embark on an adventure. Every year we have to learn, as a class or team, how to critique the work of others by doing it a few times. It takes modeling comments and questions in the first few attempts at peer critique to get students to make more thoughtful and insightful criticisms of their classmates’ work. Students too, will inform the group as to what “quality” looks like, over time. The quality of observations, being made by the audience, also increases over time. This is turn, leads to a higher quality of feedback for the presenter. Presentation styles can also be informed through critiquing the quality of a presentation. They soon learn from each other two key elements to sharing your work; the importance of a “good story” about your work and that a great data visualization is worth a thousand words.

Formal versus Informal Critiques

Students can earn feedback from their peers in two different ways in class, formally and informally.  When we first began the year, all presentations of work for peer feedback were given formally, that is one or two students giving a slideshow aided presentation of the current progress of their work. These formal “crits” were modeled off of the first year we used product design in the 6th grade curriculum (2). I soon noticed that the quality of peer feedback grew over several weeks and I began to trust my students to give key feedback I would have been dishing out as the adult in the room. With that role covered by my most ardent student critics, I now reserve my comments to offer clues to a solution or for direct suggestions to deepen their knowledge, as any literacy guru would do.

The problem with formal critiques, is that they are formal. Adolescents hate public speaking, at least some do, and they take days to do properly (allow time for feedback). That is a lot of conference/old-classroom/teaching style information to sit through, no matter how interesting it may be. To add to that, the process of active listening for critical feedback is exhausting. I have to remind myself often, that these students are only eleven. We brainstormed as a class, ways to improve the system and two ideas emerged. Students almost unanimously agreed that peer critiques were valuable. Rather than have every share of work be done formally, they decided to do informal style critiquing, where student share their work more science fair style. For informal critiques, several tables are set up gallery style throughout the iLab. Students can then design their work display using whiteboard tables, rolling white boards, markers, standing their iPads up as displays and displaying their prototypes in an analog timeline.

The second idea to make formal crits’ less painful came recently when we needed to participate in a series of formal critiques for students to share the results of their testing for product development. This critique needed to be formal as students presented their authentic questions about their work up to this point. This is more like you would see at a scientific conference only with audience critique of work afterwards (This may in fact happen at real scientific conferences, but not at any educational ones I have attended). To help get through the process more easily and effectively, we made sure to schedule only 5 presentations a day, over a series of days and always indulged in an intermission that required no brain cells (any YouTube video with kittens getting stuck in things will do). The key was to keep the learning process fun, even if it was still formal.

Feedback

As peers take in the description of work from those presenting, they know that a valuable part of the process is to give real criticism to the presenter.  This feedback can be verbal and interactive, such as that given at the end of a formal presentation of work or it can be more passive; feedback in the form of what we call “love notes,” or post-its and sharpie marker (see below, students leaving comments for their peers using the sticky note and sharpie model) These brightly colored comments have been deemed “love notes.” Love notes can have an effect on a student’s project on different layers, emotional, as well as cognitive. The sheer act of getting a paper covered in love notes, still brings a bright-eyed glow of relief to the face of a student, having survived a presentation. My students, seem to genuinely feel rewarded for their intellect and work by the simplest of notes such as those scribbled with the words, “very cool!” or “I liked your ideas.” What adult wouldn’t what to get that kind of encouragement for their work on a regular basis?  The key to using peers to critique student work, is that feedback is immediate and expected by the student presenters, which can be a very powerful motivator to do well (Kettle, et. al. 2010).

Love notes can offer key steps to academic growth as well. As research into effective peer assessment for MOOCs has shown, peer assessment can be as effective as assessment done by a single adult or teacher (Koller 2012, Sadler et. al. 2006). While a maker classroom is not a MOOC, it is a place where student driven work can seem overwhelming to assess for a single teacher. Using peer assessment, allows for deeper differentiation in the learning process for our students, something we strive for at Hillbrook.

See below, one student’s collection of feedback from the formal peer critique of her scientific testing. Her question was whether she could prevent bananas from turning brown in her ice-cream recipe using one of two recipe changes. Her ice-cream was designed to combat depression, the problem she chose to investigate for the year. Once she decided to make a food related solution, she researched micro-nutrients that aid in the relief of depression and invented an ice-cream. Looking at her critique or “love note” form, can you tell which comments came from an adult and which came from an 11 year old?

Can we measure the worth of peer critique?

It is one thing to have an intuition that something is valuable in your classroom. It is another to be able to share something of value outside of your classroom using only anecdotal evidence. Isolated in the iLab, I could see growth happening in my students due to the peer critique system we had been using. Still, I struggled with a method of measuring the value so that I could explain the value to others. After deliberation with Hillbrook’s science teacher Ilsa Dohman (also our Center for Teaching Excellence research design guru beginning 2014), I began asking students to do a reflection on the peer critique process. I asked them to dwell on the process for a moment while they focused on the following topics:

1.     What was the goal of this presentation of your work?

2.     Self-assess your presentation in terms of quality (see image below)

3.     Tweeze out constructive criticism from the love notes to decide on a plan of action for your next iteration

I wondered if students could be keeping a better track record of how the comments and feedback they got from their peers was reflected in their iteration process or growth as a student. That way we could all see the value of the process.  The analysis of this attempt to measure growth is still pending. Ilsa and I hope to design an experimental assessment that allows students to more actively map the connection between peer feedback and growth (either as a student or of the design or scientific process). In the meantime, we continue to collect data in the form of reflections, as seen below.

References:  

1. Berndt, Thomas J. “Developmental changes in conformity to peers and parents.” Developmental Psychology, 15.06 (Nov 1979): 608-616. doi: 10.1037/0012-1649.15.6.608

2. Flores, Christa. “Authentic Learning and Assessment in the Self-Directed Environment of a Middle School Maker Space.” paper submission for IDC 2013

3. Kettle, Keri and Häubl, Gerald  “Motivation by Anticipation: Expecting rapid feedback enhances performance” Psychological Science 21.4 April (2010) 545-547

4. Koller Daphne “What we’re learning from online education” TEDGlobal talk, filmed June 2012

5. Sadler, Philip M. & Good, Eddie “The Impact of Self- and Peer-Grading on Student Learning” . Educational Assessment 11.1 (2006) 1-31

6. Senger, Jenna-Lynn. “Student Evaluations: Synchronous Tripod of Learning Portfolio Assessment—Self-Assessment, Peer-Assessment, Instructor-Assessment.” Creative Education 03.01 (2012): 155-63. Print

7. https://www.boundless.com/sociology/understanding-socialization/agents-o…

I have just started Dialogic: Education for the Internet Age by Rupert Wegerif, Professor of Education and Director of Research at the Graduate School of Education, University of Exeter, UK.

The author analyzes how  the use of the Internet disrupts the traditional logic of print-based education by offering an experience of knowledge as participatory and multiple. Before mass print-based education, culture everywhere was largely oral and thinking was mostly understood in terms of dialogues. “The Internet continues to support print-based ways of thinking, but it locates this kind of thinking more clearly  than before in a larger context, the context of the long-term living dialogue of humanity.”[1] So  the logic of education in the Internet age has to be dialogic and define education as learning to learn, think and thrive in the context of working with multiple perspectives and ultimate uncertainty.

I keep returning to the same thought lately, “can real learning ever take place inside the formal classroom, or even the formal idea of school?22

Seymour Papert was and is still ahead of its time . This speaks for the book, unfortunately, many of his ideas are not yet arrived today in many schools. Although the technological development are becoming increasingly a more and more importance in everyday .

I’m currently working in a Montesorri school here in Potsdam and among other things i’m responsible for the subjects of mathematics and physics in the 5th and 6th grade ( Germany ). In this age is immensely important that the students learn and understand the next abstraction level in mathematics. This means the students have to understand analytical things like functions or variables. According to Seybert, I think this step comes to late for this students. He shows in his book that this can be done differently.

Unfortunately, the reality is that Piaget ways of thinking are only rarely addressed in the classroom. this sounds very pessimistic, but I prefer an optimistic approach to this problem.

For me it is very important to the student to collect from their current thoughts and integrate them into projects. Examples are: The students talk about their new smartphone-apps, they also able to program their own apps. / They talk about new gadgets, they can create her own self-designed gadgets …

These include for me also projects where multiple subjects play a role. In our School we work not only at the school but also in groups in the FabLab and a farm. This school has some additional agriculture land outside of our city. this area is managed by the students. i think this stroke of luck for some projects. We construct together greenhouses and build prototypes of irrigation systems . Here, the argument put forward by Papert idea of debugging plays a very important role. While it is not always easy to reach a high motivation level after the first operation of an idea, the mindfusion a book is a good source of inspiration. One important thing for me (described in the book) that the student think and learn in the so-called “debugging mode”. This includes cyclical improvement steps of a project and the ability to present a project that others can understand it.

Mario Parade

FabLab Potsdam

I have been thinking about making and progressive education for a while. We started taking our children to the maker fair years ago, and we have a long history with Peninsula School http://www.peninsulaschool.org in Menlo Park, CA. My sister and I attended the school in the 70s from kindergarten to 8th grade, and one of the reasons my husband and I moved into the neighborhood we did was to send our children there. They started in nursery, and my daughter graduated last year; my son is in 6th grade. The school was founded in 1926, and has stayed true to the progressive tradition. I served on the board for one term while we were revising the mission statement, and one of the things that struck me was how consistent so many of the values of the school had been over the years.

The revised mission statement is quite clear: “Peninsula School creates a space where children thrive and develop their full promise as confident contributors in the world.  Here they learn about themselves and others, discovering their passions and growing intellectually in an inclusive community rich with choices, exploration, and play.”  But the community felt that such a short statement could not encompass what Peninsula School really is, so in addition to the mission statement, the school has a list of core values and core beliefs. There are a few that relate directly to what I see as the benefits of making and fab labs in education.

In the values section:

•       Freedom and Responsibility
Children learn best by experiencing daily opportunities for making important choices and reflecting on the results.

•       Meaningful Academics 
Children explore their world and develop strong critical thinking skills through a progressive teaching and learning program, with opportunities to discover, problem solve, and meet challenges.

•       Play 
Children need ample time and space for safe, open-ended exploration in our richly varied environment.

In the beliefs section:

• Each child is a unique individual whose intellectual, social, emotional, creative and physical self must be honored and nurtured.
• Time and space for making choices and for play are essential to children’s learning and development.
• Relevant and effective curriculum must include hands-on learning grounded in the arts and the natural world.
• Teachers need to have the freedom to develop excellent age-appropriate curriculum and to be authentic in their teaching styles.

This mission statement is a recent revision, but the goals and values of the school go back to its founding in the 1920s. And when I was a student there in the 1970s I was privileged enough to think that this was what school was about for everyone. It made perfect sense to me to learn about things by doing things.

And I spent a great deal of my time in three places: the weaving room, the clay room, and the woodshop. In each of these places I learned to imagine, design, and make the things I wanted to, using the skills and techniques around me. I did a great deal of math creating patterns for weaving, I did some geometry to build things in wood, and I learned iteration and patience as my skill as a potter took years to develop.

Project based learning seemed natural to me, not only in these separate activities, but also in my classrooms. We planned every meal, every route, and every scrap of gear we needed to take on our two week long 8th grade camping trip. We had been participating in the planning and organizing of our trips since about the 3rd grade, and we loved it and learned. We did projects for all kinds of subjects, including history, English, and science. For math and spelling we met in more traditional configurations, but still learned by doing, building, and exploring.

So when people ask how did I come to bring making into my classroom, I have to say I brought it back. I still love to weave, and I have not found a way to put that into my curriculum, but I have taught sewing and soft circuits in an elective (which will be much better the second time around next year!) and I continue to think about ways that teaching and learning are enlivened by a wide variety of making.  I guess I never really left.

Hi all,

I’d like to do a couple of “office hours” with guru groups this week and next. And if an hour is too long, I think 30 min is fine too!

As Paulo said today in the webinar, we are going to ramp up on this particular task – but with plenty of time for edits and peer feedback.

I’m going to try this planning tool called Doodle that does time zones. Put your name AND your group mark available times and let’s see what happens. I’m going to pretty much open up all my waking hours to see what works for the non-US Fellows. One time only offer! But if you don’t see any time that works for you, let me know.

http://doodle.com/fu8np8amp756pscz

I KNOW this is a busy time for those of you powering to the finish line of the school year, so our visits will be short and (hopefully) sweet, but focused on producing useful things.

Sylvia Martinez

Since I moved my first steps on the maker scene I was interested about what people think about fabLAB/maker space format and how they define it. During FAB5: The Fifth International Fab Lab Forum and Symposium on Digital Fabrication in Pune, India in 2009 I made a mini doc asking people  to define a fabLAB in 3 words. Here the video.

People offered a big variety of definitions trying to describe the complexity of the fablab format. So the fablab more than just a lab or a shop is defined  as a global network or a tinkershop. Almost for everyone the interest is on how people can grow and learn in a makerspace. Ones of my favorite definitions  are:

• fablab is a curiosity stimulator,
• a resource of resources
• a place to get people excited about things
• a new way of learning.

For everyone it’s clear that fablab it is not just a workshop or a set of technological tools, but something that has to do with community and empowerment through learning.

During the first visit at fablab, after exploring the space and trying  the tools I usually ask the kids to do the same exercise and try to define a fablab. My intention, this year, was they run a simple research on makerspace format starting from the exploration of the space and connecting with what they feel making stuff  there.

So first we brainstorm a little, playing with adjectives and the outcome  is not trivial.

fablab is: an investment, is interesting, is exciting, fun, imaginative, hallucinating, fantastic, awesome, innovating, dangerous, creative, good, educational, fabolous, magic..   

Than I asked them to research a little more, checking project from all around the world and try to explain what it is. Usually they are really impressed by the network-factor, by the possibility to be connected with inventors all around the world… (as educators we should use that and try to connect group of kids from different labs)

Here a small  taste of definitions from primary school students.

• fablab is a laboratory where one can create and invent marvellous things (Carolina 9 years old)
• fablab is a lab you can find in several places in the world where you can invent things. all the lab are connected so if in one lab somebody invents something, others labs can communicate with them and do it (Martín 10 years old)
• fablab is a laboratory where one can invent and create inventions that make easier our work and save natural resources, in general they are ideas that are good for people. Those inventions are made by people who work in fablab but they can be improved by every inventor in the world. (joaquín, 11 years old)
• fablab is a lab with awesome inventions you can use, like the 3D printer (Inés 10 years old)
• fablab is a place where you can express new ideas and develop new inventions (Lucía 10)
• fablab is an interconnected lab (Eduardo 10)
• fablab is a place where people can build things with machines and tools (Inés 11)
• we have a lot of fun in fablab (Carla 11)
• fablab is strongly connected to the society (Pablo 11)
• fablab is like internet but it exists physically. (Mar 11)

After that I asked them to elaborate a learning wishlist related to fablab activities. By discussing together each group defined a set of learning wishes. In general there is a big interest on technical skills like to be able to use the lasercutter or the 3d printer or specific software, but also the kids expressed learning wishes like: create together, learn english and draw, invent new machines, develop new software.

Together we designed a kind of physical rubrics for the auto evaluation of learning during the activity, using the learning wishlist we made. So during the class or after kids and teachers express how they feel about what they are learning. The kids usually have a great time using that, is like a game and a way to say goodbye before they leave. Also they propose to add new boxes for new learning wishes or create new symbols for evaluate, like lightbulbs or sparkling stars. The rubrics is changing all the time, adapting to new interests.

I know it can sound crazy but during the class this object acts like a “totem” and allows us to have a kind of ritual about conscient learning. It invites students to reflect on what they wanna learn. Because they made the object they feel free to add or change stuff and adapt it to the actual situation. In some way is an “object to think”( for sure not so powerfull as Papert’s tools) it serves to put in physical form a set of learning desires and check constantly on their evolution.

This is just a start. I’d like to engage the kids to design materials and object that can help improve their learning experiences specially in the field of participatory and self evaluation.

I hope I’ll have your expert feedback.

I’ve been reading Make Space lately and this book has some great ideas on how to layout a design lab.  I have especially enjoyed the authors ideas on what type of furniture to put in the various spaces.  Modified Z-racks, cocktail height prototyping tables and flip-top storage/brainstorming tables have all be inspiring.  I’ve actually taken on redesigning our lab and have modified some of our spaces to be more modular as well.  Currently I am repurposing some old A/V carts using Brogen’s laser cut box plans for storage.  I think next year I’ll have the student’s actually cut out their own boxes so that they have one for storage of their projects as the semester progresses.  I actually went down to IKEA and since my head was in the “redesign my lab” space it was fun to think about how I could “hack” some of the IKEA furniture to be used in the design lab.  It’s just fun to walk around the store, see something like a stainless steel dish rack and think, “I bet I could store some Chromebooks in there.” I may have to design a class around the idea of redesigning the lab spaces using IKEA peices as the catalyst to get ideas flowing.

The Make Space book also made me excited for using more CNC in our lab.  The amount of furniture that you can create on your own with a CNC is amazing.  I do wish that the CNC furniture that was referenced in the Make Space book could be downloaded for use on my own CNC machine.  I may have to check into that to see if someone would be able to get me some of the files.

Overall, the Make Space book is an amazing resource.  If you get a chance, read it.  Even if you don’t need to redesign your lab it would be a great read to help challenge your thinking on why and how to use your design, fab, or maker spaces effectively.

This essay was written last year for the Learning Creative Learning MOOC at MIT. It was originally posted to my personal blog as a response to Seymor Papert’s classic introduction to Mindstorms, Gears of My Childhood. I thought I might be appropriate to share it here.

My First Makerspace

Even at the age of seven, I had a makerspace. The cellar of our family home in suburban New Jersey was dark in corners and the cement floor was cold year round. But the combination of semi-discarded machines, random material selection, and my father’s heavy tools turned this underground cavern into my own proto-fablab, a place where I was free to imagine and explore with making things, where I could tinker and create, a place where I could learn at my own pace and study in my own way.

My workshop was huge, encompassing the entire footprint of the largest house in the neighborhood. A generic wooden staircase descended into the middle of the room, splitting the floor plan into four main sections. The left side of the wall facing the base of the stairs was lined with the hot water tank and furnace that warmed the water for our house. Mysterious noises would emanate from this area of the basement. Sometimes my brothers would cruelly turn off the switch at the top of the stairs and the only light in the room would be the flickering blue glow of the furnace reflecting on the shiny concrete floor.

Turning right to face the front of the house, one long windowless wall was lined floor to ceiling with steel shelves. These muscle rack units were stacked with junk and treasures packed into boxes and old luggage. There did not seem to be any order to what was in each container. It was up to me and my brothers to find out. The lower shelves were filled with boxes of our old toys and broken sports equipment. This discarded bric-a-brac became raw materials for make believe and fantasy. The upper shelves seemed to contain older items, foreign detritus from our parent’s childhoods. Reaching these archaic items was dangerous. The shelves were free standing and we had to climb up them to reach the upper levels. More than once, a whole shelving unit tipped over on a small child, spilling ancient report cards and faded sepia photographs all over the concrete.

One entire shelving unit, closest to the staircase, was filled with my father’s tools. This was my favorite of all the shelves. I knew I was not supposed to play with these adult toys, but there was something magnetic about them, their heft and their power. On the lower shelves was one large box of nails and one large box of screws. I loved to bang those nails with a hammer into scrap two-by-four at wild angles bending them haphazardly. Then I would use the pry bar on the hammer to remove the nails slowly. I loved the squeaking sound that would make. Some of the longer nails were harder to pry out. I remember discovering that a small block of material between the claw and the wood would help pull out those more difficult nails…one of my first discoveries of a simple machine.

On one of those shelves just above my head, my dad kept a few huge 12 volt batteries. I have no idea what they were for, but I’ll never forget when one fell on my big toe while I was trying to climb up and pull it down off its perch. I lost my toenail soon afterwards. I used to love those batteries. They were so different from the wimpy batteries that powered my toys and remote controls. They had conical springs for power and ground. I remember playing with those giants and how I discovered that placing a nail across the two metal springs would produce sparks. My early experiments with electricity were fueled by a dangerous level of unbridled curiosity. I would connect my toys to those big boxy batteries and observe the effects. Sometimes my poor toys would make crazy sped-up noises, or popping sounds and smoke. I was circuit bending from a young age. Often the toys would stop working afterwards.

I lost interest in those batteries once I discovered the power of alternating current. In fact my favorite toy growing up was an old electrical power cord that had been pulled out of a lamp. I don’t remember where I found it. Maybe in one of those boxes on the shelves, or more likely, I cut it off a lamp myself. I used to run tests where I’d send 120 volts of alternating current through various materials, and observe the results. My favorite objects to observe were metal bolts; they would get white hot. I could pick them up with pliers and burn hexagonal holes in paper or plastic. Now that I know a bit more about electricity, I realize my experiments could have caused some serious accidents. But I learned more about the principles of nature by getting electrocuted through that damn lamp cord, than I ever could have in a classroom.

In fact I learned plenty of real lessons in that basement that I never could have learned in school. In school the counselors and psychologists were saying that I had an attention deficit, that I had a hard time paying attention to the task at hand. In classes where we had to sit row by row for 45 minutes at a time listening to a teacher talk about science or math, I was dreaming of doing science and math in the basement. And as soon as I got home, I would forget about that two page worksheet that I was supposed to fill out for homework and get right to working on blueprints for my latest creation. In school I felt like a failure, but in the basement I was a designer, an engineer, and an inventor. In the basement, I would take stuff apart and put stuff back together. I was always trying to figure out how things worked. I would make things and often break things.

When Dad brought home a brand new Sony Triniton TV, everyone in the family was excited about the huge curved glass and those giant red, blue, and green pixels. But I was more excited about the prospect of disassembling the old TV, an ancient black and white box. I was convinced that if I could take the television apart, I could figure out how to source all the individual parts, but smaller, and build my own handheld television set. Of course once I took that box apart, I saw how complex the system inside really was. I kept breaking that TV down into smaller and smaller parts until every single screw was removed and the giant glass cathode ray tube stood menacing, but alone. It was not until years later, in graduate school, when I learned that the capacitors inside a television set hold enough current to kill an adult.

Not all of my explorations in the basement were as dangerous as the electricity experiments. Most of my time in this makerspace was spent playing and inventing with a safer materials.

One winter, I decided to build a snow bike. In the basement, I had all of the supplies and tools that I needed. The bicycle that I learned how to ride on was small but heavy, my sister’s old pink and white trainer with tassels on the handlebars. I studded the solid rubber back tire with screws spaced around the entire circumference. I attached a short child size ski with c-clamps cuffed around the bindings and the rim of the front tire. I’ll never forget the satisfaction that I felt as I rode that pink bike around the snow covered streets of the neighborhood. It might have been the first time I made a real working prototype of one of my inventions.

When I was twelve years old, my family moved to another town, another house. A house without a basement. Into my teens I continued to fail classes at school. My parents sent me away to a very traditional boarding school. My love of doing math and science in the basement faded. I was forced to fill out vocab worksheets and study for mathematics quizzes.

It wasn’t until years later, after college, when Alan Alda appeared on PBS touring around the MIT Fab Lab, that I recalled the joys of making in that basement. The fantastic machines that I saw in that lab at MIT were way more advanced than any hammer, battery, or lamp cord, but I recognized a playfulness and creativity that had disappeared from my life as I left childhood.

In search of that feeling, I went back to school and I learned how to use those fancy digital fabrication tools that I saw on the TV. I learned how to program a computer and build machines that sense and respond to the physical world. I learned more in two years of graduate school, than I learned in all of my years of primary schooling combined. I rediscovered learning by making.

In New York City, where I live now, most kids don’t have basements or garages, so I’ve been teaching in Fab Labs and starting makerspaces for kids. I’ve become obsessed with the idea that school should be more like my childhood basement, a place where students are allowed to explore and experiment, to tinker, to make, and to discover principles of nature all on their own.