E ala! E alu! E kuilima!

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Up!  Together!  Join hands!

Teachers are at the heart of my fondest memories of my primary and secondary education.  Ms. Neet, Ms. Kala, and Mr. Akana were my fourth, fifth, and sixth grade teachers, respectively; Mrs. Harbottle taught music in grades four through eight; Mrs. Melahn taught me seventh and tenth grade math; Mrs. Huch for ninth grade English; and Mrs. Powers for eleventh grade English.  These classes also happen to be the classes I learned the most in and whose content I can readily recall.  Papert, in his blog post, Gears of My Childhood, highlights the relationship between affect and learning, and what these teachers provided for me were memorable classroom experiences leading to well-learned content.

As I embarked on this new adventure of opening my own high school, I took to heart the relationships I developed and nurtured with my primary and secondary teachers.  I aimed to create learning environments that supported knowledge acquisition and retention, which meant implementing practices beneficial to creating memorable classroom experiences.  I recalled memories of how these teachers and their classrooms made me feel and asked colleagues and friends and family to do the same in an attempt to find commonalities and central themes of teachers who positively impacted learning and the learning environments they created.  These trips down memory lane confirmed the importance of the affective domain in learning; specifically a “sense of belonging – when one feels a part of a particular group” (Trujillo & Tanner, 2014, p. 13).

A signature pedagogy of Nā Hunaahi is “learners engaged in the construction of an artifact or shareable product” (Hay & Barab, 2001, p. 283) in order for the learner to build his/her knowledge.  However, attention must also be given to the development of practices that imitate the positivity, joy, and happiness felt by students with memorable classroom experiences in which knowledge was acquired and retained.  In Gears of My Learning, Papert suggests the need for “a positive affective tone that can be traced back to … experiences” (Papert, n.d., para. 5) that connect with joyful and optimistic memories and prior experiences.  I might further his suggestion by also inspiring teachers to create positive affective tones through relationship building.  Baumeister and Leary (1995) define “a need to belong, that is, a need to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of interpersonal relationships” (p. 499), and teachers, as persons with significant time spent with students, can create a sense of belonging by purposefully and intentionally choosing to form quality interpersonal relationships.  Additionally, numerous studies connect a student’s academic success with his/her sense of belonging (Brooms, 2019; Korpershoek, Canrinus, Fokkens-Bruinsma, & de Boer, 2020; Master, Cheryan, & Meltzoff, 2016; Museus, Yi, & Saelua, 2017; van Caudenberg, Clycq, & Timmerman, 2020; van Herpen, Meeuwisse, Hofman, & Severiens, 2020), and that sense of belonging can be developed by an individual and/or the school.  Regardless of who or what supports the development of a sense of belonging in students, doing so helps create memorable relationships that foster learning and achievement and creates an anchor students can set and navigate back to throughout their lifetimes.

In Hawaiʻi, we like to say, “It’s a kākou thing,” meaning it is the responsibility of all.  Kākou is the first-person inclusive plural pronoun used to denote three or more persons including the speaker.  The beauty of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, the Native Hawaiian language, as with many Polynesian languages, is its “distinctions in its pronouns between inclusive and exclusive forms and between dual (2) and plural (3 or more) referants” (Saft, 2017, p. 95) allowing the speaker to clearly orient “the number of people being referred to and whether their interlocutors are going to be included or excluded in the content of the speech.  An inclusive form, then, can serve as an immediate signal that all of those involved are (or are not) part of one inclusive group or community” (p. 96).  Beyond its use in speaking and writing, kākou also evokes images of togetherness and unity and supports the development of a sense of belonging.  In addition to the use of language, ʻōlelo noʻeau, or Native Hawaiian poetical sayings, are used to remind students of their connection with each other, their teacher, the school, and the community.  “Pūpūkāhi i holomua, unite in order to progress” (Pukui, 1983, p. 302), is referenced often by teachers, coaches, community leaders, and government officials to remind us of our connectedness, and that progress comes through our combined efforts.  At Nā Hunaahi, we use ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and cultural practices and quality time to build strong adult-youth relationships.  These relationships also demonstrate our commitment and dedication to the student as a person, to his/her family, and to his/her learning and achievement.  It also contributes to developing a sense of belonging for the student.

When looking to support student learning and achievement, in addition to allowing students to build knowledge through construction of learning artifacts, we must also address the affective domain of sense of belonging.  By creating a sense of belonging, we help students develop a context around their content of learning.

References:

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497-529.

Brooms, D. R. (2019). “I was just trying to make it”: Examining urban black males’ sense of belonging, schooling experiences, and academic success. Urban Education, 54(6), 804-830.

Hay, K. E., & Barab, S. A. (2001). Constructivism in practice: A comparison and contrast of apprenticeship and constructionist learning environments. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 10(3), 281-322.

Korpershoek, H., Canrinus, E. T., Fokkens-Bruinsma, M., & de Boer, H. (2020). The relationships between school belonging and students’ motivational, social-emotional, behavioural, and academic outcomes in secondary education: A meta-analytic review. Research Papers in Education, 35(6), 641-680.

Master, A., Cheryan, S., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2016). Computing whether she belongs: Stereotypes undermine girls’ interest and sense of belonging in computer science. Journal of Educational Psychology, 108(3), 424-437.

Museus, S. D., Yi, V., & Saelua, N. (2017). The impact of culturally engaging campus environments on sense of belonging. The Review of Higher Education, 40(2), 187-215.

Papert, S. (n.d.). The gears of my childhood. From The Daily Papert: http://dailypapert.com/the-gears-of-my-childhood/

Pukui, M. K. (1983). ʻŌlelo noʻeau: Hawaiian proverbs & poetical sayings. Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press.

Saft, S. (2017). Documenting an endangered language: The inclusive first-person plural pronoun kākou as a resource for claiming ownership in Hawaiian. Jourrnal of Linguistic Anthropology, 27(1), 91-113.

Trujillo, G., & Tanner, K. D. (2014). Considering the role of affect in learning: Monitoring students’ self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and science identity. CBE – Life Sciences Education, 13, 6-15.

van Caudenberg, R., Clycq, N., & Timmerman, C. (2020). Feeling at home in school: Migrant youths’ narratives on school belonging in Flemish secondary education. European Educational Research Journal, 428-444.

van Herpen, S. G., Meeuwisse, M., Hofman, W. A., & Severiens, S. E. (2020). A head start in higher education: The effect of a transition intervention on interaction, sense of belonging, and academic performance. Studies in Higher Education, 45(4), 862-877.

 

Making means head and heart. Not just hands.

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Can you recall the secret thrills of your childhood? The deep fascinations that enraptured you across worlds? We might call them obsessions, fixations, or phases — as doomed to end as the passing of seasons — for even as much as I was filling my room and imagination with dinosaurs, I never became a paleontologist. Neither did Seymour Papert, MIT faculty who “developed an intense involvement with automobiles before the age of two,” become an auto engineer.The deep fascinations of our childhood are but infantile experiences — and so we are quick to forget them in the cultivative grounds of our becoming.

For Papert, however, these pastimes of playing with car parts — turning gears around in hand, rotating all manner of circular objects against each other, learning the stories of their functioning — fostered within him a deep love for gears that transcended merely innocent playthings. The gears instead served as material medium to the universe’s most poetic distillations. Car child did not become car professional; he became a mathematician.

He also became a cyberneticist and renowned learning theorist, responsible for both the 1:1 computing initiatives and the constructionist movements rippling across education to this day. As a preface to his seminal book on constructionism, Mindstorms, Papert reflects on the gears of his childhood. Gears were, he describes, a transitional object, both abstract and sensory, connecting with both the formal knowledge of mathematics and the body knowledge of the child. In turn, as he turned wheels in head and hand alike, the complex patterns of differentials and transmission shafts and mental gear models provided the means for Papert the child to see mathematics in his own world. Multiplication tables and variables and algebraic equations alike were all embedded in the workings of the gears! Thus they were no longer abstract, but rather comfortable friends substantiated and reified in the things he had come to know and love.

This notion of knowing — what it means to know something, to learn, to develop knowledge — formed the central thesis of Papert’s career. Knowledge is not merely absorbed through cognitive assimilation, but actively constructed through affective components as well. Papert would assert, in other words, that we learn best when we are actively engaged in constructing things in the world. Real, tangible things. Things you can hold, manipulate, feel in order to make sense of them.

Look inside schools, however, and you shall largely see a different picture: rather than learning the world by reading and writing the world, experiencing it with the fullest of our senses, we seem to learn the world by hastily memorizing facts about the world. (Or, as HGSE professor Dave Perkins suggests, we learn through aboutitis: never getting to play the whole game and only learning about the game.)

Perhaps this is why the so called maker revolution is surging today. In a school culture where learning has become so rote, so mechanized, and devoid of meaning, constructionism is an attempt to restore meaning to the hands of students. Same with hands-on learning and student-centered pedagogy. When going to school means jumping through hoops, and when boredom in the classroom is higher than ever, we as educators are called to shift what it means to be learning in school.

But there are problems with these movements as well. Hands-on activities like making slime or crafting grecian urns can offer the illusion of disciplinary engagement — this is science, this is cultural literacy, and hey the kids are having fun too! But following cookbook instructions does not equal scientific inquiry and slapping gluey newspaper on balloons does not equal historical analysis. Similarly, making a model of a cell, whether it is from paper or cake or plastic, lends no further understanding of how cells function if the student is not also thinking how their model works as a model for cells! What are the parts, how are they connected, why do they look the way they do, how are they complex? Too often we leap into hands-on activities with the belief that because they are fun, they are engaging and therefore students will learn more deeply. But we are mistaken when having fun merely means being entertained.  Through the trap of passivity we shall learn nothing.

Papert was prescient to point out that constructionism was supposed to be an analogue of instruction, a vital counterpart to be used in tandem with direct instruction — yes, direct instruction can be good! — but it was not supposed to be an absolute replacement. Perhaps, in this manner, we would be wise to seek such balance between thinking and doing: head and hand. Both are vital for the richness of learning we so desire.

But I also think a third component is left out, and that is the heart. When Papert writes of his involvement with gears, he does not limit his language to just cognitive and sensorimotor actions. He is adamant in describing the emotional forms of his play: positive affect, feelings of joy, wonder, magic, and love. And he speaks on love quite often — most pointedly, when he asserts that the “essence of the story” is not in the doling out of gear sets for all future generations of children but that he so poignantly “fell in love with the gears.” Papert’s successes, as he would ascribe, were not due to interacting with gears as objects — rather due to falling in love with the gears as more than objects, as a conduit across intellectual and emotional worlds. (Unfortunately, today’s ed tech does less to foster such experiences of connected learning than it does to turn classrooms into shiny Skinner boxes.)

I think this concept of love is worth further attention in teaching and learning. Not love as a toxic unwavering positivity, and definitely not love as dedication to test scores. I mean love as understanding, interconnection, interbeing. The phenomenon whereby through deepest care, expansive listening, and attending to another, such stretching of our perceptive faculties brings us to “see another as a legitimate other” (Humberto Maturana) and expand our notions of objects from that of reductive othering It to that of fullest personhood Thou (Martin Buber) — surely that must be the heart of learning! Change of paradigms made manifest in our very perception of others-in-the-world, down to our most fundamental cognitive and neural architectures. What if, as educators, we invested our energy towards such heart in our curriculum? What do we want our students to love, in fullest understanding and appreciation? I think that goes far deeper than, say, what standards do we want our students to master!

Making is a vital act. Not because it is assumed to be fun, or entertaining, or an escape from the traditional disciplines of schooling — though all of the above are often true. Making is vital because it represents what teaching and learning could and should be. When students are actively engaged in the construction of a meaningful product in order to be shared with the community, THAT is powerful learning! Uncanny, because it seems so obvious. Complex, because it is so difficult to achieve. Yet revolutionary, because it precisely what is missing in so many classrooms today.

Revolutionary, also, because it is a shift in how we relate to things in the world. Making is not just about giving kids things to put their hands on. It’s about embracing the agentivity of children as learners, and their agency over media and the material world. It’s about shifting the paradigm from students as receivers of knowledge to students as constructors of knowledge. It’s about letting go of the mindset of command and control. It’s about liberation. It’s about the heart of what it means to be human: fully sensing and making sense of the complex world in which we are bodily immersed.

We live in a time where we are profoundly disconnected from nature, from each other, and our own selves. We are so disembodied, and we yearn to become whole. I daresay that making is not just vital but sacred to being human. Without it, we are lost. So let us come to our senses, and make way. This is the way.

-LS

Lior Schenk, FabLearn Cohort #3

Finding my gear at 23 – Reflection on “The gears of my childhood by Dr. Papert”

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After reading Dr. Papert’s “The gears of my childhood”, I realized that I found my gear way past my childhood.
As a kid I used to love tinkering with anything I could get my hands on, whether it was an old toy with a mechanical movement, an old computer or even random household objects.
Luckily I grew up with a mom who loved tinkering herself and a father who as a mechanical engineer, had every tool there is to help me in this hobby of mine.
When I finished highschool, I thought my passion was programming, I had a knack for writing programs and analyzing how the digital world works, I was lucky enough to be born at the time where I was young enough to know the internet but was still able to play in the streets.
So naturally I decided to study something related to my love for the digital world, which is why I studied computer engineering.
After graduation, I realized that my love for tinkering objects still outshined my love for programming, I loved to see the tangible results of what I do and not have them confined behind a computer screen and that’s when I stumbled across the “FabLab” World.


I was like Willy Wonka walking around in my own definition of a chocolate factory. I was 23 when I first knew what a FabLab is, which is a space with different tools that enables people to build customized solutions to problems, there was no lower or upper limit to what the problem can be, whether you wanted to just customize a mobile stand or build cutting edge products that could be turned into viable businesses.

At 24, I decided to take the “Fab Academy – How to Make Almost Anything” diploma, it was a 6 months intensive program that teaches principles of digital fabrication. With a background in programming, I do admit that it was easier for me than my colleagues.

Ever since then, I’ve been instructing the Fab Academy program and trying to incorporate what I learnt with the different educational programs I run at the FabLab, where I work.
I incorporate hands-on practical learning methodology in almost all educational programs, that stems from the believe I have of the importance of engagement, if kids are engaged, it is more likely for them to develop an interest and a passion for whatever they are learning.

Although I believe there is truly no age limit to finding your gear, I still aim to maximize the exposure of youth to as much as possible at a young age to enable them to find their passion “Gear” as fast as possible.


Jordan’s first Mobile FabLab, “Luminus Mobile FabLab Sponsored by Orange”.

Reflection on “The Gears of My Childhood”

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The title The Gears of My Childhood written by Seymour Papert raises many questions and sparks as I reflect on my own life experiences, both of my own childhood experiences and being an educator experiencing my student’s learning experiences.

The word Gear metaphorically meant to me a slight push that put things in motion for you to learn from your own experiences.

As John Dewey pointed out in his book Democracy and Education “An ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance. An experience, a very humble experience, is capable of generating and carrying any amount of theory (or intellectual content), but a theory apart from an experience cannot be definitely grasped even as theory. It tends to become a mere verbal formula, a set of catchwords used to render thinking, or genuine theorising, unnecessary and impossible”.

Experiences should be of such nature which drives inquiry and demands thinking. But what is there to inquire? Well, it can be about everything and anything about various aspects of life that children have curiosity and questions on and mostly they are open-ended. The children should be given opportunity to explore their questions like babies explore the world around them. They drop things to test for their strength and sound and form theories by experimenting. These experiences and exploring with things have been the Gears of my life as they have provided an opportunity for me to think, reflect and learn.

As a child I loved playing games a lot. But the major question back then was that how can I possibly possess all those games or toys which I saw? The constant urge to play pushed me to make new games on my own. Hence, I started making games from old cardboard boxes, newspaper and twigs. The games which I saw at my friends or relatives places, I made them on my own and iterated the rules to suit the material or the structure. These self-made games were not only exciting to play but actually made a lot of my mental models around problem solving, generating ideas and resource optimisation which I didn’t realise until I studied these concepts in economics and management during my graduation.

Not only the concepts but it gave me a perspective to find a way through the maze if I got stuck. This was visible very soon when during my graduation I met with an accident and was not be able to write my exams due to steel rods in both my arms. At that point of time everyone asked me to drop out but I was only thinking of possibilities of how can I write my exams? And I got the answer in making. As I was making something I realised that I could easily cut using a scissors with both of my hands. This gave me the idea to try writing with both my hands simultaneously to compensate for the loss of speed of writing with only one hand. In the end I gave my exams and this whole experience gave me a big push to keep looking for solutions.

This problem solving and learning by doing had always been an integral part of my learning. But in spite of knowing and experiencing it, it was very hard to internalise it. A lot of reflection was needed to understand all the threads especially when I had to teach. When I started to teach I had understood that the focus of my lesson plan should be on doing and learning would happen with it. So I designed many such tasks but as I say they were mere tasks in the end. So the children were experiencing making but a question arose as to the nature and extent of learning. In a class when children were learning about alternative sources of energy they made wind mills, solar cookers and learnt about the concepts through making. It was just a concept with no connection as to why were we making it or what’s the need to learn this. They had no chance to incorporate what they were doing into a larger picture. The focus was on just completing the task. Every child followed the same process incorporating the same design. There was no opportunity to alter the course of task to fit the meaning-making of any individual student.

This made me think and reflect on my experience of observing my students doing and learning, as to what learning is and is making or doing actually resulting in any kind of learning?

I had to stay with the question for a long time till one day when I along with my co-teacher was doing a project on the working of hand pump. I made a working model of the hand pump to explore the nuances with students but they seemed to be disinterested in the discussion. This was an unusual thing. On probing them, I found out that the design made by me was inappropriate and they were not sure if they should challenge or question my thinking and knowledge. Thus, raising question by children was answer to my question. Children would learn by doing only when they make things to find answers for their own questions. So in our organisation we started a Question Hour in which children  could just share their daily curiosities about anything and everything. They raised questions, discussed possibilities which they explored lot of times doing it. In one such conversation a child raised a question about alternative sources of energy.

They asked that if it’s that effective, can it solve our problem of charging a mobile phone as there was no electricity in the village and they had to walk 5-7 kilometres to a shop to charge it. To find a solution they read some books and did some trials before coming to the conclusion of making a solar mobile charger which was up and running. This not only gave us the answer to our questions but on further reflection on my life experiences I understood how questions and thinking are closely related to doing and making and learning results from this inquiry.

Since then there have been many such instances where children’s questions had led to their exploration and tinkering as well as finding provisional answers. This has led everyone in our organisation provide opportunities for students to do things and make things with both body as well as mind using hand and senses. Tinkering and Making develops a sense of resourcefulness, a discipline of working and exploring with different types of materials and tools, even when the students attempt to construct something out of their imagination. In this process the student finds a space for creative expression instead of being a passive learner.  

Aligned with the child’s propensity to meaning making any filed of knowledge  arises from curiosity, asking questions and finding provisional answers by exploring and doing . And when it is applied to the context of the child it evokes further questions. As mentioned by John Dewey experience has two core characteristics continuity and interaction. Thus if knowledge has to remain living then we have to make and re-make the connections rather than treating information as a finished product to be held in memory. 

To end with a thought which I believe in has been written by John Dewey and it has been the gear which keeps me motivated and has made me a reflective teacher:

“Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results.” 

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Freedom! It is Easy to see

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School Bell

Many times in my childhood, I was misunderstood not only by my caregivers but also by my peers. My teachers, who I view as my destiny makers also misunderstood me in some instances. Life and education in the upcountry back then was an adventurous experience accompanied with the bliss of childhood memories; such as those school bells that reminded us it’s playtime or class time is over. This could open a whole new chapter in the day of all kinds of plays, the sorts that always ended at dusk. Getting home in the dark, knowing so well this will not end well but you still match home like a movie star only to be ushered in by the disciplinary committee. As if growing up and learning in a village school was not enough assignment itself, maths was a real “monster” to me.

I had this inner thought that would always make sense only in my brain and I couldn’t express the ideas whether it was through writing or verbally. Not realizing my inner inquisitive nature and adventurous way of learning that required patience and deep understanding and above all freedom to date think differently. Maybe just maybe, nature would have understood me much better or I could be, that one of us was too obtuse – that’s me or my destiny makers.

Back to my parents, to them I was that family lawyer, yes ‘okil kamaloka’ – the lawyer; because of my inquisitive mind, I always wanted to see that statements and assumptions made sense – not a perfectionist. However, I knew I had to be extra careful especially before my mother or else things would be rough home and away, knowing well she is a teacher in the same school I go to. I can vividly recall my morning trips to school (of course, it will be a nice morning walk) being met with constant stroke of the cane which was usually because of either incomplete maths assignments, or incorrect maths assignments. Sometimes the order changes but I realized the more they changed the more they remained constant.

It took me a while to realize that the stereotypical text nature of maths wasn’t my favorite cup of coffee. All this inquisitive nature was purely associated with my curiosity for anything related to numbers, patterns and whether they made sense. The numbers here were not limited to numerical but also statistics.

My high school maths life had fun moments and a few instances of strong smashes on my head by my ‘maths destiny maker’. To my maths teachers, ‘these things’ referring to maths things were always easy to see in their eyes. It seems like my maths journey was taking a new turn, from being “misunderstood” to landing on an “easy to see” pad.

Taking the context in my experience while working with kids, they have taught me one important skill, no actually three: the art of patience in teaching and learning, freedom to dare think differently and whatever is so obvious to adults is not always obvious to kids. I find it awesome, and a moment of pure bliss when one of my students can break one of my obvious ones! For instance; when having any grid, why do we count the corner twice while getting the dimension length and width? That moment a child innocently asks you to make them understand what you have always found to be so open and obvious. Children have this “weird” ability to not know many things yet. This means that until they experience it or are taught, nothing is obvious to them. From this experience as a maths educator, now unlike before I assume less of my learners and I am careful with my assumptions.

Back to my high school life, it was a moment of rediscovering what it meant to be obsessed with logical maths. This made me think for a moment, maybe I wanted to inherit my mother’s prowess in accounting and money matters despite the limited educational background she had in this field. In business studies, the accounting option was always a bonus to my high school life, and this confidence made me think accounting was my next big thing. I was all wrong.

Maths started making a lot of sense when I joined University to pursue a maths course. This happened during one of my Introduction to logic, proofs, and refutations classes. For a moment I felt like one of my nerve endings were ignited, maybe this is due to the stereotypical texts in which maths had been introduced to me and made the subject look like a monster to me, maybe just maybe, this could be the case of many untapped skills and great minds lost in the pool of conventional way of learning. I have always found joy and beauty in collegial maths discussions and for this reason, I resolved to help and support young learners in trying to regain the long-lost glory of the maths language. Maths is freedom.

Who killed our inborn maker culture?

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What kind of toys do your child play with? Who chooses those toys for your child? Kenya Universities today, over 50,000 Engineering students graduate annually but how does this translate to actual productivity? This is no different from most African countries. Very little manufacturing is taking place locally and this has contributed to among other reasons, lack of practical experience in our education system. Most graduates are not confident enough to try to make things but instead would prefer explaining the theoretical version of how those things work. Growing up in the rural Africa was the most exciting experience one would want to have a taste of. Kids in these regions had no choice but to decide their own happiness by building their own playing toys. The resources were so scarce, and the urban life was just a fantasy.

I grew up in the rural parts of Western Kenya region of Africa and this was my story too. When I joined school, the entry level was tested by children being asked to fold their hands over the head to touch the ear on the opposite side. The school was far enough and so as a little boy I had to rely on joining older people to walk to school. Some of the classwork, I remember at my early days included drawing sketches; we were taken out of the classroom to the bare ground to draw on. Others included moulding toy domestic animals, houses, cars and other household items. As I was growing much older and experienced, my peers and we started building things which mattered to us. I could spend many hours making toy cars using wires, or tangle – a plant bearing lots of rounded fruits which we were using as wheels. At some advanced level, were able to build a locally made wheelbarrow-like bearing automobile using waste materials. These equipment could be used for transportation of farm harvests to stores, enjoying the rides at no costs, or ferrying water which was fetched a distance away.

While sent to a shop, I could use my Nyangee – a hand-made ring-shaped transport equipment rode by tapping on it to roll on the ground while the rider runs chasing it just like you can roll a car tire. On this journey, you could hear me reciting the items I have been sent as sukari kwota, majan gi change – meaning 1/4kg sugar, tea leaves and the balance until I reach the shop. This was to ensure that I get to the shop faster and to avoid detraction by my friends on the way. When I reached upper primary level, I met more related lessons which pushed us into more making. They included Art and craft where we had to build musical instruments, do mosaic, stitching among others but that seemed to an end. Going to high school, there wasn’t much practical subjects even though as an individual, I remained interested in making and repairing things

.

My life took a different angle when I became a community social worker fighting Gender Violence and promoting children rights. I remember one day when I was working at a child care center and the Irish volunteer lady bought LEGOs for the kids; this became my biggest duty playing with kids to help make various toys out of them.

Later while working trying to establish a Gender Violence Recovery Centre (GVRC), we decided to do a survey and I went to the field to collect data. I met and talked to so many girls and young women in their early 20s who were either single mothers or divorcees or married but suffering the Gender Based Violence (GBV). As a social worker, I did not have so much to give other than Counseling and hope. They were in a suffering situation and they needed more. They found themselves in the vicious cycle of poverty. Their spouses who were also very young school drop-outs – men who had turned to drug addiction and beatings due to frustrations. What kind of support do they deserve? They all agreed that they need hands-on skills that would help them generate their own income.

Quoting from Seymour Papert’s The Gears of My Childhood, “What an individual can learn, and how he learns it, depends on what models he has available. This raises, recursively, the question of how he learned these models. Thus the “laws of learning” must be about how intellectual structures grow out of one another and about how, in the process, they acquire both logical and emotional form.” I can relate well my childhood engagement with the challenges we meet today. This inspired me to undertake the Fab Academy (Digital Fabrication Course) which then rekindled the maker-fire in me. This then led to the establishment of FABrication LABoratory Winam – an innovation makerspace where makers can share both tools and knowledge to custom make things they would like while learning too takes place.


Working in Fablab Winam with different makers, learners, professionals and kids have provided me with unique opportunity of seeing how Making and Constructionism learning theories are applicable. But where did the rains started beating us?
Will the efforts of makers who are focused on working with children as well as enabling innovation hubs which are currently fast growing in Africa revive this dying culture? When more young people will get a chance to gain courage to make things in their early lives and walk through their lives with same enthusiasm then we will probably change our story. The maker culture may turn around the economy of our country by encouraging a lot of local manufacturing cottage industries hence reduce the youth bulge crisis facing the government currently. This maker culture can have impact in individual lives as they choose to make their own things rather than calling for technicians for as simple activity as fixing a bulb.

Artificial Intelligence Club at the Polo Educacional Sesc in Rio de Janeiro

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Teaching Artificial Intelligence in K-12 education through educational robotics and remote learning: the role of students and the mobilization of the school community

“ Studying is not an act of consuming ideas, but of creating and recreating them. ” (Paulo Freire)
  • The motivation to teach Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education

As it is an increasingly pervasive technology that has expanded its field of action in a short period of time, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been applied in actions ranging from the area of Marketing, Medicine, Engineering, Politics, in services related to Human and Financial Resources and even in leisure activities, including Games and Social Networks. We find smart devices in countless technological resources and our youngsters are users of most of them.

The ubiquitous nature of this technology has caused people to interact with AI passively without considering, for example, that this interaction exposes their individuality and privacy. This fact is enhanced by the facilities that its use provides. Many people are not careful about its use and are not careful with the permission to obtain their personal data.

One of the ways to raise awareness and clarify the population about this technology is via Literacy in Artificial Intelligence actions, so that users interact with devices equipped with this resource in a critical and less passive way. The best place for these actions to take place is in K-12 education.

There are important reasons why the school should include subjects related to AI teaching in its curriculum. Among them, we can point out the impacts that AI has caused on human relations in 21st century society (Druga, 2018). In addition, the expansion of the integration of this technology in day-to-day resources points to changes in the professional world, enhanced by the fourth industrial revolution[1].

In this sense, the update of the National Curriculum Guidelines for Secondary Education in Brazil, a document dated November 21, 2018[2], proposes for the Formative Itinerary[3] of the Mathematics and its Technologies area  that curricular arrangements be structured allowing, among other topics, studies on AI:

“deepening of structuring knowledge for the application of different mathematical concepts in social and work contexts, structuring curricular arrangements that allow studies in problem solving, (…), robotics, automation, artificial intelligence, (…), considering the context and the possibilities of provision by education systems”

According to Libâneo (2004), the school can no longer be an institution isolated in itself and separated from the surrounding reality but integrated into a community that interacts with the broad social life. In fact, the school environment is a space with the potential for this topic to be addressed and the AI’s operating logic can be presented and discussed as a means of clarifying to students what makes smart devices so invasive. Initiatives like this provide the training of new generations of citizens aware of the benefits, risks, and care related to the use of such devices.

  •  The implementation of AI teaching at the Polo Educacional Sesc

In order to relate Mathematics, Computer Science and New Technologies to the high school curriculum, in 2019 I proposed a course for the Mathematical Formative Itinerary, called Math Maker.

The course is a mathematics teaching-learning proposal inspired by the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) approach and integrates robotics, automation, programming and AI in the teaching of the subject.

Just as the Brazilian Ministry of Education proposed actions to modernize and update teaching through the Common National Base Curriculum[4], the STEM approach is a government initiative that emerged in the United States with the aim of improving the learning of exact sciences.

In November 2009, former US President Barack Obama presented the “Educate to Innovate” initiative as a collaborative effort between the federal government, the private sector and the nonprofit and research communities. Thus, STEM education was recognized as an approach that brings greater relevance to the teaching of concepts in mathematics, physics, chemistry and computer science topics.

This approach provides the student with a leading role in their learning and develops important skills for the 21st century professional. This professional will find a labour market that will demand a new set of cognitive skills and abilities, previously only accessible to specialists, promoting the democratization of various tasks.

At the Polo Educacional Sesc, one of the activities that comes from the actions that the Math Maker course promotes is the Artificial Intelligence Club.

  • The first year of the Artificial Intelligence Club – 2019: The construction of the Frankie robotic device and the realization of face-to-face workshops

In the first year of the Club, students participated in workshops that promoted the introduction of machine learning concepts[5] via educational robotics. During 4 months, it carried out activities related to pattern recognition, database definition, training, classification and accuracy using the Python programming language[6].

As an AI resource, the WiSARD Weightless Neural Network was used, an acronym that highlights the names of the creators (Wikie, Stonham and Aleksandre’s Recognition Device). WiSARD is considered a model of simple understanding because the operations that it performs are mostly of binary logic. To understand how it works, it is necessary to know how to perform basic mathematical operations, among them, perform percentage calculations and recognize representations of binary images. In addition, the student need to have skills that involve combinatorial thinking and random processes. Anyway, subjects that are easy to understand for high school students, and for this reason, it was chosen as an AI library for these actions.

In the institution’s Maker Space[7], the Frankie robot (Pictures 1), was prototyped (F.R.A.N.K.I.E stands for Fostering Reasoning and Nurturing Knowledge through Informatics in Education). This robot makes it possible to teach students the mechanisms behind an artificial neural network, promoting the learning of what makes an AI resource so important in countless applications.

Pictures 1 – Robot Frankie prototyping stage

It is important to highlight that the use of robotics to promote the teaching of concepts of Mathematics and Computer Science enables a multidisciplinary experience and creates different forms of interaction with the learning space.

During the workshops, the students “taught” the robot geometric shapes that, when recognizing them, should make a decision in the environment (Pictures 2). Through a database of images created by them, students trained the algorithm to recognize the geometrical figure and later move in a predetermined direction. Upon realizing that Frankie’s AI algorithm sometimes did not properly recognize the image learned and consequently moved in a different direction than expected, students compared it to an autonomous car and raised the following question: “Whose responsibility would it be if an AI, driving an autonomous car, makes an inappropriate decision and causes an accident? The owner of the car or those who developed the AI algorithm?”.

Pictures 2 – Conducting field activities with the Frankie Robot

In addition to the engagement of students in the workshops that promoted the teaching of AI resources with robotics, the first year of the AI Club showed that the theme goes beyond the learning of mathematics and computer science concepts. The meetings with the students pointed to the need for a multidisciplinary discussion.

At the final meeting with workshop participants, some questions were raised, among them the power that AI has in processing a large amount of data and transforming it into privileged information. One of the participants said that he had read that the data is the new oil, referring to the phrase said by Brittany Kaiser, former director of the extinguished British company Cambridge Analytica, and which corroborates a statement by computer scientist Kai-fu Lee, which in one of his books says that “if artificial intelligence is the new electricity, big data is the oil that powers generators”.

In addition, students show concern for ethics on the part of those who develop AI algorithms and those who obtain and use the personal data of the population through these algorithms. They also pointed out fears about the social impacts of using this technology such as the automation of numerous fields of work and consequent unemployment. Young people assessed that unqualified citizens would find it difficult to allocate themselves professionally and reflected that investment in Social Programs would be essential for a reality with widely implemented AI.

Through these questions, we can see that the results of the 2019 workshops exceeded the limits of technology learning and provided an important reflection on ethical and social issues regarding AI.

  • The second year of the Artificial Intelligence Club – 2020: The set of remote actions involving experiments and debates

With the pandemic in 2020, the Club maintained its activities with remote experiments and organized biweekly Lives (Livestreaming) to debate some issues regarding AI. For the actions of the second year of the Club, I counted on the partnership of the researcher and co-worker Isaac D`Césares[8]. It is important to emphasize that for entrepreneurial educational actions to work with quality, establishing partnerships with other educators is essential.

Machine learning experiments were introduced using free web interaction platforms such as Teachable Machine[9] and QuickDraw[10] and converged to hands-on programming activities on the Google Colab platform[11], which allowed students to collaboratively program machine learning libraries on the web in Python language.

Online workshops were promoted using AI resources such as Linear Regression Algorithm, Scikit-Learn Clustering, Decision Tree Algorithm and Neural Networks. One of the workshops, organized by members of the Club (Pictures 3), provided experimentation with WiSARD.

Pictures 3 – Online workshop promoted by students

On the other hand, the debates promoted by the organization of the AI Club, into Live format, were attended by educators from the Polo Educacional Sesc and professionals from various fields of knowledge, among them former students of the institution, as well as important researchers like Professor Paulo Blikstein from Columbia University.

Two debates can be highlighted, in which students discussed the ethical, social and political issues in relation to the use of AI in the management of the personal data of the population by public and private organizations, whose themes were: “Artificial Intelligence and Ethical Implications” and “Power and Politics in the Digital Age” (Pictures 4).

Pictures 4 – “Artificial Intelligence and Ethical Implications” Live  & “Power and Politics in the Digital Age” Live

In the Live “Artificial Intelligence and Ethical Implications” (http://bit.ly/ia_ethical), values and principles involving the implementation and use of AI by technology companies were discussed. A student described the case of an American company called Target, reported in the book “The Power of Habit”, with the title “How Target knows what you want before you know it”, highlighting how companies use their customers’ personal data to recommend targeted products and boost their sales.

Menstruation Apps were also highlighted as an example. In them, the user can note, in addition to the date of her period, emotions and symptoms, if she had sexual intercourse and when. Thus, the app can predict her next menstruation or indicate the possibility of a pregnancy. When users approve the Terms of Use, they allow their data to be used by companies without being aware that it can be shared and sold to other companies. For example, if the user checks in the app that she has dry hair, she can receive ads for hair products. The center of the debate was ethics and personal data.

In the Live “Power and Politics in the Digital Age” (http://bit.ly/ia_politics), it was discussed, among other topics, how AI is used in the dissemination of Fake News and targeted political propaganda.

During the Live the young people detailed the emblematic case of how the extinguished British company Cambridge Analytica[12] managed, with permissions given by users in the terms for using quizzes on Facebook, to have access to all their likes and likes from their network of friends. So they used that data to influence elections in the United States.

The students pointed out that in an action with 270,000 users who participated in these quizzes, the company had access to the data of approximately 87 million people. Based on their interactions, the types of citizens’ personalities were drawn up to promote political advertisements aimed at these people, with content that caused the polarization of society and influenced the country’s political destiny.

In their presentation, the students pointed out a survey that revealed that analyzing 70 likes, Facebook “knew” the user better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than his parents; and to know the user better than his love partner, only 300 likes were needed. They emphasized the need to control access to this data so that what happened in the American election is not repeated in other elections.

The actions involving experiments and debates proved to be complementary, as the students dealt with the subject through the bias of those who had the most proximity to technology, those who had lived and experienced it. According to Paulo Freire, consuming ready-made ideas does not make an educator a scholar or a researcher, but participating in the process of creating ideas does. This process can be stimulated with actions in which the student assumes the role of protagonist of his learning via activities in which he participates in the construction.

Our next step is to expand the activities involving Artificial Intelligence`s resources in another project that will be called STEM + AI Club. The goal of this new approach is to ampliate the participation of the academic community in the discussions of the fourth industrial revolution and its impacts on our society.

  • AI Club 2020 Remote Meetings

Meeting 1: Presentation: “Artificial Intelligence Club – 2020”

Meeting 2: Workshop: “Introduction to machine learning and the development environment”

Meeting 3: Debate: “Artificial Intelligence and Ethical Implications”

Meeting 4: Workshop: “Machine Learning Experimentation – WiSARD Weightless Neural Network on the Google Colab Platform”

Meeting 5: Debate: “Creativity and Artificial Intelligence”

Meeting 6: Workshop: “A Matemática por detrás de predição usando um Algoritmo de Regressão Linear”

Meeting 7: Debate: “Teacher training, Maker Movement and Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education with Professor Paulo Blikstein – Columbia University – NY ”

Meeting 8: Workshop: “Clustering with Scikit-Learn: Working with Unsupervised Data”

Meeting 9: Thematic Panel at the Knowledge Festival of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro: “Artificial Intelligence in K-12 Education – The teaching of AI, and the teaching through AI. How can the school prepare for this new reality? ”

Meeting 10: Debate: “Power and Politics in the Digital Age”

Meeting 11: Workshop: “Classification using the Decision Tree Algorithm”

Meeting 12: Debate: “Artificial Intelligence contributions to human health”

Meeting 13: Debate: “Artificial Intelligence, Iot and Smart Cities: The contributions of Mathematics to a Society 5.0”

  • References

Druga, S. (2018) Growing up with AI – Cognimates: from coding to teaching machines. In: Dissertação (Mestrado). Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Libâneo, J.C. (2004) Organização e Gestão da Escola: Teoria e Prática, 5. ed. Goiânia.

[1] Just as the first industrial revolution introduced machines into the production system, the second introduced electricity and the third introduced information technology, the fourth revolution encompasses a broad system of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the Internet of Things.

[2] https://www.in.gov.br/materia/-/asset_publisher/Kujrw0TZC2Mb/content/id/51281622

[3] Formative Itineraries are curricular units offered by educational institutions that allow the student to deepen their knowledge and advance in their studies of interest or prepare for the working world.

[4]  Document that defines the essential knowledge that all K-12 education students in Brazil have the right to learn.

[5] Machine Learning – is an AI field whose objective is to develop algorithms capable of improving its performance in specific tasks. Machine learning algorithms learn information directly from data without the need for a predetermined equation as a model.

[6] Programming language that can be used for the most diverse applications. It is Open Source and it was developed having as one of the main objectives to be easy to use.

[7] https://www.sesc.com.br/portal/noticias/educacao/espacos+makers

[8] https://www.linkedin.com/in/isaacdcesares/

[9] https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/

[10] https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/?locale=en_US

[11] https://colab.research.google.com/

[12] The story can be seen in the documentary The Great Hack.

My story

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Between garage and electronic workshop 

I come from a modest family

I stopped studying very early to help my parents

When I was 15 I walked into a car garage to learn a trade: mechanics.

Being very young, my role was to do some light tasks for adults.

Two years after my uncle who worked in a fuel distribution company with a car garage inside,

took me under his wing.

a year later my boss, an employee in this company, had a parallel garage and ended up settling there as his representative.

I stayed there for four years before meeting Moussa an electronics expert who transformed my life.

Moussa was a very equipped video game repairer (generators, oscilloscopes …)

I often came to watch him work, I listened to his discussions with other technicians, although I couldn’t understand a thing. I watched them and listened to them religiously without understanding the terms used.

I came every day at 6 p.m. after the garage closed and stayed until 10 p.m., so in the morning in the garage and in the evening with Moussa.

This is where I started my first creations: a radio made with recycled parts:

An intercom installed at the door of our house,

An FM transmitter to broadcast music in the neighborhood

02 years later I am going back to school for training in electronics and computer science.

I repaired almost all electronic devices

I participated in the installation of the first fablab in Senegal

To conclude, I would say that learning by doing based on spotting is very important.

I was a specialist in electro-mechanics and my only secret was to take benchmarks.

Before disassembling a mechanism, I marked the intersection between the different gears.

This is why I ask learners to observe well, to take cues, notes to facilitate documentation.

Stop Waiting to Love Learning Again – Reflections on “The Gears of My Childhood”

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I’ve been a little worried lately. Not about the world, or politics, or COVID – well yes, of course about those things, but lately I’ve been mostly worried that I’ve forgotten how to teach. I feel out of practice and out of touch. Everyone in education is a bit out of practice, having spent a lot of time teaching remotely, learning how to use Zoom, learning how to be somewhat engaging for our students online, and learning how to connect with people at a distance. In the midst of all that I have also been transitioning from an established position in a school where I taught for 20 years to a FabLab Lead teacher role in the Global Center for Digital Innovation (GCDI) in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It’s intimidating, exciting, and amorphous. My job description is all about collaborating with classroom teachers and helping integrate maker education and digital fabrication into content areas, inspiring kids of all ages to create prototypes of new and innovative ideas, and giving community members a space to try their hand at entrepreneurialism. It is truly a dream job! And so far, I’m still just dreaming about it.  

 

Reflectively, I feel like I am pretty good with change and I love a challenge, however, it’s the delay that has made me nervous. In the midst of a global pandemic, the building construction stalled and an opening date of August 2021 has been pushed back; all the way back to – not yet. A tentative “move-in” date of April 2021, has been promised and I am cautiously hopeful.  Eight months of planning at first seemed a blessing. But some of my confidence has waned with the passing months. How will I get the space ready for kids in time for summer camp?  Do I remember how to use all of the equipment? What supplies do I need to order? How long does it realistically take to put together a full-sized ShopBot? And most importantly, do I remember how to teach?

 

Of course, I haven’t been idle for 8 months. I have been working with students the whole time. This year teaching has been more informal and focused on small groups of students who want coaching on soldering, or laser cutting, or Fusion 360. I have facilitated professional development workshops for teachers both in person and virtually. I have been productive and contributed to the school community. In many ways, it has been the best teaching experience of my career. But I just can’t shake that feeling of uneasiness while I wait…

 

Fast forward to about a week ago, when I read, “The Gears of My Childhood” by Seymour Papert.  Papert begins by explaining how much he loved cars as a child and how he found an affinity for understanding the interactions of gears – particularly the differential.  Honestly, my first thought was, “Oh no, do I need to understand a differential?”  Then I realized the story was really about how Papert credits the experience of loving gears and being able to use a differential as a model of learning for his successes in mathematics.  He states, “Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult.”  I completely agree.  When knowledge can be connected to previous experiences or mental models it fits within a student’s mind and can be more easily learned.  But it must also be loved, like Papert loved gears, to be transformative. 

 

After Papert pointed it out, it seems so obvious that our ability to learn is tangled up in our emotions.  As a child, I found comfort in the natural world.  I loved figuring out how bugs and plants and mammals all interacted and needed each other.  It is no surprise that my major in college was Biology.  I loved systems – at first, the only systems I could see well were ecological, then I started seeing systems in things like bicycles, and eventually, I started seeing systems in the art of teaching.  It became fun to plan lessons for students that sparked inquiry and wonder.  Students weren’t aware of all the “strings” holding together a complex unit plan, like a food web, intertwined that lead them toward self-discovery and hopefully a love for learning, but they were there.  Papert wrote, “The understanding of learning must be genetic. It must refer to the genesis of knowledge.”  Maybe it is the science teacher in me that wonders if this statement was a bit of a joke, but I like the idea that it is the genesis or beginnings of learning that impacts students the most.  It includes the how, when, and where of learning.  Now one of my favorite systems to observe is a group of students highly invested in brainstorming solutions or making a new design, they invest both their minds and emotions when working on a meaningful problem.  There is a genuine sense of pride, maybe even love, in creating something out of nothing.  Maker education provides kids with the opportunity to examine how things work, how systems are interconnected, and how they can influence those systems through innovation and creation.

 

Perhaps the uneasiness I’ve been feeling lately has stemmed from the fact that I’ve been in limbo, not really knowing how things in my life are connected or how our world in Pandemic will adhere to the previous rules of cause and effect. Patterns have changed; interactions are no longer predictable.  It’s been a dark year and I feel like maybe my fears about teaching are simply a manifestation of my fears about the world.  I am looking forward to awakening a renewed love of learning for myself and my students in the GCDI and creating lessons with intertwined “strings” that lead students to new discoveries about themselves and their world.  That’s why I see April as a date for change, for moving forward, for taking back some control, and a date to just stop waiting.   I know moving into the new FabLab is really only a symbol, however, I need it and I will take it!

 

Photo Credit: Betty A. Proctor, Chattanooga State Community College

Gears and fears – A reflection on Seymour Papert’s essay ‘The Gears of my Childhood’

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When reading Papert’s essay I was fascinated by the way that Papert creates the link between his earliest childhood memories to his experience of learning and how these experiences shaped the way he would forever interpret the world around him. In the article he describes how his love of automobiles helped him to give context to the gears in a construction set. The gears then became a ‘comfortable friend’ for him to experiment and explore mathematical ideas. This concept of building on learning and developing strong abstract representations to think with really interests me and is something I would like to explore further here.

My own personal ‘gears’ story began with music in particular the Yamaha VSS30, a sampling keyboard used primarily by my brothers to play expletives in 8bit samples across 32 polyphonic keys, but there was more. I was fascinated by the way that audio could be looped and manipulated using effects to create new and otherworldly sounds.

The Yamaha VSS-30

I loved electronic music, I would spend my pocket money on records and cassettes with no concept of how this music was created. At no point did I consider that the sampling keyboard had anything to do with this new futuristic soundscapes that I enjoyed so much. Something so obvious now seemed inconsistent then. I would watch the BBC music show ‘Top of the Pops’ religiously, and try to figure out what was going on. I would write to my favourite musicians to try and find out how they created their sounds, if I was lucky the PR staff would send me a signed photo of the act.

Image of the band The Shamen - 1993 The Shamen – 1993

Computer technology and music weren’t two things that I had made a link with. During this time I would visit the local Bainbridge’s department store and see the latest ‘tech’. I was amazed at a computer’s ability to display a photograph, so the idea of the machine’s potential was not clear to me. It wasn’t until a few years later that I managed to sneak into a nightclub one Tuesday evening after school, I was awakened. I had recently bought the album ‘Homework’ (ironic right) by Daft Punk and they were headlining. That evening was the best homework I would ever have. I stood on the balcony in amazement as I watched visuals played via midi keyboard connected to an Apple Mac computer. On stage Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel played an array of electronic instruments the likes of which I had never seen before but most importantly, I saw people enjoying and interacting with technology in ways I had never even considered possible.

Image of a Newcastle Mayfair ticket | Daft Punk - Daftendirektour 1997 Daft Punk – Daftendirektour 1997

From that day I was hooked, analogue musical instruments were relatively inexpensive (in comparison to today’s prices) and they weren’t too hard to come across. I built a small setup of my own. I began to learn about waveforms, patterns, synchronization and sampling through play. I was inspired to learn about video, animation and sound. To this day I apply these principles to my work and not just in the context of music.

At the same point in our lives I found my love for sound, and Papert ‘developed an intense involvement with automobiles’ we both had found our favourite pastime. I was intrigued as to what an ‘Erector Set’ was so I decided to take the risk of Googling it. An ‘Erector Set’ advert from the 1930’s reads;

‘Hello Boys! Look at this giant power plant! You can build it yourself with the great new Erector!’

Image of Erector set - 1930s Advertising Erector set – 1930s Advertising

I was confronted by an uncomfortable thought what if my experiences had been determined by my sex, race or gender? From an early age Papert had ‘developed an intense involvement with automobiles’ but what if that hadn’t happened?

When considering Papert’s article ‘The Gears of My Childhood’ and reflecting upon my own experiences my initial thoughts were ‘what if Papert wasn’t exposed to cars as a child or didn’t have the opportunity to play with toy gears, or even, what if he wasn’t a ‘he’, what then?

Of course we can look at this advert today and suggest that ‘it’s of it’s day’ or ‘things were like that then’, but have things really changed that much, have they? Do we still see gender bias in ‘transitional objects’? Of course we do! How many people have missed learning opportunities by not being given a toy or ‘transitional object’ because of their sex?

If you were to walk into any major toy store you will see a pattern, the ‘pink aisle’ and the ‘blue aisle’. Where would you most likely find a ‘Meccano set’ or an ‘engineering toy’?

Research conducted by the Royal Academy of Engineering and WISE has found that just ’12 percent of engineers in the UK are women and they earn around 11 per cent less than their male counterparts, on average’.

I don’t want to oversimplify the issue or suggest that toys are to blame for this, but through my own experience, electronic music has the same issues. In 2020 the top 15 Highest paid DJs in the world were all men. It is widely accepted that children identify differences between the ages of two and three.

‘A modern-day Montessori might propose, if convinced by my story, to create a gear set for children.’

Seymour Papert – The Gears of My Childhood

I think this could be a positive conclusion; let us build a gear set, let us create a sewing set, let us create a whatever set! But let us not impose gender stereotypes upon these objects.

Image of 8-Bit Cross Stitch - Make Stuff North East Activity 8-Bit Cross Stitch – Make Stuff North East Activity

Nostalgia plays a pivotal part in Papert’s story, without his experience of automobiles and with gears and the ‘Erector Set’ Papert may never have discovered his ‘comfortable friend’. We may never find our own ‘comfortable friend’. I hope that as an educator one day I can help someone to find their own ‘comfortable friend’ and not be constrained by the vision that our modern patriarchy imposes.