Role-playing Games as Petri Dish for Whimsical Tinkering

“I like to think of play as the art of world-making, and that play is about inventing invented realities. It is about creating a world, physical or virtual, inhabiting that world, and then eventually becoming inhabited by it.”

– Edith Ackermann, “Playful Inventions and Explorations: What’s to be Learned from Kids”

We’re sitting at a kindergarten lunch table, munching on snack crackers and carrot sticks — when all of a sudden Kumbalayo, the evil sorcerer with fat warts on his nose bursts into the laboratory and we all transform into Pusheen kittens in an attempt to escape. In the real world, we’re small and struggle with things like peeling open clementines, but in Kumbalayo’s laboratory, we can have any power we want – the ability to shape-shift, to hypnotize, to sneak around like a ninja – and “there’s always a way to escape” (as Dustin reminds us often.) In the real world, I am the only adult – everyone else is 5 or 6 years old – but today in the game world, I am a Pusheen kitten and I am hiding behind a rack of jelly donuts. Sometimes I am the storyteller, but today I am waiting for Lilah the Donut Princess to save me. A bell rings and we all turn back to humans. The laboratory fades away and we start packing up our lunches and wiping down tables. “Can we continue after school,” Lilah asks. “Of course,” I say, “Bring your wand.”

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Every time you play a game, you enter a magic circle, “a temporary world inside the ordinary world dedicated to the performance of playing.” The circle is both a concrete boundary – a playground, a card table, a basketball court, a computer screen – and a state of mind that leads players to deep immersion, increased motivation to overcome challenges, and a willingness to adopt new rules and roles. I think about the magic circle often in my teaching practice, which from the outside may barely resemble “teaching” at all. Since becoming a FabLearn Fellow, I have worked in two non-traditional learning spaces: (1) MetaMedia, a free, drop-in digital media lab designed for middle-school students in Evanston, IL and (2) Brightworks, a K-12 private school in San Francisco, CA where kids learn by making projects based on thematic units (called Arcs). In both environments, I have spent a portion of my work time playing games with kids (an enormous privilege) and observing how their play sessions influence their project work. I’ve noticed that role-playing games help establish a whimsical, child-generated narrative context in which physical, social, and digital tinkering emerge and flourish. Because these tinkering experiences are embedded within a dramatic narrative story, they have the power to create indelible emotional memories for children.

A CULTURE OF CHOOSING YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

At Brightworks, children are afforded a lot of choice in how they navigate their school day. They co-construct classroom curriculum with their teachers (called Collaborators). They choose the format and focus of their capstone projects. They are given Independent Design Time each day to dig into personal areas of interest. Brightworks students enjoy role-playing games, which tend to involve character creation and open-world exploration.  This year at Brightworks, there are two primary cohorts of children who play collaborative role-playing games during school, the LARPers and the Text Adventurers:

1. The LARPers (live-action role-players) primarily consist of older middle-school and high-school students, who schedule outdoor play sessions during the all-school recess block. One high-school student is the game master and is responsible for planning the narrative, codifying the rules, and directing the game each session. The game master establishes a scenario (eg. “The players are on a ship sailing to a nearby town and are attacked by orc-pirates”), which the players then physically act out using costumes and props.  Characters and narratives are developed over multiple play sessions.
2. The Text Adventurers primarily consist of younger students (5-8 year olds), who initiate games during moments of down time (ie. walking from school to the park, over lunch, after school, etc.) Games require one storyteller who guides players through a story and offers them choices along the way (eg. “Kumbalayo bursts into the lab. Do you [Choice A] or [Choice B]?”) Characters and narratives rarely develop beyond single play sessions, although storytellers tend to remix each other’s themes and scenarios.   

PHYSICAL TINKERING: TOWARDS A TANGIBLE GAME-WORLD

Sometimes during play sessions, children will make physical artifacts to enhance their storytelling. Sometimes the artifacts are two-dimensional representations: character sketches, maps of the world, diagrams, etc. Other times, the artifacts are three-dimensional: props, costume pieces, or environmental spaces that mirror the game-world. 

During one outdoor play session, the Text Adventurers traced the outline of a boat in chalk on the blacktop to the (not-quite) scale of an actual boat. They could climb inside of it with their bodies and be rocked overboard during shipwreck. With just a line on the floor, they were all able to know how it felt to be squished into a tiny vessel, and were naturally compelled to wonder, “what if we made our a boat a little bit bigger?” During an indoor session, they used a set of color-changing LEDs to conjure the lighting of a lush forest, topped a couple of life-size Lincoln Logs with a green blanket for trees, and cued up Howard Shore’s Fellowship of the Ring score so that they, too, could walk barefoot around The Shire. 

The LARPers also make physical artifacts: helmets, shields, and weapons — all from duct tape, foam, and other scraps. These props are more precious and permanent. The older kids take turns toting their cargo to the park each day in a giant barrel. They repair them when they get bruised. They develop regulations around how to care for them, and become irritated when rules are broken.The LARPers store their artifacts in a public place, which allows them to become incorporated into the Text Adventurer’s play sessions as well.

SOCIAL TINKERING: RULES, ROLES, RITUALS, AND AGREEMENTS

Role-playing games at Brightworks don’t come from a box. There are no instructions to reference or online forums to consult for advice. The children’s habits of play are as much a construction as the props and costumes that they physically build, and they constantly tweak these structures depending on the dynamics of each session.

Often before play, the Text Adventurers reset their group agreements: How do we take turns playing? How long can a person’s turn be? Can anything happen during a turn? Are we each in charge of our own character – or are some of us sharing characters? How many players can the storyteller handle today? They tend to need the help of an adult to facilitate this conversation, resolve disagreements, and ensure that everyone’s ideas are heard.

The LARPers, on the other hand, are entirely self-organized and document their systems in a binder carried around by the game master. They think deeply about how the game is perceived by others, how they share space on the playground, and how new players join their game. For many of the LARPers, the game is more than a pastime. It’s an identity that they proudly adopt.

DIGITAL TINKERING: COMPUTER AS POWER-UP

There are common limitations in both styles of role-playing games:

• Games can’t be played in exactly the same way twice
• Game progress can be easily forgotten or misremembered
• Every component of the game has to be pre-determined by the storyteller or game master, which means that nothing can happen by chance. 

In some instances, LARPers and Text Adventurers will use digital tools to overcome these barriers. For example, a LARPer, feeling constrained by the linearity of a notebook, charted his game’s plot using Twine, a free web-based tool for coding interactive fiction. Some Text Adventurers have adapted their games into sharable Scratch projects, creating animated avatars that they can control on the screen. During one play session, Text Adventurers programmed a Micro:bit to become a random number generator, which determined the success of their move. Similarly, a LARPer has experimented with prototyping spells that can be cast from player-to-player using RFID tags embedded in cloth satchels.

This form of tinkering, unlike the previous two, typically happens outside of the play sessions. If I’m trying to nudge a Text Adventurer towards Scratch, I might suggest we try to adapt one of their role-playing game stories into a digital project. For some children, this is an excellent provocation, and they slide into programming with gusto — but even in that ideal circumstance, their whole bodily approach changes. They go from standing to sitting, from being aware of the physical environment to staring at a screen, from creating in concert with others to working mostly alone, from rapidly erecting imaginary worlds to slowly crafting sprites, from authoring with their hands and mouths to feeling limited by the keyboard and mouse.

Is there a way to prepare the environment so that this shift doesn’t happen and children can engage in digital tinkering while maintaining their play? 

Last week, I visited Dynamicland, a community workspace in Oakland, CA that attempts to solve this problem by reimagining the computer interface. At Dynamicland, people create software together by “programming” on scraps of paper. The paper-code is seen by a camera/sensor rig mounted in the ceiling and then the program is projected live onto the tables, floors, and walls of the space. The setup encourages programmers to incorporate physical materials into their projects. During my visit, I play-tested a game by Nicky Case called Frog Wars, where players flick origami frogs over projections of buzzing flies to score points. That same program was then transformed into a game called Tub Wars after Nicky brought new materials onto the table. The physical materials, which included a baking sheet filled with water and bathtubs made from plastic cups, inspired a whole new theme and style of play. There was no latency between playing the original game, imagining a way to remix the game, and playing the remix. 

here are some people playing a computer game that they just made up @Dynamicland1 pic.twitter.com/UYVDXmzahI

— Bret Victor (@worrydream) February 20, 2018

For the foreseeable future, the Dynamicland technology is only available to people who have access to their headquarters in Oakland (boo! hiss!), but it represents one potential solution for integrating digital tinkering into physical play. In the meantime, as we wait for the technology to catch up, it’s important that we nurture playful makerspace environments so that children see tools as direct extensions of their imaginations and as vehicles to help tell stories, share visions, and make magic.  

We’ve all done that classic maker activity at one time or another: the paper cut out snowflake. Most makers would agree that paper is one of our most basic, essential materials. For me, many of my earliest “Making Memories” are from time spent playing out in the snow! Therefore I would like to suggest that FROZEN WATER is also an incredible, versatile material for makers, young and old alike. Yes snow – the thing we love to hate when it interrupts our daily commute. While the challenges it causes may give snow a bad reputation, on balance this frozen water has many qualities that make it valuable to makers both outside of education and within.

This post has been inspired by something my sons and I did this winter, something most people would call “crazy”. We slept outside in the snow fort we made! This got me thinking about outdoor making in the winter, and I came up with many examples that I’d like to share.

Imagination

In my early years (to be precise it was the winter of grade 4) I recall we didn’t get much snow, so during recess we used our feet to make huge elaborate “floor plans” in the snow. Scraping and shovelling with our boots, we made little piles stretched out in long lines, and then squished the snow into 10 cm high “walls”. Next we made openings for “doors” and defined newly scraped spaces as “rooms” and “halls”. The kitchen was particularly interesting, since we had to add in fixtures and appliances.

I was reminded of that memory this past week at my children’s school, where children had dug a “kitchen” into a snowbank. A block of snow here for a plate, another over there for a pet cat. A square hole in a snowbank was at times a microwave, a sink, or a garbage can. Next to this “kitchen” my sons and his friends had made a very similar looking structure – but for them it was the “secret agent fort” complete with secret communications, and a war plan. (Should I be distressed to hear about spies, enemy agents, and double crossing?) For them holes in the snowbank were weapon storage for their horde of snowballs!

Iteration

The great thing about snow is how easy it is to work with. Doesn’t work the first time? Snow is like playdough – reform and reshape it. Pack it down with pressure, heat it up a bit in your hand to make it stay where you want. If that doesn’t work, start all over again with some fresh snow in a different part of the yard. Making ice sculptures on the other hand is less like working with playdough and more like carving sandstone. You don’t need glue for ice – you just get another piece, some water on the surfaces and then cool it again (maybe clamp it?) and you’ve reiterated. The tools for ice carving are also more fun: chainsaws instead of shovels!

Responsibility/Organization

Snow can bring out the best in children. Most obvious is the enthusiastic young entrepreneurs who go door to door offering to shovel for a fee. When it comes to winter making, my children think ahead about shovelling snow into conveniently located piles for future project use. Often my children are out early to shovel on school days, and our square patch of grass becomes surrounded with 4 walls of snow. This includes the wall made by the snowplow along the street, and suddenly, with a couple of turrets on the corners, we see the merging of responsibility and organization with imagination.

Cooperation

Making a snowman takes cooperation. Children have to plan where to start the snowball so they will end up in the right place. Getting the second ball on top of the first is not easily achieved alone, so children have to talk together to plan and organize how to lift it on top.

Invention

Uniquely Canadian problems have brought innovative solutions from Canadian inventors. The snowmobile and the Zamboni are both products that resulted from recognizing a problem and applying the design process. This is not a modern phenomenon, as Inuit inventors long ago solved the problem of snow blindness with a strip of material cut with two small slits. Inuit people have for many years survived harsh northern winters. They have survived through ingenuity and deep knowledge of snow and ice (both in hunting and in shelter building) to the point where the “Igloo” is probably the most readily identifiable object connected to northern peoples.

Creativity, Beauty, Whimsy

There are so many ways in which frozen water astounds and delights the viewer and the maker, whether it’s Ice Candles, Snow Lanterns, Snow Angels, Ice Sculptures, watching snow fall, or catching snowflakes on your tongue. Who can forget the incredible beauty and geometry of the imaginative ice castle in the hit movie “Frozen”.

Structures/Physics

The physics of snow and ice has fascinated me since I was a young child. I have tinkered with structural snow by building snow forts. You can make them either by making snow piles and digging into them, or by rolling huge snowballs and arranging them. I have always wanted to make a fort big enough to sleep in, and this winter we did it! While my children did learn about the physics of the Roman Arch that supported our shelter, it wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as the incredible structures in the famous ice hotel scene in the James Bond film “Die Another Day”. Winter festivals in Ottawa and Quebec in Canada, and in other northern countries have adults reliving their youth, building huge snow and ice houses and play structures.

Risk

Snow and ice on their own cause risk of injury – just ask any injury lawyer. Makers in extreme winter sports know this as well, but that doesn’t stop children from making jumps on the local toboggan hill, parents from making long tube runs for their kids on family acreages, and young adults building impressive downhill skiing and snowboarding courses. Children especially learn so much from this otherwise risky exercise. Through a process of rigorous experimentation and testing, children learn how to make jumps that don’t disintegrate when their sled flies over it! They explore questions like what kind of snow to use, where to place the jump, how big, and what angle? It may be risky, but it is valuable learning. I won’t go into further detail here – you can read my previous blog post about risks and failure.

Winter Sports

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention making in the context of winter sports, particularly in the middle of the 2018 Winter Olympics. It is easy to spend most of winters indoors, but winter sports allow for enjoyable exercise even in the cold. As mentioned, the Zamboni was a big invention for ice sports that we take for granted today. The dutch invented skates in the 14th century. Now, after 400 years of curling, and 100 years of hockey, ice sports have seen new innovations recently, for example downhill ice skate racing, and the advent of “skate trails” like the new one built this year under Toronto’s elevated highway, or the popular trail in the woods at Arrowhead provincial park.

The Environment

Finally, snow (and ice) is reusable, recyclable, and likely the most environmentally friendly maker material. I often wonder about the waste we create when we make – and how we sometimes turn otherwise recyclable things into landfill, just by putting multiple materials together in the maker process (eg. a piece of cardboard contaminated with copper tape and glue gun glue). The great and sad thing about frozen water is that eventually, it simply melts.

Melting is both a solution, and a problem. It means this wonderful material only lasts for so long each year! I try to take advantage of snow and ice while I have the opportunity, so I’m going to finish this blog post and go down to the frozen river with my homemade ice fishing rod, and make some holes!

In 2015 an association of local businesses asked me and some colleagues to organize a robotics after school lab for five different first-grade classes in the Bologna area.

Our committee had seen the milkBot, a little robot that combines the  open-source Arduino microcontroller with scrap material, and they wanted to offer a similar creative experience to the students involved in the project.

However, our students had no experience with Scratch nor with Arduino, so we started reflecting on choosing the most useful kit for our purpose.

Constructionism provides learning dimensions

Seymour Papert’s Constructionism was the model that we choose as inspiration to design the learning experience because we strongly believe that the educational power of  a technology resides in the potential for creative expression that it offers.

So we asked ourselves :

“What learning dimensions should an educational robotic kit have to be effective for a Constructionist learning experience in a school context?”

Papert outlined  the features that a technology should have to be useful for a constructionist learning experience in two dimensions:  Low Floor and High Ceiling.

Low floor: to be effective, a technology has to be easy to use even for a beginner.

High ceiling: the same technology has to offer the possibility to create increasingly complex and sophisticated projects as the user becomes fluent and wants to experiment with new things.

Mitchel Resnick, who is the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, adds another dimension, Wide Walls.

Wide walls: To be effective, a technology has to allow multiple types of creations in order to enable the users to express themselves creatively regardless of their level of competence.

Practical considerations
Working in a school context with groups of 25 students at a time demanded that we consider other practical and logistical elements.

1. Cost: For a technology to have a significant impact on learning at school it should be available in sufficient quantity  to let a class of 20/25 students work in groups of 4 members at the same time.

2. Adequacy: to be effective at school, components must be in line with learning and developmental goals already achieved by the final user (students) and, at the same time, must stimulate its progress gradually (scaffolding).

For example, a technology must be adequate to fine motor skills but also to the ability to take care and respect tools and materials. The variety of components, from actuators to sensors, available in the kit must respect the cognitive level achieved by the students and must provide adequate challenges to grow up and enrich learning.

Every teacher/educator has the duty of assessing the adequacy of what’s available in the kit based on the learning goals and the skills already acquired.

This is the most delicate and challenging aspect of our job because it requires us to empathize with our students, to put ourselves in their shoes and imagine how they could interact with the robot and what they will learn through it while trying to go beyond to our personal expectations.

3. Quality of the programming environment: an effective educational robotics kit must be supported by an online and offline programming environment:

Adequate and adaptable to the level of competence of the students: as the kit components, the programming language must also be adapted to the competences goals already reached by the student and must gradually stimulate their development. It could, for example, offer blocks programming, and then gradually move on to text programming. Also in this case, the level of adequacy (and the programming language offered) must be evaluated by the educator based on the skills of the specific class group (or, at least, for the expected targets for the age).

Providing a good level of interaction between robot and computer: by “interaction” we mean two issues, the first one is about the communication between robot and computer: do we have to use a cable? do they connect via bluetooth or use a wireless protocol?We observed that the kits that only use the cable communication limit student’s creative possibilities, yet kits that communicate via bluetooth tend to have connection problems (for example, the robots in the classroom connect to the wrong PC).The second one is related to the possibility of making the robot interact with things happening on the screen. The traditional concept of robotics involves the use of computers only for compiling and uploading the code in the robot’s brain, in a constructionist learning environment it would be useful to be able to do more.

4. Versatility: to be effective within a constructionist learning environment in a school context, the robotics must be adaptable and “neutral” enough to enhance imagining and ideating of all kinds.

At the same time it must be practical and light enough not to clutter up the students’ creations.

For example, in some cases the “brain” of the robot is very bulky and poses some very difficult design challenges for the students. Or sometimes the kit comes with very short connection cables (from board to sensors/actuators) limiting the size and aesthetics of the creations.

Moreover, some kits are sold in boxes containing images that invite to build certain types of robots, which are very appealing to the eyes of a boy or a girl, but can limit imagination and creativity

For example, kits that only show examples of rovers and cars.

We have observed that students that experiment with robotics kit by building and programming a car are less likely to imagine and create something far different from the car.

Even if only they saw the image on the box their ideas will converge in direction of a car.

There is no perfect solution, but we did it anyway

There are many kits available on the market which support the three learning dimensions to one degree or another. Finding one that meets all three in a balance is the difficult part.

For our project we chose mBot off the shelf robotics kit from MakeBlock company.

We felt it had a low floor because components were easy to connect to the board,

the mCore is an Arduino-core microcontroller built to facilitate plugging sensors and actuators thanks to its RJ25 wires, avoiding kids to struggle with circuits, breadboards and resistances.   

We felt it had high ceilings because it provides a blocks programming language, very similar to Scratch, that translates blocks code into Arduino code just pushing a button so, students can start discover how an Arduino code looks like and  upload their code on the mCore.  

Robot and computer communicates through cable or with a 2.4G wireless protocol so students can easily create sophisticated projects in which robot interacts with what happens on the computer screen.

The kit is very cheap, compared to other robotics kits, and the number of components provided is wide enough to let kids experiment and learn about different kinds of sensors and actuators.

What we missed using this kit were wide walls and versatility,

the kit is setted up to build a car, provides chassis, tires and short RJ25 wires that facilitates building  compact objects. Plus, box and instruction booklet show images of a car and how to build it so kids’ imagination and creativity resulted limited.

After 3 years of using those kits we figured out how to design the learning experience and how to introduce students to the kit so to solve wide walls and versatility issues.

As an example, we use spray paint to cover all the images on the boxes and we took chassis and tires away from the box, as the instruction booklet so to not limit students freedom in exploring and imagining what they can invent.

An alternative option is buying an Orion board (it’s similar to the mCore but with more RJ25 ports) and choose to buy separately each single component instead to go for the off the shelf kit.

This solution needs a more conscious budgeting and reflecting on which component to buy (so it tooks more time) but offers the chance to go beyond wide walls and versatility issues and provide our middle school students with adequate building material and objects to think and tinker with.

Final reflections

It is very important, before buying an educational robotics kit, to have the chance to experiment it in first person or to talk to someone who already uses the kits.

My  advice is to visit fairs and events dedicated to educational robotics, participate to workshops or observe laboratories (such as CoderDojo) where you can use robotics kits, join numerous online communities or ask for feedback from colleagues in other schools and make a decision that takes into consideration the pros and cons based on all the information you have found.

Every context, every class group, every educator is unique and special and for this reason needs a personal reflection and a careful evaluation of the characteristics that an educational technology must have in order to be useful for achieving the pre-established objectives.

I am not a maker. I am a maker. I am not a maker. I am a maker.

I fear making. I feared making. I fear making new things. I feared making new things until I made them.

I wasn’t good at making things when I was a kid. I didn’t know that what I made was valuable. I didn’t know that I could keep making more things and that I would find more and more value in the things I make the more I make them.

I am a maker.

I am a valuable agent for student empowerment through making.

I am an intellectual.

I spend my time carefully analyzing, reflecting upon, and practicing teaching that will maximize students’ abilities to leverage their minds to create the world around them into something that inspires hope for our communities and the world abroad.

I am their collaborator, facilitator, and coach.

The work that I do is integral to the mission of ensuring all students develop the knowledge, skills and proficiencies required for college, career, civic, economic, and most importantly, creative success.

My students are makers.

My students are thinkers.

My students construct their knowledge, develop their identities, and inspire their communities with the artifacts they create in their learning space.

My students are empowered as they build an understanding of the world in which they are viewed as valuable contributors to their own futures.

My students, with making at their fingertips, will have the ability to extend and transform the human experience.

My students will bend boundaries and be active participants in communities that are at the forefront of our ever-changing technologies and futures.

My community is full of makers.

Culture matters.

A commitment to a strong maker education will build a powerful culture of inclusion and inspiration.

When students are given agency to construct and drive their own learning, the possibilities for achievement and social and economic contribution are endless.

(Inspired by Paulo Blikstein, my fellow FabLearn comrades, the FabLearn conferences I have attended, and my current situation as a seemingly misunderstood and undervalued educator)

Please, tell me, what would YOU add to this manifesto?

Materials: 2-speed 12VDC Windshield wiper motors, PVC pipe, bubble wrap/foam pool noodles, various connectors/motor arms, various hand and power tools, props and costumes, iPad or mini projector

Materials included: PVC pipe, metal fasteners, power drills, wires, and wood.

This unit was designed to explore the possibilities of how far into the world of animatronics students could go in our makerspace. Animatronics is a unique and mostly unexplored industry at the cross section of STEAM. Fortunately for the students at Bing Wong Elementary in San Bernardino, CA, the world leader in animatronics happens to have his business center and warehouse 5 minutes down the street. Garner Holt Productions has adopted our school because of our focus on career exploration and STEAM. As a thank you to Garner Holt for adopting our school, we thought it would be perfect to have our students make animatronics to showcase for him at our adoption ceremony. We had never built animatronics before this project, but had worked with servo motors. We had also built underwater ROVs using a lot of the same materials we wanted to use with animatronics, so we had some background skills and knowledge to guide our exploration. We had 5 groups of 4 students (grades 4-6) working with 1 adult each, 2 days per week after school for an hour over the course of 8-10 weeks.  

In this project, students decide upon a character they want to build and up to two movements they’d like the character to do (movements can include nodding of the head, waving an arm, shaking hands, spinning a rope, basically anything repetitive), sketch out the skeleton of the animatronic and measure out PVC pipe, wood, and dowels to build the skeleton, study the wiper motor mechanisms and figure out how to place the wiper motor to the skeleton in order to get the desired body part to make its movement, cover the skeleton with bubble wrap and costumes so it looks like a realistic figure, record a video of the animatronic character (a student actor) speaking and have it playing on an iPad that can be attached as the head of the animatronic.

A student and adult leader working together to build the structural foundation for the animatronic figure.

As we worked through this project, we realized that students needed to stop often for mini-lessons from their adult leader. Students needed to understand the electronics (and safety) of the motor. Students needed to understand the physics of motion. Students needed help with measurement. Students found they needed parts that didn’t exist. Students needed crash courses in fashion and costuming as well. We realized by the end of the project that the project itself could have easily been broken up into “chunks” or units of learning that would have helped to allow for more creativity in the process. But because we went into the project blind, we learned through trial and error that we may have done things in an order that took entirely too long, or we overlooked important learning opportunities in order to meet a deadline, or we missed out on opportunities to share our knowledge across groups because of the way we were grouped (instead of working as one large team on multiple projects together, we worked as separate teams). We also had never made anything so physically large before. Most of our projects in our makerspace, are small tabletop projects. These animatronic figures we were making were fully life-size and some of them slightly oversized!

A student working on a design to laser cut as part of the figure finishing process.

If I could do this project again, I’d spend time with the adult leaders crafting a sort of construction manual divided into units. We would start with the structure of the animatronic. Spend time sketching out the skeleton with dimensions and teaching students how to frame such a large project. Next, we would move on to the motors. Spend time teaching students and having them explore how the motor works with smaller objects first. Last, we would spend time “figure finishing” the animatronic, as it’s called in the world of animatronics. This would include lessons on how to make the animatronic look lifelike, where all the fun art comes in! We could explore with makeup, sewing, vacuum forming, even skin and hair.

An animatronics project truly allows for so much creativity. The learning possibilities seem endless as we could easily have taken our finished animatronics and tried to improve their mechanisms with more electronic parts, sensors could be added, customized 3D-printed body parts could be designed, eyes with eyelids that open and close, hands with fingers that bend and move, speakers could be added, so many options to explore with this project. So many in fact, that we have made animatronics a class elective at our school so students have the option to go into depth for longer periods of time.

SolidWorks is a CAD program, stated to be the world’s most popular, used widely in the manufacturing industry, and it’s a program I teach to Kindergarteners. You might be wondering, Why teach SolidWorks to young children at all when free programs such as Tinkercad exist? Well, initially I had a very specific purpose for teaching SolidWorks, and it can summed up with the following: LCFF→ LCAP→ Community Engagement Plan→ Linked Learning→ Career Pathways→ Career Exploration.

Let me explain.

The lab out of which I teach, our elementary school makerspace, which we call the iSTEAM Lab, was envisioned and built with a certain end in mind. The iSTEAM Lab was built to fulfill a need which our school district became aware of through the state of California’s Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The LCFF basically is a state policy/funding law which affects how school districts spend money. According to the LCFF, each California school district must have a Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP), which incorporates all stakeholders including parents, community members, and students. The LCAP must state how the school district plans to meet goals and address state and local priorities. In my school district, the San Bernardino City Unified School District, we designed a Community Engagement Plan to meet LCAP requirements. Our Community Engagement Plan includes 9 strategies that are designed to meet the goals of: each student developing and pursuing an academic and career plan based on his or her interests and talents; each student demonstrating independent initiative, civic responsibility, and community pride; each student developing creativity through mastery of fundamental knowledge and applied skills; and each student enjoying learning throughout life by learning how to learn. Of these 9 strategies, which include titles such as “Applied Learning,” “Learning Beyond the Boundaries,” and “Network of Alliances,” Strategy 6 is titled “College and Careers.” Detailed in this strategy is our district’s plan to: transform high schools and the student experience by implementing a District wide system of Linked Learning pathways, built upon K-8 experiences that ensures college and career readiness upon graduation; establish a system of communication so that community, District, and school site Strategy Leaders are actively engaged in the work and can articulate the District’s vision; create an infrastructure that supports development, quality, and sustainability of college and career pathways; have 100% of District students participating in high-quality pathways that focus instruction on academic and industry standards, as well as 21st-century demands, and are equitably accessible to any interested student; and assess progress and revise plans using processes and systems that support a culture of continuous improvement for District college and career pathways. Clearly stated here in our Community Engagement Plan is our commitment to career pathways through what’s called Linked Learning. From the Linked Learning Alliance website, “Linked Learning is a successful approach to education based on the idea that students work harder and dream bigger if their education is relevant to them. The Linked Learning approach integrates rigorous academics that meet college-ready standards with sequenced, high-quality career-technical education, work-based learning, and supports to help students stay on track. For Linked Learning students, education is organized around industry-sector themes. The industry theme is woven into lessons taught by teachers who collaborate across subject areas with input from working professionals, and reinforced by work-based learning with real employers. This makes learning more like the real world of work, and helps students answer the question, ‘Why do I need to know this?’” In order for this strategy to work at an elementary school, our school, Bing Wong Elementary, has begun a flagship “Career Exploration” program. The iSTEAM Lab was built to pave the way for the rest of our school’s Career Exploration focus. The iSTEAM Lab was built specifically to allow students the opportunity to explore careers in the manufacturing industry. The manufacturing industry is a dominant industry in our region of California, and our school district has identified it as such, thus creating a manufacturing pathway at our local feeder secondary schools, Curtis Middle School and Indian Springs High School. My program in the iSTEAM Lab at Bing Wong Elementary is designed in alignment with the curriculum of the manufacturing pathway that is being taught at Curtis Middle School and Indian Springs High School. So, all of this to explain why I am teaching SolidWorks to children as young as Kindergarten. SolidWorks is the industry standard 3D modeling software in the manufacturing industry and the program my colleagues at the secondary level are teaching their students. Whew!

Now that I’ve explained the initial and technical and valid reasons why I teach SolidWorks to young children, I’d like to share why I continue to be passionate about teaching SolidWorks to students and why I would want to teach it to young children regardless of any LCFF, LCAP, Linked Learning, or any other district or state or organizational reason to do so.

I want to make clear that I have no background in engineering. I have never taken any engineering classes. I have never been formally taught SolidWorks. Most of what I have learned about using SolidWorks, I have learned through personal trial and error, YouTube, and from mini lessons from friends and colleagues who know more than I do. When I was first introduced to SolidWorks and struggled through completing a simple tutorial (when I say struggled, I mean STRUGGLED, like wanting to throw my computer across the room kind of struggled), I left the experience thinking “Why would I ever want to put young children through what I just went through? I could make this on Tinkercad so much easier…probably…I think….”

Turns out, I could not make it easier on Tinkercad. I did not have the precise sketching and dimensioning tools that SolidWorks has. I didn’t have the ability to sketch on one plane, and then go sketch on a different plane at a different angle and still have everything align well together. I couldn’t sketch separate parts and then put them together in an assembly to see if they would actually fit together (which turns out to be so helpful when designing 2D pieces that will be laser cut and then pieced together into a 3D object). I couldn’t transfer all of my sketches over to a drawing/blueprint so students could deconstruct my work. I couldn’t have my students slice their part and analyze it’s interior structure. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to run the sustainability simulation as I taught students about the impact mass producing their product would have on our environment.

A 5th grade student using SolidWorks to design a part for her independent project.

Now, I may be wrong. Like I said, I’m no expert in engineering, nor 3D design, nor have I had a heck of a lot of time using Tinkercad or SolidWorks or any other CAD modeling programs. But as I spend more and more time with both Tinkercad and SolidWorks, the more I am convinced that Tinkercad is a nice place for my young students to get an introduction to 3D modeling, but SolidWorks is where I want to be spending most of my time teaching 3D design. The students are beginning to organically love studying and sketching blueprints. They are making math connections more quickly by using said blueprints. They are feeling more authentically like the engineers I am always telling them they are. They are feeling more authentically like the artists I am always telling they are.

Some examples of SolidWorks projects I have done or are working on with my young students include:

• Designing tetrahedronal kite connectors and then 3D printing them to build kites with straws and tissue paper (3rd grade project)
• Designing coin cell battery and LED light holders and then 3D printing them (4th grade project)
• Sketching birdhouse pieces as separate parts, then creating an assembly to piece them together, and finally laser cutting the parts out of wood to build the birdhouses (Kindergarten project)
• Sketching shadowbox pieces as separate parts, then creating an assembly to piece the shadow box together, and finally laser cutting the parts out of wood to build the shadwoboxes (5th/6th grade project)
• Designing parts to make a hydraulic scissor lift kit and analyzing environmental impact of manufacturing the kits (5th/6th grade project)

4th Grade students used SolidWorks to design a coin cell battery and LED holder.

5th and 6th grade students designed these parts in SolidWorks, then laser cut them, and finally assembled them into a shadowbox.

In summary, if you are teaching 3D design or 3D printing, I’d recommend attempting to get funding to purchase some educational licenses of SolidWorks as it is a powerful program that allows for powerful teaching moments, even with young children.

During the past years I’ve been deeply interested in creativity. In this post I’ll try to condense some strategies aimed to stimulate children’s creative expression in the classroom that I’ve tested in my physical programming classes, and analyzed during my master’s research. Most of the strategies presented here are not based merely on personal insights, but rather grounded on theories suggested by researchers from the field, which I adapted to my own classes.

Strategies to foster creativity in classrooms

The strategies shared here are divided into three main groups that refer to 3 relevant aspects connected to creativity expression, which are:
(a) Fueling intrinsic motivation,
(b) setting a supportive environment for exploration, and
(c) scaffolding the development of ideas.

Of course, there are many strategis on the intersection of those 3 aspects, and this division is only a way to try to organize them.

Fueling intrinsic motivation

Teresa Amabile, who studied creativity for many decades, found out through her researches that people are more creative when driven more by enjoyment, interest and passion than by external pressures (also called extrinsic motivators) such as grades or money (extensive examples of studies conducted about the subject can be found in Amabile & Fisher, 2009). Below I suggest some strategies that could help to foster this important aspect for creativity.

Create ways to connect activities to student’s personal interests

Involvement in explorations connected to personal interests is an important aspect to foster student’s creativity, since it highers the levels of intrinsic motivation. Moreover, by connecting classroom activities to their passions, learning becomes a way to achieve personal goals, which makes it feel much more valuable and meaningful.
However, if we want to offer opportunities for this kind of engagement to all students, it is important to consider broad and gender-neutral themes for the activities, that will enable each one to find its own point of intersection between the proposed theme and their own interests. For example, instead of asking all students to accomplish a stricted goal or a narrow challenge, activities based on broader themes can be much more inviting to be connected to their interests (Rusk and collaborators have condensed some of these strategies beautifully in their paper “New pathways into robotics: Strategies for broadening participation”). When implemented in my classes, such strategy was really effective to engage students in learning in a very personal way. Some examples of themes that have created wide engagement in my physical programming classes were creating an interactive art project, a magical house story, a Rube Goldberg contraption and a pinball machine game.

Encourage students to believe in their ideas

Throughout my teaching practice, especially in underserved communities, I have seen how relevant it can be for your students if you show, as a teacher, that you believe that their ideas are valuable. Sometimes, when I talked to students with very little confidence in themselves, words of encouragement and demonstrations of enthusiasm seemed to be important supports to make them move on and keep challenging themselves, feeling confident to test out their own ideas and going beyond what they expected from themselves. Of course, is not about being super excited about everything just because, but rather of looking for things you really find cool on their projects or discoveries, and talking to them about it.

Creating a positive emotional climate and showing enthusiasm for students’ ideas and discoveries throughout their learning processes encourages them to believe that they are capable of bringing their ideas to life – which, by its turn, can influence positively motivation and creativity .

Create opportunities for cooperation instead of focusing on competitions

Encouraging cooperation rather than competition can influence positively motivation and creativity (see Amabile, 1989), and expand participation of learners with diverse abilities and interests in technological-related activities (see Rusk et al., 2008). Moreover, in classrooms with large numbers of students per teacher, peer collaboration can allow students to be less teacher-dependents – students who help others usually feel more confident, while the ones who need help, if stuck, don’t have to wait for the teacher to move on. By collaborating and getting in contact with other project ideas through interacting with their colleagues, ideas can be much more shared and inspirate others, creative process.

Setting a supportive climate for exploration

Create a safe environment for initial explorations

Overly open and unstructured activities can generate frustration and lack of interest, rather than engagement and autonomy. On the other hand, activities based on very restricted challenges usually don’t offer many possibilities of connection with personal interests and of creative development.
By creating short initial activities from a limited number of materials (whether physical elements or programming blocks), students can develop some initial learnings from their own personal paths, feeling safe to explore possibilities without the fear to mess up the efforts of long periods of time.

Select materials that are appropriate to experiment with

The materials offered for construction are directly related to the way students engage in the process of testing ideas. When materials allow short periods of time between making a changes in the design and observing its effect, students can perform small quick experiments, which can stimulate the development of new ideas, since several ideas can be tested and refined.
In my classes, I have seen kids really obsessed at trying to build something with materials and tools that were not ideal for the situation and to their goals. When inappropriate materials crossed the way of obstinate students, the result was that they spent long periods of time trying to build something that eventually led to the frustration of not being able to adequate the materials to their needs. In these cases, after long efforts and successive frustrations, the result can be the dropping of intrinsic motivation.

Allow course changes throughout the process

Many teachers think that, as important as creating something, is planning out how the creation will be created – the steps involved, the materials needed and the outcomes expected. This planning skills can, of course, be very valuable in many circumstances through our lives. But, if planning is always the entry condition (or barrier) for creating something, a lot of ideas won’t have the chance to be explored, and kids won’t have the wonderful experience of being led with the flow in unpretentious learning experimentations. If we want our kids to be creators, it’s important to show them that it’s ok to rethink our paths and change our ways.
By allowing (and creating conditions for) our students’ ideas to evolve with time, their creative processes will certainly be much more fruitful. So, instead of always requiring them to make plans for the final product and then proceed to the construction, we can rather, leave them somewhat free to explore new pathways when problems are faced and as new ideas arise.

Provide adequate time for the development of projects

It is common among teachers to say that if there are no deadlines students will work slowly and unfocused. However, what I have learned over time is that, if the task is sufficiently engaging for the students, they will work hard to find the answers to their questions – and, even though they can take longer periods of time to create a “final” product, they will engage in a much meaningful experience.

Encourage sharing in a safe environment

Providing space for students to share their ideas, questions, projects and insights in collective moments are important aspects of classroom dynamics. However, it is important that the sharing climate is pleasant and stress-free so that students feel comfortable to share unfinished creations, and can emphasize the learning process instead of only their final creation.
One time, I told my students that they would share their final projects in an exhibition to the whole school. Then, I started to see some of the kids (especially those with lower self-esteems) changing their “crazy” (but super cool and complex) ideas to something much simpler, that they already knew how to make, just because they were afraid of not having something working for the “super important” moment. Since I was interested in fostering their creative potential, that made me rethink the way I deal with exhibitions.

Scaffolding the development of ideas

Provide learning resources that allow students to follow different paths

Providing good learning resources is essential to allow deeper explorations and greater autonomy during the development of projects. An aspect that can be helpful in the design of such resources is the having small blocks of information that can help in their initial steps and that can be connected among them for the development of more complex projects.I think the Scratch Cards are great examples of learning resources like that – instead of giving step-by-step instructions on how to start a project, students can autonomously imagine their projects and look at the resources to achieve their goals – which can be speacilly important in classrooms with many students and open ended projects.

Encourage students to get inspiration from the available materials

As discussed before, materials can have deep impacts on the ways ideas are developed. A strategy I like to use sometimes is, instead of asking students to come up with a project and then to look for the materials they will use to build it, to encourage them to start by looking at the available resources and only then imagine the project they will create. Usually, in my classes, we used to work mainly with everyday, low-cost materials and recycled materials. When ideas can emerge from the contact with the available resources, ideas usually evolves really fast and can go to ways not expected by the begging of the process.

Stimulate students to look at familiar resources in new contexts

This suggestion is very much based on the Tinkering Studio’s approaches and it seemed to be very effective in my creativity research.
In my classes, besides from bringing recycled materials (I’m the kind of person that accumulate all sorts of things that could be called “trash”), I also like encourage kids to bring new materials from their homes to our classes. The materials they bring are not supposed to be used for their personal projects, but instead to be a common resource for the whole group to use. In our talks, I saw that this was a really important strategy to encourage them to look at the things around them with a new and curious way, which made them feel more creative.

As a maker, one of the things I like is spending a great deal of time on something, going deep, and feeling that the result is really due to my hard work. I have taken up quilting recently, because it is that kind of project. I need to learn new things, and then do them. It makes me happy.

As a teacher of history, I love bringing in that maker mindset, but I also have a few other priorities that I need to balance with that idea that the maker (in this case the student) should figure it all out. Even when I am teaching in the maker space, or a sewing elective, I still wonder about that perfect balance between what I should do to help and what I want the students to figure out for themselves.

One of the things I have started to do when I explain something to students (something fun, like using the laser cutter, or something perhaps less fun, like constructing proper footnotes using the Chicago style) is to remind them that even though I am telling them all the steps they need, and they have them in the instructions, I don’t expect them to get it all the first time, and they should ask each other and me for help. I do want them to read the instructions and help each other. We are all still working on that.

But it always comes back to the same questions I have asked myself about instructions, kits, prepared sets of parts, and other methods to move things along a bit faster. How much is too much? How much is too little? In some ways this gets at the heart of the difference between my own personal making and my making with students in the classroom. The goals are different, and some of the methods are different too. So rather than thinking in terms of strict rules of making, I want to think in terms of questions to ask and ways to balance competing goods. It is not a case of one right answer, one good answer and one bad one, but rather in any given situation, which of the two good arguments gets to win out a little, even as I try to give some space for the opposite argument.

In some of my projects I have come to a pretty satisfactory balance. When I do my project on the telegraph, I have both instructions and parts, because the lesson is about history, and the making activity brings life, a tactile understanding, and amazing questions and observations from the discussions (questions that have never come up when we just read about the invention and use of the telegraph). But my goal is not to teach the science of electromagnets, or current, or anything. It is not a bad thing that students sometimes ask questions about these things, and I invite them to explore the answers. If I were teaching science class I might reverse the order, give them few instructions and let them figure that part out. Likewise when students make display boards for National History Day I don’t make them discover that contact paper is the best thing to use for covering the cardboard (spray paint will warp the cardboard, leaving it plain won’t work since we recycle the boards) or that if you mount an iPad at the top of the board it normally tips everything over. They could learn from trying other backgrounds, or breaking several iPads, but I have made the decision to start by telling them these things. Sometimes they don’t listen, but that is a different story. I also use the large format color printer to print their images for them — they don’t have time or access to that particular printer, and their other choice would be to pay a copy service, and that costs money some of them don’t have.

There are other projects where I still go back and forth about how much I take away from their opportunity to learn when I tell them the answer. I guess I always will. I do think after almost two decades of teaching 8th graders I am getting better at asking the questions.

• What does the item I would be giving or doing for them have to do with the point of the lesson?
• How realistic is it that students can figure it out themselves or make the item themselves?
• Could I give some help but not do it for them?
• How much is time a factor?
• How much joy will they get out of doing it themselves?
• Can I do less for them to do more?
• Can I teach one member of the group and have her teach the rest?
• Can I use this lesson to teach students how to figure it out? Should I?

The list of questions could go on, but the idea is there in these first ones. What questions do you ask yourself?