This is a personal reflection of Dr. Seymour Paperts work called “The Gears of My Childhood”.

I’ve been in Maker education now for about 16 years and I truly believe that learning should be done through an array of modalities. I find that in my own life, I tend to learn better when I hear things and make things based on what I see and touch.  I also know that I’m a visual learner, I like seeing things in front of me. I like to play with objects and ideas to see how they work or relate to other ideas. 

My personal “Gear” story happened when I was in grad school. I took a generative art course where we used computer programming to make animated pieces of art. There was one project I started to play around with sines and cosines to make my animations grow and shrink to make the piece look like it was breathing.  It was through that tinkering that I understood what cosine and sine were. It was also my first glimpse of what I wanted to achieve in my career, taking math which I know is so beautiful, and applying it to teaching in a way that made sense for others. Learning trigonometry in my junior year of high school was rather bland, it was just going through the motions of solving problems but not understanding what the point was or having an experience to grounds my ideas.

Currently, when I co-teach Trig Functions with @KateBelin, we start with students building a Ferris wheel and looking at the motion between the bottom of the ride to the top of the ride. This provides a guidepost for the experience to study the concepts. But I digress, this story is about my “Gear”. Anyways, It wasn’t until I started making art with trigonometry did I feel like I understood the concepts. Now I know everyone has a different experience latching onto different interests and ultimately different ideas. Dr. Pappert spoke of this when he stated “ I fell in love with the gears”. My visual representation of sine and cosine and what they did to my animation was the vehicle for me to understand concepts deeper. Sure not everyone is going to understand math through Ferris Wheels, gears, or through generative art, but I think this is why I enjoy teaching Making in the classroom. 

Making is an experience that connects different ways of learning to make both new ideas and objects. There’s something mystical to when an idea just clicks through the experience.  What makes it very special is how intimate these ideas form to the individual.  When people are Making, they are engaging with the materials all the while they are forming new ideas. Everyone is making their own connections and meaning through the process. I believe that if Dr. Papert could see a Maker classroom he would appreciate the work being done. His notion about the computer is how I see Making,“ it can take on a thousand forms and can serve a thousand functions, it can appeal to a thousand tastes”. 

As I write this blog post, thinking about Making and Constructionism learning theories, I think back to my daughter’s Parent-Teacher conference we just had. She is in second grade and in a week she will have been in remote learning for a whole year. She has done more remote learning than in-person instruction in her entire elementary school career. She is a lovely person, of course a parent would say that, but in truth, she loves to learn, create and imagine. Sadly we spoke with her teacher about how the science video lessons are not engaging her. Her class is learning about simple machines and will ultimately create a bridge from these experiences, but they are learning about simple machines through watching videos.

We chose this school not so much for the “Academic Rigor” but for the holistic curriculum and the level of project-based experiences in the classroom. As a teacher, I also know the challenges of trying to do engaging remote instruction and stretching one’s own creativity to include hands-on work. Anyways, I wanted to communicate to the teacher that something was missing in the remote instruction, both my wife and I believe it’s the lack of engagement and socialization but there was also something else missing in the equation specifically with the engagement piece. What would get my daughter into learning simple machines? What is her “Gear” in all of this? 

It dawned on me today after she went to a fellow peer/friend’s home, a girl that she visits every Thursday to do science and socialize. She came home so happy to show me her Catmobile that she built with recycled boxes, straws, and bottle caps after studying wheels. She also was proud to show me charms she made with yarn, bottle caps, and hot glue. At that moment I realized what was missing, the Constructivist piece that attracted us to attend this school. With remote instruction, she was missing the hands-on learning and the magic of making connections between new ideas through the hands-on approach. I whole heartily believe that she learned more about wheels today than she has watching videos about wheels. Also watching her light up, beaming proudly, at what she made helped me see the glimmer of her love of learning again and of her own gears turning. 

“Catmobile” By Zoë Bringas