FabLearn Fellows Tea Sippers & TurtleStitch

For 24 Sundays in a row, I have set an alarm and jumped on a Zoom at 10 am. Usually, Sunday is the one day a week I choose to sleep in, be lazy, and not do anything productive. I do not like getting up early, but I can’t help myself; I just keep doing it. I have Zoomed from all over the place these past 6 months, including a campsite in Kentucky with very spotty wifi, from the car in nowhere Georgia with an even less reliable signal on the way to a beach trip with 2 of my girlfriends, and from a friend’s kitchen with two very young kids bouncing around. Most Sundays, however, I have been home in Tennessee in my PJs sipping coffee (ironically, not tea) and absolutely enjoying the heck out of the morning. The craziest part of this whole experience is that I have been learning math & coding on these morning Zoom meetings as part of an amazing group, self-titled, Tea & TurtleStitch.

Tea & TurtleStitch is a first-class group of educators and makers and intellectuals and artists from New York, Boston, Tennessee, Texas, California, Italy, Germany, Sweden, and China. What brings us together is that we are all interested in using coding to make embroidery. Yes, you read that right, we use code to determine the size, shape, type, and color of stitches in an embroidery pattern. TurtleStitch is based on the programming language Snap! However, I have noticed that we have done most of our coding in a LOGO kind of way. This is not surprising since Cynthia Solomon, co-creator of Logo, the first computer language for children, is one of our two fearless leaders. Our other leader is Susan Klimczak, Education Organizer at South End Technology Center and FabLearn Fellow. These two are a pretty hilarious duo and bring out each other’s strengths each week. Cynthia is the master coder and Susan is the master maker (as well as an amazing coder). Susan has inspired me to learn not only how to code for embroidery, but also make finishing touches to the design like adding zippers to pouches and laser cutting frames for display. The group itself is a who’s who of maker educators and computer scientists. But the best part is the collaboration and joy everyone brings to the art and science of TurtleStitch. The simplest achievements are genuinely celebrated on-screen and on Twitter. As a novice coder (and embroiderer for that matter), I have felt included and encouraged at every step.

In conversations with friends of mine over the years who are math teachers, I have realized there are some serious gaps in my math education – and in my spatial reasoning. I could memorize and pass tests (most of the time), but what I have been lacking is a deeper understanding of mathematical concepts and any real practice in geometry. Calculating the volume of a ‘cone of corn’ may have been part of my college entrance exams, but it never held any meaningful applications in my life. I even worked at Baskin Robbins as a teenager and filled waffle cones with ice cream, but I was never asked to measure the volume because folks just wanted the most mint chocolate chip I could squish down inside! Logo and our friend the Turtle may have been developed for kids, but I am so grateful for the experience of finding joy in math for the first time.

Best lesson yet – scale! I made a witch based on Ed Emberly’s book teaching kids to draw entitled, “How to Draw Monsters and other Scary Stuff”. The first version resembled more of a chicken on a broomstick than a witch (really check out the picture below). What I figured out is that, unlike the Ed Emberly drawing, an equal-sized nose and chin give the impression of a beak especially if it isn’t filled in with green color. I also realized after I embroidered the first witch that she was tiny and only about 1.5 inches tall. The design needed to be big enough to make changes to her nose. My first instinct was to quadruple the size of every shape. While that did allow me to give her a proper nose, now she was too big to embroider with my machine’s 4-inch hoop. Darn! The next step was to scale her down by ¼. Because I really did not want to sit and do the math for every step. I thought I was clever and multiplied all the move blocks by 0.75. It worked! Since turtlestitch.org makes every design public, Susan and Cynthia would check on our progress between Sunday sessions. They would celebrate our successes, remix our projects, and offer suggestions when appropriate. While the design was cute, Cynthia noticed a terrible inefficiency in my code. During our next Sunday session, she explained how she improved my code by creating a variable called SCALE. Now the witch can be changed easily to any size. In hindsight, it seems simple and so obvious, but for the mathematically disinclined, it was a revelation. It is the simplest example of why variables are so important in both coding and math – but it took a relevant application to really see it. This reminds me of my favorite quote by Seymour Papert when he says, “Anything is easy if you can assimilate it to your collection of models. If you can’t, anything can be painfully difficult.” Well maybe that is why math was always so difficult, I had no models with which to assimilate it. TurtleStitch and these amazing fellow Tea Sippers made learning difficult concepts FUN for me. I am as surprised as anyone that I want to spend hours after our Sunday morning Zoom sessions working on a new design or a new coding concept.

I am the luckiest person in the world to have been led to this group. Thank you!

It took several weeks before I was ready to start using my embroidery machine. Learning how to thread the machine was a whole different learning experience. In the meantime, here is Susan’s multicolor (variegated) thread embroidery of my shell2 design.