Lightsaber Workshop Recap
Firstly –
The Computer Programming Workshop this coming weekend is NOT at the church.
It will be at MIT in room 56-154 (email us if you’re not familiar with MIT’s layout). It’s a bit of a maze.
It will NOT be at the church!
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Okay! Now the actual blog post:
We had a good pretty good turnout for our lightsaber event. 7 kids showed up, 5 went home having made something cool out of a combination of piping, motors, leds, battery packs, duct tape, etc. Oddly enough, to me, I think that the majority of the kids had never seen Star Wars. Now, I am pretty much in favor of any critique of Hollywood or mass-media that you want to make, so not watching TV or movies with your kids, for whatever reasons, seems cool to me, especially if you’re out making and doing stuff instead. I’m also a big sci-fi fan, and, underneath my commitement to non-violence, I think sword-fights and laser-battles and violent video games can be pretty cool. So I think it’s totally great for kids not to see Star Wars and I also think that it’s pretty much totally great for kids to see Star Wars. I was just surprised, is all.
We have some video of the event, it’s pretty awesome, here:
and
That said, I’m not exactly thrilled with a 5/7 satisfaction rate. At camp things are different, of course – we have a lot going on at any given time, so even if you’re not inspired by one project it’s pretty easy to wander off and find another cool something happening that you want to be part of or that inspires you to want to make your own thing.
Still, I’m slightly troubled – I’m troubled in part becaue the 5 kids that made cool things were boys and the 2 who got frustrated and left were girls, and because I’m pretty concious that this happened for all of the really classic reasons why girls don’t generally get well-taught in most science/engineering programs.
I don’t mention this as a thing that I, or camp, does poorly, or well. I mention it as a thing that I, and all of us who interact with kids should be thinking about , noticing, and considering carefully.
And it’s not actually about girls versus boys – it’s about shy/polite/quiet versus loud and pushy. At the ages of 6-10, by and large (and I’m making generalizations based on my experience and limited sample size andall), boys are pushy, at least in the context of hands-on-education build-it-yourself type workshops. When they want your help on something they’ll poke and prod you until you pay attention to them. This is a strategy that’s pretty effective for them during the sorts of programs that we run. When there are 5 different people working on 5 different things at 5 different stages, I’m pretty much just wandering from person to person trying to check up on them and see what they’re working on and offer advice. It’s too easy, though, to get caught going between checking up on the 3 people who are really insistent about having my input.
I have a tendency to assume that, if kids aren’t asking me for my help, it’s because they don’t want it, because they’re happy doing what they’re doing and don’t need me. Maybe I’ll check them out at some point, because I’m always curious about what everyone is working on, but I don’t want to be the hovering teacher-guy who’s always checking to make sure that you’re on task. I really don’t want to be that guy.
This strategy works pretty-okay during the latter days of our multi-day programs. After a day or two at camp or in a similar environment, kids generally get the gist – they get that us adults are basically around to function as resources and references. But it absolutely does not work during the first day of camp or during an event like we ran yesterday, where the environment is unfamiliar, the people are unfamiliar, and the task is unfamiliar.
So I feel bad about that. I think I probably could have helped two kids and a mom have a fun day and a really cool invention experience if I’d made 5 minutes to chat with them and see what they wanted to make or do during the workshop yesterday, but by the time I actually got around to doing so, they were ready to leave.
I do have a couple of good new ideas for how to present the lightsaber project (yesterday’s event was as much of an experiment for me as it was for any of the kids – I’ve still never done the project in its entirety, but until a few days ago I’d not walked myself through any of the steps at all, I’d just seen kids doing it at camp last summer).
I have a long-standing quest to find good ways for people to connect two wires together without having to solder them. The best way to do this is, of course, to twist them together, but I find that it takes a little while for people, kids esepcially, to get the hang of twisting wires in a way that actually connects them. If anyone has any insights into this particular problem I’d love to hear from them.
Anyway, my idea with the lightsaber project is to take a big sheet of cardboard, and stretch the wires out on it and wrap each end around a pin, so that you have two wires totally stretched out and held in place in front of you.
Then you can just lay the LEDS out on the wire, give each LED leg one twist around the wire, without worrying too much about how stable the connection is, wrap the whole thing in a little ball of tin foil, and then drip a drop of hot glue on that.
I think that this would get rid of the most difficult part of making the lightsaber, and I think that making a couple of models of this process at a few steps along the way would make the project a lot easier to present to groups.
Next time!