popcorn recap!
One of the stranger results of us running really small programs this year is that I haven't been very dilligent about taking photographs of our day-to-day tinkerings -- it's a big change in environmental aura when one of two adults, one of eight people at camp shifts from being a participant to an observer/documentarian. I mention this mostly because I'm going to tell you a story that ends with a popcorn fire, and I think that it's pretty lame to tell you without showing you.
There were two kids at our first week this summer who we'd met last year at Camp Kaleidoscope. Last year they somehow became aware of the fact that coils of wire with power running through them became hot -- if I was willing to stretch the truth in order to make the story better I'd say that they noticed this when making electromagnets or speakers, but I don't honestly remember what the circumstances were -- they played a lot, and very freely, with pieces of electronics, and they listened to a lot of what we said without ever really engaging too much with our specific projects or instructions. There were a million things going on at camp last summer, and I wasn't the adult who was working with them in the electronics room during most of these experiments, so the story I tell is likely to be imperfect. Anyway, they got really excited about wire getting hot, though, and worked last year on making a space-heater -- coiling lots of wire and connecting it to some of the transformers that we had lying around in the crate of wall-warts, looking at and playing with different voltage and current ratings. I think that their space-heater warmed up but never got too hot. Somehow this project dovetailed with the unsanctioned project of putting too much voltage into LEDs and burning them out in spectacular ways. Dicussions happened between them after camp last year about what they would work on together this summer and the LED-exploder project turned into plans for a 12VDC popcorn popper.
The beginning of this story is a perfect illustration of the sorts of processes we're designing our programs to inspire and facilitate. We believe that there are three major pieces that make up a productive environment for learning and experimentation: tools, freedom, and inspiration. The tools, in this case, are the pieces of the "electronics table" -- wires, breadboards, leds, resistors, battery packs, wall-worts, but also the "ambient expertise" in the room. We try to make sure that there are always enough helpful and knowledgable people, kids and adults, in a room so that all of our tools are usable and understandable. The most relevant freedom we provided, for this particular project, was the freedom for kids to be in the electronics room, and to have free access to the tools and components in it, to build and tinker and play and think without having any pressure to be constantly "working on something" or "getting something done". I will, one day, write something about the fuzzy line that kids have between engineering and imaginative play -- suffice to say that, given a room full of electronics components and a little bit of knowledge about how they work, they will freely combine sound engineering and working circuits with outlandish claims, tremendous enthusiasm, and incoherent wiring. It seems to me that imaginative play is one really powerful method that kids have for developing comfort and familiarity with certain kinds of objects. And the inspiration in this case was a combination of being in a room full of interesting people who are excited about making things, hearing a lot of conversation about circuits, and witnessing, if not explicitly participating in, projects like making electromagnets and speakers -- projects which presented a handful of useful concepts in an intuitive and hands-on way. Moreover, working on interesting projects in a free environment brings people together as collaborators and peers and friends -- the popcorn engineers continued to think about their experiments together during the school year -- these productive and creative social relationships are probably the most valuable thing that we can foster through our programs. It's probably the most valuable thing that any learning institution can do. Certainly it's the most valuable thing that I got out of my time spent at engineering school.
Returning to a few weeks ago. The night before camp started, I got an email -- "Just so you know," it read, "we're going to make a popcorn popper at camp this week. We will need the following:" It ended with a parts list and a number of exclamation points. As kids trickled into the church basement on Monday, they were presented with a stranger and a peer who said to them, one by one, "hi! we're making a popcorn popper. do you want to help?" I couldn't design a better way to integrate people to camp -- pretty much there's only one possible answer to that question. We all worked, off and on, on the project every day. To accomodate more and different kinds of effort, "making a popcorn popper" turned into "having a popcorn sale". In a TED Talk about The Tinkering School, Gever Tulley observes that when kids become frustrated by working on a project they spontaneously start decorating it. This seems to be a way of simultaneously staying engaged and taking a break. "Having a popcorn sale" is broad enough of a topic that it can accomodate building a popcorn popper, acquiring ingredients, making signs, posters, logos, thinking about other things to sell, coming up with plans for distributing profits.
Kids designed and engineered until they got stuck -- how to make a case, how to connect coils, how to make sure wires don't short out, what amount of voltage/current is right. Eventually they decided that they weren't going to be able to make it work with any of the transformers we had lying around -- they just weren't getting hot enough. This realization led, the next day, to reappropriating heating elements, taking the tips off of soldering irons, arraying them, mounting them. Popcorn kernels started to smolder. We needed fans to distribute the heat better. A whole series of natural design problems and solutions cropped up because we weren't following a plan that was guaranteed to work. Some pretty bad and uninformed design decisions were made early on in the project that caused a lot of trouble later. The process of identifying them and trying to fix them took a lot of time and a lot of thought and a lot of effort -- provided a lot of experience and many insights. The temptation, for me, was always to try to steer design and inquiry in the directions that I thought would be fruitful, to make sure that the popcorn popper worked, and I had to keep reminding myself that I valued process over product, inquiry and creativity over measurable success, etc etc. I also had to keep reminding myself that I didn't actually know how to build a popcorn popper out of our scrap materials either.
Eventually all of this testing and designing ended up with a strange and ungainly box sitting on our brick testing ground outside of the church, heating up with popcorn inside. After a while, and to much celebration, the popcorn started to pop! And then the tape started to burn -- some tape had been used to joing some pieces of the project together and to mount some things. Tape started to burn and popcorn started to burn. We removed everything valuable and destroyable from the incipient fire, unplugged all of the equipment, and watched as the box smoldered and started to fall apart.
By this time the last day of camp was almost over. Everyone had a lot of really good ideas about how to refine the design, but we put them on hold, popped up some popcorn out front of the church in a pot on our electric burner and held the popcorn sale. Some kids had never made popcorn outside of the microwave. Popcorn and salt. Kids and parents sat and ate and chatted together. It was delicious.