Parts and Crafts

Because documentation is one of our major interests – not just doing projects, but doing what we can to make it easier for other people to do similar work in the future – I’ve struggled a lot, in thinking about camp, to figure out how to quickly and easily bring new adults into the environment. A part of me balks at the term ‘staff training’, because it’s a combination of two words that don’t feel right to use when talking about camp, but the idea is similar. How can we work with adults to help them have a better handle on how to enjoy themselves and be helpful at camp (where these two usually amount to the same thing)? This feels like a very tricky problem to me, because a lot of what’s called for at camp (and, indeed, in any widely collaborative, largely communal environment) is the ability to pay attention to people and read them and know how to help them with (inter-)personal problems. Having a variety of technical and artistic skills and interests is the other requirement, of course, but, well, I don’t actually ever meet people who don’t make and do awesome things, so it’s the other, more nebulous skills that I feel like I need to figure out how to teach and talk about.

One of the fundamental rules for working with people, I think, is that attention ebbs and flows. Successful organization needs to take this fact into account. As someone who by and large invents his own work schedule, it’s taken me a long while to figure out the optimal ways for me to move back and forth between different types of projects and types of thinking so as to remain happy and effective for extended periods of time. When I get unfocused I start to work really ineffectively. I check my email more often. I flash though all of my browser tabs and all of my windows in rapid succession without stopping on any of them. I get frustrated. Kids are usually less sedentary in their distraction. They wander away from a project, or, if they are physically or mentally prevented from wandering away, they stop paying attention, start doing other things with the materials at hand or, in the worst-case coercive scenario, start sabotaging the project itself by refusing to listen, refusing to learn, and distracting others to bring them over to their side. At camp we have a couple of solutions to this problem: the first, and main one, is that we never ask people to work on things or participate in activities if they don’t want to do so. We will make people not be destructive, but we will never make them be constructive – creativity and inspiration are too fragile to survive in captivity. The second, though, requires a bit more thought. Sustained frustration with an activity that you’re required to do turns into anger and rebellion, but frustration with the only activity that you really want to be doing at any given moment just leads to boredom. I think that boredom is a really important emotion, in a lot of ways, and I think that it’s really important for people to learn to be frustrated, be bored, be confused, and figure out for themselves what to do with themselves, but I also think that these are actually really difficult skills to acquire. A lot of the camp environment is built around trying to make acquiring these skills as easy as possible.

We use Scratch to flatten the learning curve for learning to program computers. Since we have found that we, and others, seem to learn best when we have concrete goals that we are working towards, when we are actively engaged in making something or making something happen, we look for tools that will help people immediately start working. There are a number of barriers of entry to learning to write computer programs in C, or in Java. Kids can learn to do so, but they will end up spending quite a bit of time early on doing things that they don’t understand, and slowly figuring out abstractions, before they can really sit down and be creative and productive. With Scratch people can immediately sit down and make an interesting program, and, in making this program, will figure out the concepts that they eventually will need to write more sophisticated programs in more complicated and abstract languages.

Off to the side of the electronics worktable we have the take-apart area. Here we have lots of scrap stuff, electronics and appliances and devices, that we’ve scrounged from recycling or that parents have brought to camp for us to use as we see fit. The take-apart area provides an outlet for a really natural curiosity that people have. It’s one of the main places to which newcomers gravitate. Usually kids at camp start out taking things apart in more or less destructive ways. Most kids need a lesson or two on how to use a screwdriver (and how not to use one!), and it takes while to figure out what to do when you’re stuck taking something apart: when do you look for more screws, when do you look for little tabs or clips, when do you just start prying? Kids are liable to start prying at the slightest provocation, or to hunt down a hammer and try to smash stuff open. In time, though, they start to slow down and, maybe on their own or maybe with the help of an adult, actually look at the pieces of the objects they’re dismantling and either think about how they fit together or what else they might be able to do with them.

I was helping a boy take apart a boom box last summer. Video and audio tape players are some of my favorite pieces of scrap to look at with kids – they have a lot of really interesting and clever ready-made mechanics – motors and gearings and all of the little ways that tape cassettes are moved into and out of position – so a slow and attentive dismantling of one of them can take much of a morning. We played with the mechanisms for a while, and then moved on. I had suggested earlier in the day and week that we could make speakers, so I wanted to make sure, if he was amenable, that we spent at least a little bit of time looking at and playing with the speakers. If you wire the two speakers together, you can talk into one and hear it in the other, like a kind of high-tech tin-can telephone. The vibrations from your voice turn into electrical signals when you talk into one speaker, and the other speaker turns these signals back into vibrations. This makes a lot of sense, abstractly and intuitively, but we’re so used to electrical devices needing to be plugged in or have batteries that this bit of physics feels a little bit like magic. Because the connections aren’t that great, and because the speakers aren’t designed to be very high-fidelity microphones, you have to really listen to hear the sounds coming over the wire. It’s a lot easier to notice, and more impressive, when you’re far enough away from your partner that you can’t hear their voice except through the speaker. We unspooled two very long lengths of wire, conneccted the speakers to each toher with them, and sat at opposite ends of the church, behdind closed doors, and had a little conversation about how amazing it was that we could hear each other.

The boy went around camp and made sure that everyone tried out the “telephone” we made, but then had a different idea: we could connect these wires to motors on a toy car and could make a wired remote control for it. We all spent most of the next day working on little toy cars, trying out different types of motors and types of bodies and wheels and taking things apart for useful scrap material. We didn’t succeed that day – we couldn’t get the motors to generate enough torque to actually drive the cars, and couldn’t quite get our ad-hoc attempts to gear them down to fit together precisely enough, but everyone worked together and talked together and made incremental progress on a series of engineering problems all morning. This wasn’t, like making speakers, a project that we came up with for kids to work through in order to learn certain concepts and build something cool, and it wasn’t, like the popcorn popper, or making video games, a project that kids came to camp wanting to work on that we just helped with. It was something in the middle. It grew out of the activity that I led but not from the instruction that I gave. I would never think, in writing down an electronics project curriculum, to say “okay, now you have these two long wires so you can make a remote-controlled car,” because ‘long wires’ isn’t the interesting abstract concept that I’m trying to work on when I suggest making the “telephone”. But it was the coolest thing that happened at camp that week.