Parts and Crafts

One of the big things we’ve discussed in thinking about camp and workshops is how to take informal spaces (living rooms, church basements, kitchens) and turn them into productive learning environments. Roughly speaking, thinking about how something like “classroom design” applies when you take out the classroom, take out the teachers, and try to give people space to do their own thing.

I teach freshman writing at a local university, and taught the past semester in a computer lab. It was a strange environment – a combination of equipment I didn’t quite know how to use (overhead projector + whiteboard + manager’s desk) and an intimidating seating arrangement. There were no tables to speak of – instead, we had concentric rings of computer desks, equipped with Myspace and Facebook, all facing away from the front of the room.

Using computers to teach writing is a potentially useful thing – having the internet at your fingertips isn’t just a time sink, after all, it’s an incredible research tool. It’s easier to illustrate points when everyone has Google on hand, and having actual workstations meant that in-class writing was a snap. In this case, though the classroom was filled with objects that had little to no immediate relevance to what we were doing. Computers stifle discussion. I couldn’t see everyone in the room. When someone was talking, other people had to crane to see them. Nobody was quite sure of whether we were in a lecture room or a seminar room. People stopped talking, and they started getting frustrated. They gotanxious and bored, and then (not unlike a roomful of 10-year-olds) they started to get destructive.

Not all of this is due to classroom setup, of course, but a lot of it had to do with me, and how comfortable I felt in the space. Ideally, teaching writing should be a lot like camp – it’s a relatively self-directed process, based around making stuff, experimenting, thinking analytically, and “finding your voice” (whatever you take that to mean, which is, in any case, something specific and important). Taking the classroom out of freshman writing is hard, in part, because there’s no group of people who is more eager for structure and organization. This is true of the space as much as the teaching. If people aren’t sure whether they’re in a seminar or a lecture, they’ll revert to the lecture – they get passive, and sit back, and wait for you to give them the answers. It falls on the instructor to possess and occupy the space, and clearly define its use.

I gave up on the space very early on – I decided that it wasn’t going to work, taking the lack of a seminar table as my starting cue. “You can’t teach writing if it’s not a seminar,” I said. I stopped trying to run a discussion when everyone was literally facing away from me and got used to watching people surf the internet. I never figured out what to do with the computers – and as a result, they became a much bigger deal than they needed to be.

This was on my mind during camp because we tried something new for the week: the day prior to starting camp, we opted not to unpack any of the stuff. Instead, we left everything in bags and decided to let the kids make the space themselves. The plan didn’t quite work, either: everyone showed up simultaneously, half of us (the counsellors) were sick, kids arrived early, everything became chaotic quickly. Everything got unpacked simultaneously and put in random places, and was only sort of reorganized after the fact. Consequently, nothing really had a home – instead of designated rooms, there were floating piles of stuff. A bag of tools here, a cluster of glue guns there. In lieu of planned spaces, we hadtemporary spots where people left them and picked them up again.

It also meant that computers floated freely through the space. The second day, one of the kids declared that what was functioning as the computer room was “too crowded” and took it upon himself to free up the space, designating a corner of the soldering table as the Linux station. Two days later, I looked up and noticed that the Scratch desk and soldering station had moved to the back room by the kitchen. The next day the laptop in a different place, often being carried from one table to another, with kids scrounging for cables to stop ailing battery life. Sometimes it was at the craft table; sometimes it was back by the kitchen. The quiet zone of focus that goes along with looking at a computer – whether playing with Scratch, checking Myspace, or playing video games – also moved. Instead of static space, it became portable – a tiny zone of quiet, where every day, a different kid was sitting and working quietly in the midst of chaos.

Portable space is something I feel like we don’t talk about a whole lot – in talking about classroom design, the emphasis is always on open space, on seeing, communicating, being able to talk freely (the seminar table, the open air classroom). Watching kids take computers around made me wonder if I’d gotten it backwards – that maybe it wasn’t that computers are this necessary impediments (distractions), but that distractions themselves offer a particular kind of focus. Floating computers made for a weird kind of mobility – it makes the space autonomous, but more than that, makes it chaotic, with computers set against this intensely social background of “the rest of camp.”

Portability is essential to allowing allowing that kind of juxtaposition, and allowing a place for chaos that doesn’t exist in the space of the static computer lab. It made me wonder: is it just that it’s fun to move around? That it’s nice not to have “classrooms” or “craft rooms” or “computer labs”? Or maybe what happens when you take computers out of the computer lab is, actually, a much more private and intentional space – that this juxtaposition is really essential to developing focus, and being able to function in natural, unconstructed spaces, wherever you happen to find them.

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.

We had a kitchen last summer at camp. We’d always fantasized about doing cooking and gardening projects with kids – Camp Kaleidoscope and Parts and Crafts were both started by groups of people who’d spent years living in undergraduate student cooperatives where the pragmatic and symbolic values of cooking for each other and eating with each other are both taken really seriously. We were early adopters of the presently-hip food politics – local foods, sustainability, connection with land, food, and process. When I fantasize about there being a full-time educational project (a “school”, if you will), based around our principles, I imagine kids cooking lunch for each other and eating together in small groups, and I imagine kids running a cafe, next door, cooking for neighbors and strangers, making entrepreuneurial decisions, and enjoying all of the awesomeness of working in a commercial/restaurant kitchen.

Stevo was at camp for most of the summer, and he, among many many other talents, knows a lot about food, and food-processes. Part of the point of Parts and Crafts is to create environments where adults can share their enthusiasms with kids, freely and without the weird deformations of hierarchy and judgement. We made it unofficial policy to do a cooking activity with kids every day – usually something simple and satisfying with a little bit of interesting kitchen chemistry involved.

I spent a little bit of time earlier this fall teaching a series of workshops on computer programming for students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I held the first couple of workshops in the school’s computer lab, with all of the students in front of computers, following along, hopefully typing along, watching me type code and talk through the process of doing so. These sessions were long, and, to a large degree, pretty effective, I think, but I found them really confusing. I’m standing up there looking out at all of these strangely lit faces that I can’t quite see, unable to see screens, unable to see how people are doing or whether they’re getting it. I was reminded of the experience of being in the audience at an electronic music show where the performer is doing all of his stuff on his laptop – “what’s going on? is he checking his email? playing tetris? updating his facebook status?”

During these workshops we never finished everything that I wanted to finish – the tutorial sessions were scheduled to last for four hours, which is, in my opinion, way too long for any human to listen to another human, and probably too long to stare at the computer screen uninterruptedly. Folks got bored. At some point I would start to sense this, and I would ask them – “I have a few more topics that I think it would be useful to cover. I think it would be useful to go through the bouncing balls example and figure out a good way to make the balls bounce off of each other. We’d go through a couple of the big abstractions of programming, in doing so. But I can also just go around and chat with people about what they understand and what they don’t understand and talk about projects. What do you think?” And no one would say anything. “Well, I’m trying to figure out what’s useful to do. Would it be helpful for me to chat with any of you one-on-one?” And no one would say anything. “Do you want to try to work through this next project together?” And no one would say anything. And eventually I’d make some decision, tell everyone that they could leave if they wanted, and go on.

My gut instinct here was to blame years and years of hierarchical education for rendering these otherwise intelligent and articulate and independent people mute and passive. I remembered a talk that I went to with some parents and young kids from the student-run Blue Mountain School in Oregon. The talk was about video-games and learning. It was really boring. It was really boring and was clearly given by a guy who didn’t play video games for an audience of people who didn’t play video games. I sat and made quiet snide comments to my friend who came with me. The kids got up, wandered around the auditorium, found the food that was going to be served at the post-talk reception, ate crackers and cheese, and went outside to play.

The hardest thing for me about teaching grad students was that they didn’t provide me with the immediate feedback that elementary and middle school students do. Were they bored? Did they care? Was I explaining the stuff that they were interested in? I couldn’t tell.

Last summer, though, Stevo and I were working with a group of young kids who seemed basically happy to to work on pretty much everything we offered them to do, but who were, like the Harvard grad students, really passive about letting us know when they weren’t interested. One day the activities that we were presenting started to totally peter out – I don’t remember exactly what they were, but I remember that at some point I found myself sitting with kids and explaining something and suddenly realizing that they weren’t listening, that they didn’t care, and that I didn’t actually care all that much either. “Stevo!” I said, “Wanna make pickles?”

This is pretty much my panic-response to any confusing situation – to try to hand it off to someone else for a little while to give me some time to think about it myself. This is incredibly useful, and I think that it’s really a pity that most teachers don’t have the luxury of a teaching partner. I say ‘luxury’, just because teaching partners are rare in traditional education, but, for me, they are practically a necessity.

Stevo wanted to make pickles. I’m pretty sure that Stevo always wants to make pickles. When he first came to Boston to work with us he was moving back and forth between staying with different friends of ours, and I could tell where he was inhabiting at any given moment by the number and variety of mason jars covered in bandannas happily bubbling away with wild yeasts. I asked the kids if they wanted to make pickles in my most enthusastic tone of voice in an attempt to carry them along into the project, and everyone headed off into the kitchen.

Stevo started explaining the process of pickling, talking about vinegar and wild yeasts and fermentation and brine and bacteria as he gathered up materials and ingredients. We didn’t quite have enoughcounter-space in the kitchen for everyone to be working, and I noticed one kid whose attention wandered in and out of the activity (and whose body wandered around the room). He wanted to be working on a project with us, but he wasn’t actually satisfied and engaged with the project we were working on.

I grabbed a cutting board and a few cucumbers and a serrated knife and asked him whether he wanted to help me cut. He looked at me, suddenly attentive. “Really? I get to use a knife? Isn’t that dangerous?”

So we had a little conversation about what made knives dangerous and whether he could use one without cutting himself. He decided that he probably could if he made sure that he was holding far side of the cucumber from where he was cutting. I sat with him for a little while, making sure that he was handling the knife sensibly, and I watched him experiment with different ways of cutting. First he just tried pushing really hard on the cucumber, and then he tried sawing through it. It took him a little while to get the hang of the process. Between each cucumber he looked up at me, smiling, and said “I get to use a knife!” and I told him that we needed to cut the cucumbers somehow and it definitely seemed to me like the best tool for the job.

I had forgotten that knife-usage is a real skill, and that knives, even little serrated steak knives, are real tools that you have to learn to handle. This is a ridiculous thing for me to have forgotten – I remember pretty vividly the first time I ever helped to cook dinner at the student cooperative. The “big cook” laughed at me when I started chopping the onions. I felt dumb and stupid and young. I’d never cooked before. I think of myself as a pretty good cook now, and most people that I cook for seem to agree. One of the reasons that I never learned to cook at my parent’s house was because we didn’t have any good knives, so chopping onions and garlic there was a long and frustrating process. I still don’t like to cook when I’m visiting them. I’ve gotten to be a good cook because I’ve practiced a lot, and I’ve practiced a lot because I think the process is fun, and I think the process is fun because I know how and when to use the tools effectively.

This is true of kitchen knives, it’s true of the soldering iron, it’s true of the simple process of twisting wires around each other to make relatively stable temporary electrical connections. I didn’t really need to give any instruction to our camper about how to use the knife, and beyond a brief explanation of the theories (such as they are) of soldering, or wire-twisting, there’s not a whole lot of useful instruction I can give on those tools either. The objects themselves contain the explanation of how to work them, and the knowledge slowly reveals itself through repeated thoughtful and purposeful use.

I’ve been talking to lots of people lately about trying to create spaces where kids can be around creative people doing “real work”, with them and separately from them. I find myself saying that I want kids to be able to interact with people who aren’t “teachers”, not because teachers aren’t awesome and interesting people, but because teachers don’t, by and large, get the chance to fully be themselves in and around school. Kids basically get to interact with parents and teachers, neither of whom are allowed to fully behave as normal people, most of the time.

This summer I read a newspaper story about a school that was opening in Manhattan this year. The thing that made the school newsworthy was that its teacher s were going to be the highest paid teachers in the pre-university education system in America. I received a few different copies of this article in my inbox because, of course, I am one of my social-network’s go-to nodes for topics related to education. When I found the article myself, reading the paper with breakfast, I thought it was an interesting stepping off point for articulating some of my own ideas about teaching, and what schools should or should not be and how labor should be compensated. The question I asked myself was “why does the New York Times think that this is interesting enough to warrant an article, and why do I think that they’re wrong for doing so?” (Obviously, provoking my internal dialogue is plenty of justification for writing the newspaper article, but not for what I felt, at the time, to be the writer’s uncritical acceptance of the school’s premise. Journalistic objectivity might be reason enough for that, but its a sticky concept that I’m sure I’m all that happy with.)

My contention is that, underneath the obvious superlative, there is nothing exceptional about having the highest-paid teachers in the country, at least not pedagogically. Compensating teachers well is great, as labor practice, obviously. The article went to great lengths to describe the elaborate and time-consuming process that the administrators of the school had gone through to find and hire the best teachers in the country. It described how special all of the teachers were, some of the great things that they’d been doing in their classrooms where they had taught previously, and featured interviews with their former principals about how much the school would miss them. These were good teachers. The plan: get really good teachers by spending the most money. Clearly they succeeded.

All of which is well and good, but this whole strategy puts the burden of making kids learn squarely on the teachers, and, to a much lesser extent, the management. This is a combination of accepted wisdom of the economic and educational establishments, then. How do you get good teaching? Hire the best teachers. How do you hire the smartest, most talented, dedicated workers? You give them a lot of money. And health insurance.

Okay, fine. That sounds like it’ll work. Still, concentrating the best traditional school teachers in one place feels like a highly qualified good, at best. Who is replaying them at the schools they’re leaving? So we asked a boring question and got a boring answer. A better question: why is it accepted wisdom that good teachers are rare and exceptional? After all, the material that most pre-university level teachers need to explain is more or less common knowledge. Why is it so hard for caring people to convey information that they know to a body of students? Anyone who’s ever learned something in a really good class or workshop or school know how effortless and fun learning and teaching can feel, and anyone who has spent any appreciable amount of time in the compulsory school system knows that these moments are rare.

I think that too much thought about education goes into thinking about teachers, and that not enough goes into creating tools and environments that promote thoughtful discovery. If good schools depend on exceptional teachers, than good schooling will always be an exception to the norm. How can we set up structures and environments wherein normal people ,people who aren’t geniuses, who aren’t preternaturally empathic, who are sometimes impatient, sometimes frustrated, sometimes shy and awkward, people who care by who don’t always know how best to show it, can happily and effectively share the things that they know with people who don’t know them?

In the next few weeks I’ll be writing up a series of stories, mostly from summer camp, about how kids interact with tools and spaces, and how this interaction can promote the work of discovery and learning. This blog post, then, is the introduction.

Hi all. There’s been a big lull in Parts and Crafts activity, both on the internet and in the real world. I recently moved to Brooklyn and have been working on establishing my own life, as well as our new branch of the Parts and Crafts Collective here in the big city.

My first thoughts? I miss Boston, as I do whenever I’m elsewhere. The Boston area artistic/intellectual/technical community is a really cool and a very particular thing. Whatever my (many) complaints about MIT as an institution, MIT as a community is pretty great, and pretty open, and definitely adds a lot to the area. Leaving just as my friends are starting up Sprout is a particular dissapointment to me, but I’m excited about what they’re doing and excited to have the space to visit when I’m up north.

And New York? There’s a lot going on here. I’ve been actively living in the city for a month and that’s my biggest insight. The culture industries here provide a very strange driving force for the city; one that’s full of little contradictions and mysteries (I was visiting Eyebeam recently, and they were cleaning up to make room for a bridal fashion show that was renting their space in the coming weekend, which, somehow, I can’t quite imagine happening at, say, Axiom, in Boston.)

At the same time, I’ve met a lot of really exciting people in the last month because of the sheer number of interesting projects and institutions and happenings. Due probably in large part to the publishing and art worlds, as well as the city’s long-standing by-your-bootstraps, make-it-here-make-it-anywhere reputation, the intellectual, cultural, creative, and artistic communities seem less dependent than usual on institutions of higher learning (and other large-scale organizations), which I, as a critic of institutional learning practies, find exciting.

And as much as I reject consumption, spectatorship, and celebrity, I can’t help but be excited that I’m living in the same city as They Might Be Giants.

The website is in transition at the moment, going from being the website of a summer camp in Boston to the website of an organization that runs a bunch of different programs and projects in Boston and New York, one of which is a summer camp. I apologize if things seem slightly odd here while we work out exactly what this means.

We have a bunch of exciting things coming up though! Some afterschool classes and weekend workshops in Brooklyn, a building day in Somerville, and winter-vacation day-camp in Boston! Look at our calendar or write us a note for more information about anything that we’re doing!

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.

If you’re unfamiliar with Make magazine, Craft Magazine, or the ”maker movement”, have a look at those links. It’s a vaguely defined movement/social network which is essentially, whether it intends to or not, finding the commonalities between radical DIY culture, the open-source movement, and the grand tradition of engineers making potato guns and blowing stuff up in their backyards.

Recently Instructables instituted a pay-for-features model that has upset a lot of people. Basically all of the content on Instructables remains free and open to the public (I see it in writing everywhere that non-paying members can’t view certain types of images, but I haven’t actually found this to be the case – I can’t figure out whether we’re grandfathered in for a little while or whether they’ve changed policy in response to community outcry…) but certain features that make it particularly useful to particular types of people now cost money. Every instructable consists of a set of steps in a how-to. For free, anyone can view all of the steps in the howto, but in order to view them all on one page, or print them out, one has to pay to be a “pro” member. A lot of people feel like this is against the spirit of the website, which bills itself as “the world’s largest show and tell”. A lot of people feel like it’s absolutely not-okay to take content that they have produced to be freely distributed and to hide some of it and use it to make money. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, the newly limited features are most useful to people who can least afford to pay for them – people who have dialup internet access or who have to access the site at school or the public library. Whenever I decide to work through an instructable, I bring my laptop to my workspace and click through the steps – it barely occurs to me that this way of using the site depends on me having a laptop and high-speed, wireless internet.

Instructable authors have the ability to take down their instructables or to reorganize them so that they’re maximally useful under the new web design, so, ultimately, the community does get to decide if this payment model is against the spirit of the community. If it is, enough content producers will take down their instructables, and either Instructables.com will apologize for messing up and begin the long-slow process of regaining community trust.

But they might not! I think that they probably won’t, that most instructable authors will shrug and figure that the site is still “good enough” and still the best resource of its type for information sharing. I further think that this will be really upsetting and a big surprise to the set of people who are going to take down their materials and find a free way to distribute them. Instructables.com and its supporters have said a bunch of different things in response to community criticism of their new policy, but they boil down to two things – “Yeah, we agree this sucks, but we’re broke and we have to pay our team.” and “Instructables always already was a for-profit entity, what’s the big?”

The people that I know who have in the past been most excited about Instructables.com don’t really identify or accept either of those two arguments – people who are really committed to a certain kind of DIY-inspired attitude towards life that considers money to be, more or less, a last resort for solving problems, anarchists and communists, squatters and dumpster-divers, folks who collect, cook, and distribute food for Food Not Bombs, free-open-source software hackers who freely give their own time every day to software projects that they think the world should have access to, and I think that they took it for granted, maybe, that the Instructables.com team and community was “their people”, took it for granted that people who wanted to make a tool to help people share project ideas over the internet would also have some other set of ideals – for my social circle’s case, took it for granted that people who wanted to make a tool to help people share project ideas over the internet would also be anti-institutionalists, against the forms and structures of really-existing-capitalism, and would have devoted a lot of time and thought to thinking about what’s right and what’s wrong with contemporary economic, political, and educational structures.

These are the ideals that brought some set of people to the DIY movement and inspired them to take Instructables seriously as something other than a fun hobby for engineers. But they aren’t the only ideals that might bring someone to take part in Instructables.com or share his or her projects or make his or her own whatever. Some people are inspired to take Instructables.com seriously, for instance, on the totally reasonable ideological premise that it is fine and good for engineers to have fun hobbies.

Recently a friend of mine asked me, in the course of articulating a critique of Make Magazine, how many people I know who subscribed to the publication and how many of them had ever completed a project from it. I had to admit that, while I was pretty sure I’d done a few of the simpler projects with kids in science classes, I couldn’t think of anyone else who’d ever done so, and that I’d never worked through any of the projects on my own outside of the teaching context.

Make was a rallying cry when it came out, and lots of us saw it in the newsstands and thought “wow! cool! I can make stuff! this is so amazing!” Mike Nagle and I subscribed pretty much immediately – we were teaching science classes together at the time – and were really excited, both because there was this publication which described a process-based way of learning about engineering and tinkering, but also because it seemed to exist interconnectedly with our social circle – we knew someone who had hung out with pretty much all of the principles in the movement – in some cases we’d hung out with them. This is fun – despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve only had one conversation with ladyada, I still think of her as Limor, and routinely have interactions where I’m talking with someone about DIY electronics and I refer to “Limor’s kit” or “Limor’s site” and am met with a blank stare by people who know all about “ladyada” and “adafruit”. I think that this is weird. Mike Nagle has talked with me a bit about going to the Maker Faire and realizing, afterwards, that now he’d met all of the principles of the “maker movement”, and that there weren’t very many. We had a leg-up, of course, for being involved socially – we spent some time at the small engineering school near Toscanini’s – but, even so, Nagle (who is significantly more social and networky than I am) shouldn’t be able to say that he’s met all of “leaders” of the maker movement. There should be too many leaders for anyone to have met most of them, or, better, there shouldn’t be any leaders at all. Hero’s, maybe, but not leaders.

Make is a beautiful magazine. It’s nice and big and colorful and well-designed and it’s pleasant to look at. I feel hip when I’m reading it at the cafe. This is potentially the right design move for mainstreaming the idea of DIY, but I think it also turns Make into an authority – it doesn’t feel like something that I could contribute to. And the style of project presentation – a very precise list of tools and materials and step by step manipulation of said objects – makes the projects themselves seem official, completed, precise and perfect – something which is a little bit intimidating to me since I feel like I know just-enough about electronics and engineering to tinker, but not quite enough to know under what circumstances its really important that a resistor-value be precise or when a certain material was chosen for its properties or because the author happened to have it on hand or because it was cheap.

This, incidentally, is something that we’re trying to be really conscious of in presenting projects at Parts and Crafts, and something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit as I mentally go over the process of making a make-your-own lightsaber! kit. When we did the lightsaber workshop I had a bunch of different kinds of piping and adhesive and resistors of different values and a couple of different methods of diffusing the light. I tried to make sure to articulate my ideas about these different construction materials and methods – “theoretically you need a resister for each LED because you can’t be sure that they’re drawing current evenly, so minor differences between the individual LEDS might cause them to burn out quickly, one by one, but in our practice this doesn’t seem to be the case..” and “I found that having a wider pipe and sanding it a lot and making sure that the LEDS are pointed up instead of out made for the best, most-diffuse, even-looking blade, but you could also play with wax paper, and putting hot glue over the individual LEDs and having more than one tube… all of which change how it looks differently.”

These kinds of digressions and explications of reasoning muck up the presentation a bit, and make the projects a little bit more confusing, but they do so in order to make the process less intimidating and the guide less authoritative. I think that, considering Make to be part of the DIY movement, it could benefit from a step or two away from precise directions in the direction of awkward explanations – “directions” versus “instructions”. Ultimately DIY is supposed to be about empowering individuals to meet their own needs – moving my dependence away from a centralized commodity producer to a centralized information provider certainly does make me less dependent, but it’s only a step in the right direction. One dsn’t just need to “do it” by one’s self – we need to be able to “understand it”, individually or together.

So it’s day 2 of week 1 of Parts and Crafts, home of the Pop-O popcorn electric popcorn popper.

Yep, that’s the theme for the week, it turns out. Ian and Connor, two of this week’s kids, came in with the plan of making an electric popcorn popper and some ideas for how to do it. Within minutes of everyone arriving at the church, all of the kids were on board and thinking and talking about the project. We’ve had a bunch of snags and hiccoughs along the way, trying to figure out a good source of heat, a good type of casing, etc.

All of this raises my “safety” flags, of course – long coils of exposed wire deliberately short-circuited inside of an aluminum box – I’m fumbling my way through the relevant calculations at the moment to decide what lines I need to draw and when I need to draw them –but, still, I don’t have to worry too hard – the kids are suprisingly conservative – they suggested and immediately threw out the idea of wiring directly to 120 VAC as too dangerous. Which is great, in a way, though I’d prefer to throw out the idea on the grounds that it’s just not a particularly good one. The problem with wiring 120VAC from scratch is not that it’s “too dangerous”, it’s that it’s hard enough to do safely that it’s just not worth the effort when there are other possible solutions to the problem. Care, patience, and effort make safety, but sometimes using a certain tool, or a certain method safely requires more care, patience, and effort, than we can reasonably give to it at camp.

Their enthusiasm is contagious. I’ve spent the last hour and a half or so thinking about all of the different things that I would try if I was going to make a popcorn popper so that I can have useful ideas if anyone wants my input. I actually find myself having to restrain myself – it’s not my project, it’s their project, and if I get too excited about it I forget and start to take ownership. I actually spent half an hour after everyone but me had left the church, sitting on the floor near the popper with a multimeter, poking around, thinking about temperature. I keep telling myself that it’s way better for kids to work through their own ideas, good or bad, than to use mine, and I think it’s starting to sink in. Still, I think it’s appropriate for me to offer some calculations along with the ideas behind them and let the popcorn popper makers do what they want with them.

Well, there’s one area where I have to provide my input – as I mentioned above, the project triggers a lot of my major concerns and uncertainties around working with kids. Safety, of course, is a huge huge issue when working on anything with anyone, but doubly-so when working with kids and when working with non-experts. I don’t want to restrict anyone’s tinkering anymore than is vital for their safety but, until a few minutes ago, I didn’t have a good handle on where the lines were between “safe” and “not safe” for this particular project. When working with kids you’re always going to err on the side of being too restrictive in the name of safety. If you’re not an expert, if you don’t know off the top of your head whether a method is a good idea, you have to say “no, you can’t do it that way.” This is pretty easy – it’s easy to restrict people to the point where they can’t hurt themselves, but being able to quickly and correctly do the hard thinking that lets you make more informed judgments and risk assesments takes quite a bit of knowledge and intuition. Or the willingness to say “hey, let’s not do this right now. let me think about this tonight, do some calculations, talk to some people, and see if I think it’s feasible, and then we’ll make something work tomorrow.”

I don’t have all of the immediate knowledge that I need for much of anything – the willingness to wait, ask questions, and do research is pretty much all I’ve got in the way of technical skills, but it’s a shockingly useful one. “If it’s hard, go slow” is one of our educational mantras – having trouble wrapping leds around a wire for a lightsaber? coiling wire for an electromagnet? work more slowly, you can get it done, I promise! I’m continually surprised and pleased by how frequently I say something to a camper or student and then realize that it’s actually really good advice that I should follow, too.

Let’s see, let’s see. In addition to popcorn poppers? Made some lightsabers, of course. Played with dry ice – launched some rockets and made some flowing bubble fountains that look uncannily like a particle simulation program that I wrote recently for my architecture job. Tomorrow we solder flashlights together, maybe make electromagnets, speakers – all leading up to putting together drawdios, which I am wicked excited about.

That’s all for now!

I had the chance yesterday to share a little bit about Scratch and Processing to a few different kids and adults. It was great! Leading up to the workshop I’d been kind of stressed out about a bunch of different tasks and projects, and I felt like I hadn’t quite given enough thought to how I was going to run things.

It turns out that Scratch and Processing are both really well put together tools, and that, when you give interested and creative people tools and instruction that don’t get in between them and their ideas, really awesome stuff can happen without a lot of push from central authorities or teachers. I know this, and I’ve known it for all of the years that I’ve been teaching kids and working with computers, but I’m still continually and newly impressed by how well Scratch just-works.

We had a nice age-range and ability-range, too, so we had an older kids helping younger kids and also helping unfamiliar adults. Skill-based learning really naturally brings out the helpful teaching instincts in people who have the skills in a way that’s really social and really fun – normal prejudices about age and competence fall away, and you work and talk with whoever can help you and whoever you can help.

I’ve taught people Java and Processing, and I’ve taught people Scratch, but yesterday was the first time that I’d really helped an expert Scratcher move to using a text-based language, so it was the first time that I really appreciated how well the structures and design patterns in Scratch model the structures and design patterns of functional programming.

Here is a drawing program made in Scratch:

and here is essentially the same program in Processing:

Java isn’t the most readable thing in the world, but anyone can look at these two blocks of code and see that they do pretty much the same thing, and have pretty much the same structure. Even visually, the sorts of things that you surround with curly-braces in Java are the sorts of things that are constrained inside of blocks in Scratch. The Processing draw() function corresponds to the Scratch forever-if structure, When-flag-clicked is pretty much the same thing as setup(). These things seem really obvious in retrospect, but the correspondences were particularly powerful for me yesterday when I was trying to explain Java/Processing to an expert Scratcher who’d never typed code before.

And he was excited by what he was doing in Processing. He was excited about drawing lines and smiley-faces and boxes and moving circles, and he was rightly and legitimately excited. I’ve talked to a number of programmers who worry about whether Scratch “dumbs down” coding – whether it provides an easy and addictive sense of gratification that ultimately doesn’t go anywhere, and whether being able to easily make a certain class of impressive things in Scratch might limit people’s patience for some of the more abstract hard work that has to go, initially, into making less straightforwardly impressive things in a “real” programming language.

My intuition to this question has always been that it’s a pretty dumb worry – that it’s always good to help people make the things they want to make, and that if people want to make different things they’ll learn how to make them and if doing so involves mastering a new tool they’ll master the new tool, and that the thought and design patterns that go into making stuff in Scratch are sufficiently similar to those that go into hacking in other languages that Scratch experience is gonna be really helpful for anyone learning to program. It’s nice to have a concrete experience to back up this intuition, though.

This did make me think again about a question that’s been floating around in my mind for a while – why is the ability to make and define new blocks seemingly really low on the Scratch priority list? The “function” was the one key programming concept that I wanted to introduce that didn’t have a really clear Scratch analogue. The canonical Logo examples that I was shown when I was a kid involve defining functions and then defining more interesting functions as collections of less interesting functions. A house made out of a square and a triangle. A square and a triangle made out of sets of lines. Or, more excitingly, a tree made out of lots of little trees. It seems like Scratch’s spiritual heritage (Logo, Lisp, the MIT AI Lab) was really into recursion as a fundamental concept – I wonder why it’s not more straightforward to do in Scratch…

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!

–

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!