Thinking About CMK14 [Part 1]

My 5th year at CMK (Constructing Modern Knowledge) and the best yet. (Of course I say this every year.) When I look at the range of ideas, and participants, and projects, my head spins. The access to so many materials seems to raise the bar exponentially each year. The complexity and the inter-connective-ness of ideas and tools and computing power makes for projects that you never thought possible**, especially given the fact that in most cases projects were conceived and brainstormed on Tuesday and pretty much completed and demo-ed on Friday!

Looking around the rooms this year, mid-week, I thought of what Papert says about the power of ideas, but also what he says about the power of tools and technologies. 

"Leonardo da Vinci tried to invent an airplane. If you look at his drawings, you see that he had some really good ideas—not that they would have worked. But I think that by looking at his drawings, you can see that if he had been able to experiment with those ideas, he would have seen the ways in which they didn't work and very likely would have made a successful airplane or participated in the making of the airplane in his time. However, he could not even begin that process because in order to do it, you needed a lot of technological infrastructure. You needed machine tools. You needed fuels. You needed some source of power. You needed materials. You needed a knowledge of physics."
-Seymour Papert "Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century 1998 
www.papert.org/articles/Childpower.html

Papert often mentions the sense of empowerment that intellectual tools can give you. This is exactly what I have observed in my years at CMK. There is a growth in the scope of the projects precisely because there has been such a growth in materials, electronics, and components given the rise in the maker movement these past years. The creative and amazing ideas have always been in existence at CMK, as has access to many creative tools and technologies. What I love about the projects that are created at CMK every year is how they combine and use so many parts and pieces of old and new. The projects are truly a bricolage of materials (and ideas), where Lego RCX motors make connections to Arduino boards, or to Makey-Makey's. Where a Little Bit remote sensor block triggers a Rube Goldberg machine that also includes a Bubble Machine and toilet paper. Where the 3D printer allows for immediate production of needed and newly designed parts, where cardboard and aluminum foil and felt are just as important to the integrity of the system as the batteries and the sensors.

"My goal in life, which has been my major activity over the last 10 years, has been to find ways children can use this technology as a constructive medium to do things that no child could do before, to do things at a level of complexity that was not previously accessible to children."
Seymour Papert "Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century 1998 
www.papert.org/articles/Childpower.html

I am always reminded of Papert's goal when I attend CMK, and am surrounded by the amazing educators taking risks and immersing themselves in "hard fun". Why can't I be reminded of this when I look around at what happens in so many classrooms these days? Why are so many children still being given only poster board and markers, and nothing else, and then told to make sense of the words in a text book or a worksheet?

I truly hope that schools and classrooms everywhere will mirror the growing success of CMK and the expansion of the (small m) maker movement, and I hope it remains true to the spirit of learning and as Papert envisioned.

"The deep contribution of the computer to education comes from its being a constructional material as well as an informational medium. Children can use it to make far more complex and intellectually rich constructions. It allows a shift in balance from learning mostly by being told to learning far more by making and doing." - Papert


**CMK14 Vimeo - Project videos

FabLearn Fellows 2014

This year I was selected as one of the 2014 FabLearn Fellows through the Stanford University Transformative Learning Technologies Lab.

"Part of a larger project sponsored by the National Science Foundation and entitled “Infusing Learning Sciences Research into Digital Fabrication in Education and the Makers’ Movement”, FabLearn Fellows brings together experienced educators from all over the world to create an open-source library of curriculum and contribute to research about the “makers” culture and digital fabrication in education."

I will be using this blog to post some of my writings and reflections that come out of the work and discussions and hope to share this amazing experience I am honored to be a part of with educators and makers.

http://fablearn.stanford.edu/fellows

I will continue to write about my own classroom, students, and Makerspace experiences, and plan on making this blog a more active space.

Fabricating Parts

We don't have a Fab Lab here at our MakerSpace, nor so we have a 3D printer (wish list!) but what we do have are "spare parts". I love saving things in case they are ever needed for something else. One look at my own basement confirms this.
What has been a great making experience for my students is understanding how you can re-fabricate one part from another. Two of my students needed a 3" x 1" piece of flexible metal they could use to mount 2 motors on. I showed them the storage bin that held old computer parts, hard drives, super drives, and other assorted things from technology's recent past. They dove in with screwdrivers and pliers and called me over not too long after to show me a couple of parts they thought might work. We were able to cut 3 of the needed pieces from an old SuperDrive, enough for other students wanting to make a similar bot.

Re-purposing parts can lead to things
you never ever thought possible!

Yesterday the same students needed a small switch to use for their robot. We had larger switches, but nothing that would work for their use. Then I remembered the remote control car that other students had brought in to disassemble for parts, and that there was a small switch attached to the components. After a "deal" was made between the two groups of students, the boys who needed the switch got busy. My attention was pulled away (as happens when there are 4 or 5 simultaneous projects going on in the room) and before I knew it, the team had removed the switch from its old location, figured out where it needed to be attached in the new location, and soldered it together. The switch worked perfectly!
It is exciting to see the students look at things and start to realize and understand that they can make other things. That instructions can sometimes be altered, or changed, or revised, according to materials on hand or need. That there is never just "one way" to solve a problem or attempt to find a solution and that just the act of trying to figure stuff out like that can sometimes be the best part of a project.
Too many times within the constraints of school students are taught that there is only one correct answer, or perhaps that there isn't enough time to really explore many other possibilities. It is crucial to learning to have space  for invention and innovation.

To Tinker or To Not Tinker?

At this summer's Scratch Conference a recurring theme came up in many conversations and presentations, what does it mean to tinker? There was some debate as to whether tinkering always leads to anything tangible or if tinkering itself is what is important.

Here are some notes and thoughts from some of the conversations.

Mitch Resnick defines tinkering as "bottom-up, iterative, experimental, concrete, and object-oriented."

Adults defining tinkering, how do students define it?

Do we pay too much attention to outcomes with our students?
Does it have to always be about the finished product?

If a project is never completed is it a bad project?

Creating a space with freedom and away from the constrictions of the curriculum and the classroom.

These are also the thoughts that I have had when I decided that I needed to create a MakerSpace for my students this fall.