Author: sylviamartinez

Sylvia Libow Martinez is an education change agent, writer, speaker, consultant, engineer, maker, and mom.
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If schools really cared about research, students would play chess

It bothers me when I hear about how any new initiative  in schools has to be “research-based.” It’s often a code word for “go on a wild goose chase for some citations, and then we are going to say no anyway.”

If schools really wanted research-based practices that improve student learning, here’s a short list: recess, art, music, and chess. Let’s just talk about chess. It’s a fact that learning and playing chess gives kids skills and habits that help them succeed in school and in life. It’s been proven countless times using all kinds of measures. (See below)

My own introduction to the power of chess in learning began when I worked at Knowledge Adventure, an educational software publisher (then known as Davidson & Associates). I was the producer of a new line of chess products that would range from beginners learning chess to a professional chess engine. The goal was to compete with Chessmaster, then the top selling chess playing software in the world. Knowing very little about chess other than the rules of the game, I was tossed into a fascinating world of rival chess engines and offbeat personalities.

Then I met Maurice Ashley71T-1NCrQ7L.jpg. At the time, Maurice was the first  African-American International Grandmaster and had written a book about teaching chess. He worked with young people in Brooklyn, taking them to national championships. He also “called” chess games for ESPN, using a telestrator like John Madden. I went to New York to meet him and watch him work. I sat on the floor of the TV booth for six hours, fascinated at his mastery of the game and the power of his language. This was no dusty, boring exercise – he brought it alive with words that conjured images of galloping knights, brooding, sneaky bishops, and sweaty game-day warriors grinding out a victory with their sacrifices for the common goal.

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The task then was to not simply capture his ideas about teaching chess, but also his personality and make it into a software experience that would reflect the passion and active engagement of Maurice Ashley. The result was “Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess” – probably the favorite software program that I was responsible for. (I can’t believe it’s still for sale!)

Maurice Ashley was recently named to the Chess Hall of Fame and profiled in an NPR series about 50 Great Teachers, Chess For Progress: How A Grandmaster Is Using The Game To Teach Life Skills.

Maurice Ashley’s YouTube channel has other gems – like him beating a trash-talking chess player in Washington Square Park and a TED Talk about working backwards to solve problems.

I’m glad that my friend Maurice is getting some well-deserved attention. He deserves all this and more. He’s directly impacted thousands of young people through his teaching, and even more broadly through his books, software, and media exposure. His message should be widely heard, especially in schools.

But for too many schools, chess (or recess, art, music..)  is not on the agenda while they chase higher test scores using test prep methodology that is not evidence-based. And if the test prep predictably doesn’t work, there is a new trend of “motivating” students to do well with parties and goodies. So bribes (proven to destroy motivation) – good, but chess – there’s no time.

Evidence, you ask? Decades of it – hundreds of studies, piled up the ceiling of the we-don’t-really-care-about-research room.

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Grand Challenges for Engineering

Grand Challenges for Engineering

On February 15, 2008, the National Academy of Engineering announced its list of 14 “grand challenges for engineering,” examples of the types of challenges confronting societies in the twenty-first cen- tury. The solutions to these challenges will all have large engineering components. Although engineers cannot solve these challenges alone, neither can the challenges be solved without engineers.

The fourteen grand challenges are:

  • Making solar power economical;
  • Providing energy from fusion;
  • Developing carbon-sequestration methods;
  • Managing the nitrogen cycle;
  • Providing access to clean water;
  • Restoring and improving urban infrastructure;
  • Advancing health informatics;
  • Engineering better medicines;
  • Reverse-engineering the brain;
  • Preventing nuclear terror;
  • Securing cyberspace;
  • Enhancing virtual reality;
  • Advancing personalized learning; and
  • Engineering the tools of scientific discovery.

From: Engineering in K-12 Education, National Academy of Engineering and National Research Council of the National Academies. 2008.

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The biggest indictment of our schools is…

from Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant:

“The biggest indictment of our schools is not their failure to raise test scores above some politically-determined line of ‘proficiency.’ It’s that – day in and day out – they routinely ignore the fact that our children are bored, disengaged, and disempowered. We’ve known this forever, but we have yet to really care about it in a way that would drive substantive changes in practice. ”

Scott created these charts from the most recent  annual Gallup poll of over 920,000 middle and high school students, and sharing these under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International copyright license. So please share widely! Boring students to death is ridiculous and so unecessary.

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No problem with Kohn

Dear Jennifer,

I read your post today called The Problem with Kohn after you tweeted a link to me. Thanks for the shoutout, and your flattering suggestion that I should have been one of the people mentioned by Alfie Kohn in his recent Washington Post article on educational technology featured in Valerie Strauss’s column on education issues. I appreciate that you are sensitive to women being usurped by men as role models, spokespeople, and advocates.

However, I respectfully disagree with the premise of your article, that Kohn is not qualified to speak about educational technology, and that his article is an example of sexist “mansplaining” — insulting and bypassing women advocates/critics of educational technology. * will give Kohn a “boost” of good publicity as a critic/advocate of educational technology, when there are better people to make the case, including those underrepresented in the conversation.

You say “Kohn, a non-expert on technology in schools was treated as an expert in technology in schools.” In contrast, the article exactly reflects his expertise, that technology exacerbates other trends that are wrecking schools. He wrote that technology is being used as a Trojan Horse to facilitate standardized testing (and standardized teaching), and being used in ways to allow big companies like Pearson to sell their “personalized learning” systems that are not  personal or about learning. Schools and parents are being sold this pack of lies as “modern” and providing kids access to computers. Alfie Kohn is correct. This is dangerous, self-serving nonsense.

In addition to being right on this issue, I admire his fearlessness and consistency over the decades. Kohn has stood up not just against conventional wisdom (homework = rigor), but also to giant corporations who stand to lose billions of dollars if their shameless exploitation of children and teachers is impeded. He has stood in the national spotlight for decades against politicians who use fear and junk science to advance agendas that ultimately deprive us of our full rights as citizens.

Kohn is not someone who simply “self-identifies as an expert on parenting and education issues.” He’s likely the world’s most read and cited expert on these issues. You may not agree with it, but his research is impeccable. His books are best-sellers and written in a way that makes difficult issues clear for a general audience. He gives voice to teachers struggling to do what’s right for children. I read his work and pray that I would ever achieve anything near his mastery of the written word.

When a parent or educator reads books like Punished By Rewards (1993)  or The Case Against Standardized Testing (2000), or The Homework Myth (2007), they immediately understand the right thing to do, even if it’s the hard thing to do. Maybe you still give an occasional time out, or don’t opt your kids out of tests, or struggle with completely dropping homework, but for a lot of parents and teachers what he says makes sense and opens your eyes in new ways. They certainly did for me.

Of course he’s not the only one who has been a long-time advocate for real learning. Kohn mentioned my writing partner, Gary Stager, as a critic of educational technology. That’s true, and was true for at least a decade before I ever learned to pronounce the word “pedagogy.”

But it’s not the whole story to simply call Gary a critic.

When I met Gary in 1992, one of the first things he shared was an article of his called “Integrated Learning Systems: The New Slavery.” Please read this article. It touches on educational equity, corporate mendacity, the idiocy of “learning” being about delivering content, teachers being deprofessionalized and devalued, and more. Now remember this is 1992 in the era of the first President Bush – well before our current crop of education reformers, No Child Left Behind, Khan Academy, “ed-trepreneurs”, or Silicon Valley types thinking they can fix education with a weekend hackathon. In the same year that Michelle Rhee graduated college, well before she ever envisioned taping children to their desks, much less “reforming” education, Gary was working in schools teaching programming to kids (and their teachers). And not because the kids might get a job, but because it was their right to have agency over the computer, the most powerful invention of our lifetime.

Honestly, before I met Gary I had never given it ANY thought to the idea the school system was biased towards certain kinds of students, because I WAS that student.  Gary introduced me to a whole new way to think about learning, and also to great thinkers like Seymour Papert. My learning journey began when I started to read people like Alfie Kohn and Seymour Papert, and yes, Gary Stager.

This summer, Gary and I will lead our ninth annual summer institute for educators called Constructing Modern Knowledge. Our first year, Gary convinced Alfie Kohn to be our keynote speaker. Why have Kohn speak at an event about creativity and computing? Because his expertise allows him to see the difference between computers used to do standardized testing and computers used, as Gary often says, “to amplify human potential.” Not only did we invite Kohn to reinforce this important distinction, but also to show him that there were uses of computers that met this high bar, and that there are teachers who are ready, willing, and able to take this back to their schools and make it happen.

The secret agenda was that Kohn would experience the difference, and use his immense communication skills and his national stature to help millions more people see this distinction. Maybe it worked!

The current popularity of the maker movement in education (and our book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom) is a sign that this is truly possible. We can change school, we can make them better places for learning, but only if we stand up to politicians, plutocrats, and corporations who insist that kids simply need to be plugged into learning systems set on stun. We need national figures like Alfie Kohn on our side for this to spread beyond the “educational technology” camp.

Along with Gary, Kohn mentioned three other educators, all of whom have interesting lenses through which they view and critique educational technology.  Emily Talmadge has been doing great work in pulling the covers back to reveal the slimy politics and business practices of the school “reform” movement. She stands on the shoulders of giants like Susan Ohanian, Gerald Bracey, Stephen Krashen, Roger Schank, and many many more who have been writing about these topics for years.

Will Richardson who writes passionately as a teacher and parent, and Larry Cuban as a researcher have both had long careers communicating the nuances of what constitutes good (and bad) learning with technology. These four people represent four interesting and worthy perspectives to recommend to readers of The Washington Post.

So Jennifer, should Valerie Strauss have asked someone else to write that article instead of Alfie Kohn? No! She should ask LOTS of people, men and women — teachers, advocates, researchers, parents, and anyone who can make a compelling case to write about the issue. She has in the past. Her column offers a rare national spotlight on progressive perspectives countering the well-funded education reform advocates. By featuring Alfie Kohn to articulate the harm caused by computerized testing, she’s doing us all a big favor.

Should I have been on Kohn’s list instead of them? I don’t think so. I’m not doing that “woman thing” saying oh shucks, I’m not worthy. I aspire to have the reach and influence someday of any of these people, and if I keep working and writing and talking about these issues, I might earn it.  I think I’m doing a good job and I’m getting better at this.

I do not support a call to ignore Alfie’s credentials or deny him his due national spotlight because he’s a man. And the list of people he mentioned, three men and a woman, are due their respect too.

* I changed this because Jennifer Binis and several people on Twitter pointed out that her article really wasn’t about “mansplaining”, and I see their point. However, I don’t agree with the “boost” argument. Alfie Kohn is a national bestselling author, if anything, the boost goes the other way, Valerie Strauss gets a boost for her column.

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Reverse engineering for 3D printing – at any level

Here’s a quick thought experiment. Take a look at this article, “Reverse engineering for 3D Printing: Replicate, Replace & Improve Real Parts!” If you are using a 3D printer in a school, you may be on the lookout for practical articles that help explain how to tease the most learning out of your new cool technology. The article goes through five steps for taking apart a real world object to create a CAD design to make a 3D printed copy.

But I know for many teachers who don’t have an engineering background, “reverse engineering” doesn’t mean a whole lot, and about halfway through the article, there’s a picture of the CAD model that’s simply going to freak people out. It’s pretty clear that it was written for people with a lot of CAD design and 3D printing experience under their belt. If you are teaching elementary or middle school, it’s easy to just think “there’s nothing here for me.”

But this article has gems of wisdom in it – it’s worth trying to puzzle them out and think through the parts that anyone at any grade level can try.

Reverse engineering isn’t scary – it’s a term used to mean to take something apart and see how it works. Once you see how it works, you can make it yourself. For a 3D print, this means physical objects, perhaps with mechanical parts. Once it’s apart, you can figure out how to design the pieces, make them yourself, and hopefully, if you did a good job, you can make the object wholly out of your own parts. And yes, you can reverse engineer non-physical things like code, or non-mechanical things like electronic circuits, and the principal is the same. Break it down, figure it out, make it your own.

So let’s do a close reading and see what gems we can find. You might say we can reverse engineer this article! Let’s break their steps down:

1. Get Your Tools Ready
The tools recommended in this article are pretty universal. Paper,  pencil, and measuring devices. For some ages, a tape measure and ruler will work fine. Graph paper is useful, but not necessary if your products aren’t going to be that precise. A step up in complexity is to use a caliper, a more precise measuring tool that is really useful for complex shapes. A caliper grabs the object (or spans an interior space) that you are measuring and you can read the measurement directly.

If you have other devices like laser measuring tools or a scanner, you need to evaluate whether or not they will be useful. You know your kids, so it’s your call whether your students are ready to use them. If the scanner is TOO good, you will simply see students scan things in and skip the breakdown and understanding steps.

As an aside, here’s a small problem with this article – the item they’ve chosen to break down and recreate is a brake caliper, like those found in cars. However, here’s the problem – one of the primary tools they are explaining is also called a caliper*. If you are reading the article and not really familiar with either kind of caliper, it could be where you simply stop reading.

But I think it brings up an interesting point – why did they choose a brake caliper? So here is where I would add a Step Zero – Choose your items to reverse engineer wisely.

It’s not just about avoiding confusing terms. A brake caliper is a nice product to break down. Why?

  • A brake caliper is mechanically interesting, and can be taken apart with hand tools. You want those “goldilocks” objects – not too hard and not too easy. Not too many parts, but enough to cause some head scratching. This may be a matter of trial and error, because in CAD design, sometimes seemingly simple things can be very complex. A flat cube is easy. A die is not.
  • The most important parts of a brake caliper are easy to see and the mechanical interactions are out in the open (once the case is off). You can poke it with your fingers and see it move. Objects where the internal parts and actions can’t be seen without completely taking it apart to the point that it no longer works, or objects that rely on electronics that can’t be modeled with 3D shapes aren’t as interesting.
  • The brake caliper has a few layers, but the parts mostly lay flat without a lot of tricky 3D jigsawing.
  • It’s not all just straight lines, but the curved parts aren’t too complex. If there are curves that need to be modeled, you need to be sure that the CAD program you use can actually model those kinds of shapes.

So the brake caliper is not a beginner CAD project – the number of parts, multiple layers, and the modeling required takes it up a notch. These are not hard and fast rules, and in every grade level there will be a wide range of abilities.

2. Plan For Your Design & Print

The article does a good job laying out steps that will scale to almost any age student if you can generalize them. But this step is primarily a step for the teacher to think through and do some trial runs (maybe with some peer student leaders).

  • What features are the most important to be printed?
  • Can you simplify shapes?
  • What do you need to do to get the best print, such as orienting the model, designing supports, rafts, struts, etc.
  • How precise do you need to be?
  • What will the scale be?

Precision is a crucial topic at this stage. Precision is a sometimes overlooked engineering concept that can actually help you decide what level of detail is needed in your model. Precision is precious — it costs time (and sometimes money) to make precise measurements and manufacture precise parts. Do think carefully about what precision is needed, and the math behind that. Your printer will also force some of these decisions, as you may find that your printer simply cannot print as precisely as you had hoped. If you have a model with measurements like .000002 mm, your software may happily oblige, but your printer will just laugh at you. Tolerances vary from printer to printer, and melted filament always sort of oozes in unexpected ways, so find this out before you assign students to model something that is beyond the capability of your printer or a real stretch mathematically (a little stretch is always good)!

Scale is another concept that is simple on the surface, but can result in interesting tradeoffs. For example when you make an object bigger, EVERYTHING about the object becomes bigger, including gaps and mistakes. So choosing an object that has pieces that need to fit tightly together, or fit with precision (like a hinge, gear, or snap fitting), requires more precision than a simple, single object. If you are scaling something down to make it smaller, you may run into tolerance issues where your printer simply can’t make it work. But if you don’t need precision, it’s not worth worrying about. Nobody was ever harmed by the giant paper mâché pack of gum being off by an inch or two.

3. Disassemble and Study – Understanding

This is where the fun begins. Everybody gets to take an object apart. Provide the right tools, paper, and art supplies (to make visual notes and observations) and a place to lay everything out. Students will have different styles – there will be methodical ones vs. the exploders – let them mess around with the objects and make sure there are enough backups if things get broken past the point of being able to continue to measure the parts. Provide a place to keep the parts — once the CAD starts, it often helps to go back to the original object for another (or three or ten) more looks. Sometimes you don’t know what to look at until you start work and you make connections or have questions that didn’t occur to you originally. This is part of the iterative process. Give it time.

One resource to help students learn to think carefully about the parts, purposes, and complexities of everyday objects is the Agency by Design resource called, you guessed it – Parts, Purposes, and Complexities. (All Agency by Design educator resources here.)

4. Start Your CAD Work

If you read the article I pointed to at the beginning of this post and got to step 4, you saw these images. If it made you want to run for the hills, you aren’t alone. This looks complicated, but really, it’s just shapes! Everyone starts from a beginner level and builds up. Building design skills, including reading diagrams like this, are all part of a gradual process. Trust your problem solving skills enough to know that if what you are looking at is too complicated, it’s not a threat, it’s an invitation to a future where it will make sense.

Reading these kinds of articles is helpful for the process you can extract and try in your classroom. If the particulars of a project look daunting, just skip those details for the time being. You’ll get there.

Selecting and understanding your CAD software is a big step. At younger ages, Tinkercad is always a popular choice. But like any easy to use tool, it has limitations that will eventually show up as designs get more complex. There is no “one right answer.” Try some different ones before you get locked into any one app. Read The Invent To Learn Guide to 3D Printing: Recipes for Success for suggestions. This is again a super time to use a small group of students who want to help. Let them try out different software packages and “sell” you the best one. And remember, there may be more than one choice for different students, different age ranges, and different design objectives.

With student work, try to pick the right time to move from paper and pencil to CAD. At some point, the CAD program is going to be more helpful with the design details than paper and pencil. Making students complete the whole design on paper is really a waste of time, since once they go to CAD it’s likely to change anyway.

It’s always good to have people in the room who understand how CAD design will translate to 3D printing. These skills are largely won by trial and error. The most important part of this role is that they don’t tell students exactly what to do. Don’t forget that this may include the students themselves or near peers! Spread the expertise around.

Your big picture objective at this stage is to keep the projects moving forward — bumpy roads are OK, but not driving off a cliff.

In our book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, we introduce the idea of “mouth up, mouth down frustration.” Kids should have experiences that challenge them and propel them forward. They should be gleefully leaping over hurdles, or maybe digging under them or walking around them. The smile and victory dance when a hurdle is overcome is the “mouth up” part. The other kind of frustration, mouth down, is not part of the learning process. You don’t have to “help” kids towards a predictable catastrophic failure, like setting them up with tools that are too difficult to use, or objects that are simply too complicated to model. Having one or two kids occasionally struggle through to the end is not proof that it is the right path for all kids.

5. Choose Your Filament

Here’s an example of some really good advice in this article that you might overlook because you don’t have a choice of filament. But the bigger lesson to learn here is to think about what you will do with the models you make. Do they actually have to work or are they for display? Will students use them for other classes, continue to refine the model, or do you need them for another purpose? It might change your choices on how sturdy to make the piece or how hard you work to make a precise scale model.

You may not have objects that need parts with different rigidity, as discussed in this example, but at some point, you will likely have the PLA vs ABS discussion, and these material properties are part of the decision-making process.

* Why are they both called calipers? Just like a measuring caliper grabs the object being measured, a brake caliper grabs the rotor, which is attached to a wheel, slowing the car down.

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How to teach coding

Or how NOT to teach coding.

I get a lot of email asking me to look at various computer programming lesson plans and curriculum. “Is it good? Should I use this?” people ask. Some people want me to endorse something, “We’ve created something the kids will love! It’s so maker!”

So let me share one secret, the very first thing I do when I click the link of whatever comes next in the email. I look at the first thing, the very first thing the kids are supposed to do. If lesson number one is bits, bytes, and binary arithmetic, I’m done.

Yes it’s that simple. (You may find it amusing that my decision-making process is so binary.) But it’s what poker players call a “tell.” It shows that they’ve resorted to the “building blocks” theory of learning. It shows that they’ve looked at lots of other programming lessons and that’s where everyone else starts. It ignores constructionist learning theory that the experience is the place to start.

In our book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, we begin every chapter with a quote. One of my favorites is:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.  – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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The best professional development for teachers

It’s always good practice to offer professional development for K-12 teachers as part of any new program or initiative. “Making” in the classroom is no different. Hundreds of research studies offer guidelines and tips, yet it seems that many programs, even if they follow guidelines, do not adequately prepare teachers to change their actual practice in the classroom.

Some of these recommendations are daunting for providers of professional development. Good professional development should be:

  • Long term  (But  often has no follow up planned.)
  • Focused equally on content, pedagogy, and new skills (Usually  within too short a time period.)
  • Continued collaboratively and in the classroom (Even if the school decides to only send one teacher to a workshop and offers no collaboration time once back at school.)
  • Transformative, giving teachers new ideas and ways to change their classroom practice (Even when their leaders are telling them not to change anything, or even directly contradicting the new ideas once the teachers return.)

The most frustrating part of outreach to K-12 teachers is not that the teachers are unwilling or unable to learn new things; it’s just the opposite. The ultimate frustration is when K-12 teachers are inspired and willing to go back to their classrooms and work for change, only to have those bright lights quickly extinguished by the crushing reality of the status quo.

In our book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, and in thousands of hands-on workshops with K-12 educators, Gary Stager and I work with one primary stance directed at classroom change. This is to ask educators to shift agency of classroom tasks to the learner whenever possible. Gary Stager suggests making your teaching mantra, “Less Us, More Them”.

When you make your teaching mantra, “Less Us, More Them,” you are channeling Piaget who says that it is not the role of the teacher to correct a student from the outside, but to create conditions in which the student corrects him or herself from the inside.

Anytime you feel it necessary to intervene in an educational transaction, take a deep breath and ask, “Is there some way I can do less and grant more authority, responsibility, or agency to the learner?”

For providers of professional development, this not only applies to young students, but also to K-12 teachers who are learning new content or pedagogical practices. When teachers are faced with new challenges, it is tempting to show them how to do everything, to hand them fully formed curriculum with pre-made handouts and step-by-step checklists of what they should do in their classrooms. Resist this urge. Doing so only undermines teacher confidence that they can make the right choices when faced with the real-time improvisation needed to teach in today’s classrooms.

Even when teachers express frustration that you are not giving them adequate information, try to support them as THEY find answers to THEIR questions, even if they experience frustration along the way. This is not to say that you should deliberately frustrate teachers or hide information. Answering questions with “just enough” information, and helping them find out how to find their own answers helps them develop the independence they will need if there is any chance that they can lead students in a similar quest. Teachers need to develop confidence and an attitude that “I may not know but we can find out together” and model that for students. This may be difficult for teachers who feel that they need to be the fount of all knowledge. But in today’s modern age when simple answers are just a Google away, teachers must help students learn how to find their own answers to questions both simple and complex.

In our Invent To Learn workshops, we always start with hands-on activities, because that creates the touchstone and the vocabulary for follow-up work on how this can be implemented in the classroom.

  • How is it that teachers who say, “I don’t understand electronics” can build a working circuit or a wearable light up bracelet with no instruction, and then be able to explain it to others?
  • What changes when during a workshop debrief, a table of six teachers find they used 12 different methods to solve their problems and answer their questions? How can they justify not allowing students to have the same widespread access to knowledge and expertise?
  • How can teachers justify expecting that their students all do exactly the same project when they started out making a doorbell that sends a text message, but ended up making a robot that plays a song? And learned a lot along the way?

These experiences serve to open teachers minds to assumptions they have been making about the projects their own students do and the scaffolding needed to support students.

These conclusions cannot be presented to teachers, they need to live and experience them first hand, and translate them to their own classrooms and curriculum. Because when they go back to their classrooms, they will need to carry this torch for themselves, and will need to feel agency over their own actions.

Professional development is not what we “do” to teachers, it’s what they formulate for themselves as they see themselves as practitioners who are able to do new things, learn new things, and be in charge of their own learning. This is the only way to empower people, both teachers and students.

For the past ten years, Constructing Modern Knowledge Summer Institute  has been leading the way in professional development that creates maximum impact and agency for teachers. This July 7-12 in Manchester, New Hampshire, is a chance for you to experience this kind of revolutionary professional development! Don’t miss out.

Projects from CMK 2015

xylophone

STEAM – People always add esthetic elements to projects when they have time, ownership, and interesting materials to work with.

working on a projectCan you tell who the expert is?

light up dressMaking fashion that lights up

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See you at ISTE 2016!


This June the International Society of Technology in Education is having a conference in Denver, CO. ISTE 2016 will have over ten thousand attendees, endless vendor exhibits and sessions about all aspects of educational technology.

Hope to see you there!

Pre-conference Invent To Learn Workshop

Sunday June 26, 9-3 PM – Don’t miss this amazing event!

Make It, Wear It, Learn It  [Lecture]

  • Monday, June 27, 2:30–3:30 pm MDT (Mountain Daylight Time)
  • Building/Room: (specific location will be available in May)

Girls & STEM: Making it Happen  [Lecture]

  • Wednesday, June 29, 8:30–9:30 am MDT (Mountain Daylight Time)
  • Building/Room: (specific location will be available in May)

Mindsets and Classroom Management for Making and Inventing in Every Classroom  [Panel]

  • Wednesday, June 29, 10:15–11:15 am MDT (Mountain Daylight Time)
  • Building/Room: (specific location will be available in May)
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Thingmaker – the 3D printer from Mattel – an answer for maker education?

Mattel’s ThingMaker brings 3D printing to iconic ’60s toy

Seen the headlines? 3D printing is coming, faster cheaper, easier to manage… but is it better?

Anyone who is thinking about “making in education” has likely bought (or at least thought about) a 3D printer for their makerspace or classroom. In our book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, fabrication is one of the three “game changer” technologies that have the most potential for schools. But as anyone  who has tried 3D printing knows, it’s not a mature technology by any means, and takes work to integrate it into rich design experiences for young people. At this point in time, most classroom focused 3D printers are too slow and too glitchy to really serve a lot of students doing iterative design. There is no perfect software solution, and software is at the core of the design process. Of course, every day they get cheaper, more reliable, and these problems will decrease.

So the recent announcement by Mattel of a reboot of the 1960’s toy Thingmaker sounds too good to be true. After all, if Mattel believes this is reliable enough to sell at Toys R Us, it must solve all these issues, right?

Is this “the answer”?  It depends what question you ask. Do you like toys? Do you need more plastic stuff? Then the answer is yes. Do you want kids to engage in designing, mathematical thinking, and problem solving? Then the answer is no.

And hey, if my kids were still little I would totally buy this. And play with it myself. It’s a reboot of literally my favorite toy when I was a kid. I still have some of the dragons somewhere.

But – take a close look at what you get.

It’s not going to be an open design in hardware or software. There will be pre-designed parts you can drag and drop to make creatures, robots, etc. Pick Arm A and Body B and in several hours you can print and assemble your own little monster, or other Mattel branded stuff. It’s not going to be “maker” in the sense of “if you can’t open it you don’t own it.” For those people who find that important, this is a mockery, for those who just want to reliably make plastic toys, it’s perfect.

Because from a stability and reliability standpoint, the whole “open” concept is deadly. What if you design something that can’t actually be printed in real life? A learning opportunity, you say? For Mattel, that’s a design that cannot be allowed. Locking down the design process into a drag and drop app makes it reliable. It’s not a BAD app, or a BAD corporate decision, it is what it is.

Once they sterilize the design side, and use proprietary software all the way from design to the hot end, then it’s just a hardware problem that remains. No worries about strange g-code or updates to open source code.

On the hardware side,  Mattel is good at making cheap, reliable hardware. They will require their filament (you can see it in the photo above), so that helps them maintain consistency as well.

So is it a bad thing for schools to consider? No. Depends how much money you have for toys. Will kids like it? Of course. Will some enterprising hacker figure out how to hack into it? Highly likely.

But think of the parallels. Do kids like EZ Bake Ovens? of course. Can you make edible stuff? Yes. Do some people hack them to turn out gourmet meals? No doubt. So would you turn your culinary arts program (if you are lucky enough to have one) over to all EZ Bake Ovens?

Let’s also differentiate between parents getting these for kids, and schools buying them and pretending it’s a STEM initiative. Schools buying these should consider the whole picture of the design cycle, not just the plastic parts that spit out at the end.

My childhood in black and white…

https://youtu.be/DS07TPPu0SE

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Compliance is not perseverance (the grit narrative)

Working hard on something you don’t care about or have a say in is not perseverance or “grit,” it’s compliance.

Thanks to Krissy Venosdale for the cool art! Check out her website for more maker goodies.

I said this last year at Constructing Modern Knowledge 2015. The idea that kids learn to persevere through frustration when they work on things they care about is a central tenet of the classroom maker movement. We talk about “mouth up vs. mouth down” frustration in our book, Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. The former is what Seymour Papert called “hard fun,” while the later is… well… just frustrating. There is no educational purpose to letting a student try to deal with insurmountable problems.

Maria Montessori said, “”Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.” She didn’t say that failure is the goal. It’s a big difference that I’ve discussed in other posts.

The conversation has been complicated by the word “grit” becoming the word of the day with the “if we just do x, all will be right with education” crowd. Ira Socol has written brilliantly about how this fascination with grit is grounded in shaky research and barely hidden racism. (Grit and History and Summarizing Grit: The Abundance Narratives)

So it may be just semantics, but words matter, especially if they have been co-opted and become code words for blaming children for not pulling themselves up by their own… opps, they don’t have boots.

Words that work just as well: perseverance, resilience, stubbornness, focus, attention to detail, mindfulness, or craftsmanship. I’m sure there are more.

You can’t teach any of these in isolation. I cringe at the thought of cheerleading kids with “you can do anything” rallies and then marching them back to their worksheets.

The key difference is agency. When the work is yours, it matters more. When you care about what you are making, your perspective changes. Who has ownership? Whose voice is the loudest? By the way, it’s not necessarily true that these attributes are always pleasant or easy to deal with. Stubbornness or a willingness to stand your ground in the face of authority are also indications of resilience. Agency isn’t always polite.

When you see young people as agents of change, rather than objects to be changed, it shifts perspective in a subtle way. Unfortunately, subtle messages tend to get lost in translation.

I’m continually amazed by how hard most students work on things they don’t really have a stake or a say in. Imagine if that work was being done on projects that they cared about and believed in. Every kid wants to be a super-hero, and we have the capacity to empower students to change the world, using their brains, passion, and real world challenges. The promise of the maker movement is not just about the cool tools, but that these tools can supercharge that empowerment.

The “grit” narrative will pass when some other book becomes a best-seller. But the narrative that young people should be active agents in their own learning (in partnership with caring adults) will hopefully outlast them all.

Update (1/29/16): Martin Levins from the The Armidale School in Australia posted a terrific comment on Facebook reminding us that sometimes stopping a project is the best path. Not all projects have a perfect storybook ending, and that’s real life too. Perseverance shouldn’t mean grinding out a project that should have been rethought and reworked.