This semester, Jennifer Kraemer (professor of Early Childhood Education and makerspace champion) and I are teaching a new course we developed – Making For Educators – for the first time, a hands-on course to help educators incorporate making into their teaching practice. It’s the second of our discipline-lensed making courses, including Making Social Change, a Sociology course we’ve taught now twice, in which students explore social movements and the ways that those movements use tools to enact change. For ECE 452, we’re using the excellent Invent to Learn by Sylvia Libow Martinez (@smartinez) and Gary Stager, Ph. D. (@garystager) as our text, and the class meets in the makerspace.

Tinkering Night in ECE 452 - Making for Educators

Our most recent class session was focused on tinkering. Martinez and Stager define tinkering thus:

Tinkering is a mindset – a playful way to approach and solve problems through direct experience, iteration, experimentation, and discovery.

At the start of the class, we talked about the relationship between tinkering, making and engineering, shared some examples, and after a very brief discussion of safety – no plugging things in! – students chose an item from a pile of broken and obsolete printers, laptops and desktop computers, tape and optical drives, and other electronic detritus, and began the process of unscrewing cases, cutting cables, and generally deconstructing their items.

Tinkering Night in ECE 452 - Making for Educators

Most students worked independently, content to explore the guts of their chosen electronic devices, but a pair of students decided to work together, taking apart a tape backup drive…

Tinkering Night in ECE 452 - Making for Educators

and knolling the parts.

Knolled

Students settled quickly into the work, and were laughing and sharing and generally having a good time. Unsurprisingly perhaps, many reported never having seen the inside of a laptop or DVD drive, and they were excited to explore. At the end of the session, we asked them to share their thoughts and feelings as they tinkered.

Thoughts & Feelings While Tinkering

Students shared feelings of pride and satisfaction, and described the activity as therapeutic, relaxing, savage, confusing, and cathartic. After almost two years of development, it’s satisfying (and therapeutic, relaxing, savage, confusing, and cathartic) to get this class up and running, and we’re looking forward to learning alongside these brave and creative students.

As people enter our space, we’re looking to find ways to communicate answers to the questions “Who belongs here?” and “What kinds of making are valued?”  To the first question, we were influenced by some of the practices of Stanford University’s d.school.  On our University Innovation Fellows trip last summer, we spent some quality time there, learning about and documenting the ways that physical space can be used to communicate and encourage various ideals and behaviors.  The walls of the d.school are covered with photos of people who use the space.

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We decided to borrow and adapt that idea, and purchased a little Instax Mini 9 camera…

Instamax

…to begin to create our own version.

Entryway

We take photos of visitors and users, and ask them to write their name and major on the bottom of the photo, just using a Sharpie.  The goal is to fill up the mobile wall, top to bottom.

Things We Make

As a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary space, Making Across the Curriculum is an important part of our mission, and we hold as a cultural value an inclusive vision of making.  In the center of our emerging “people wall” is a word cloud generated by Jennifer Kraemer (Early Childhood Education and maker educator champion), based on a student discussion during a “tinkering night” activity for her Constructive Math and Science in Early Childhood Education Class.  The kinds of things represented – largely crafts and more “traditional” arts and activities – signal to people the range of making valued in the space, and offer something of a counterweight to the idea that making is only about 3D printers and laser cutters.

Things We Make

The space is always a work in progress, but we hope that through intentional signalling – putting our community loom front and center, for instance – we can continue to create a welcoming and inclusive environment.

Professor Jennifer Kraemer (ECE), longtime faculty makerspace champion and creative maker, brought her ECE 342 – Constructive Math and Science in Early Childhood Education class to the Innovation Center this week to work through the design thinking process.  After a general makerspace tour, students enthusiastically worked through the d.gift design challenge…

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…and produced some interesting prototypes…

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…after which we had a really robust discussion about the ways in which they use (or might apply concepts of) human centered design in their own practice, developing activities and environments and lesson plans for children. We spent some time talking about the parallels between design thinking and the scientific method as problem-solving paradigms for children, using this video of Pre-K children creating solutions to prevent Humpty Dumpty from cracking as a leaping off point.

In addition to learning another methodology to use in designing lessons and activities, the class left with some ideas about how Innovation Center resources might help them in their work with children.  A great group of students!

Spent the better part of today building – or starting, anyway – the Rostock Max v3.  There’s tremendous cultural and social value in having folks take ownership of their tools.  We ordered this 3d printer in DIY kit form specifically so that we could build it together, following our successful building/bonding experience putting together the X-Carve (part 1, part 2, part 3).  Champion maker educators Diane Carlson (Sociology), Jennifer Kraemer (Early Childhood Education), and Max Mahoney (Chemistry) were were joined by students Nathaniel Adams, CJ Costa, and Alex Hartigan.

It sometimes takes a while to get rolling on a complicated build.  I’ve learned that one of the best ways to kick things off is to get all the participants doing something communal and simple, so we started by collectively picking out all the little bits left over from the laser cutting process.  A low risk/high reward opportunity for the group to gel, visit, socialize, and quickly develop a common purpose.

Rostock Max v3 Build Day

This kind of social busywork seems to scratch some shared primate itch, and reminded me of my favorite moment from last summer’s Making Across the Curriculum workshop, during which folks gathered around to chat and pick the protective paper off of Diane’s Wheel of Voting Rights project.

Collective Grooming - Picking the Sticker Residue off a Laser Cut Piece of Acrylic

That finished, we loosely divided up the work and got to building.  With this particular build, there are a lot of steps that can be completed independently and in no particular order – in other words, not a lot of serial dependencies – so folks were able to dive in and work in pairs and trios without (usually) having to wait for others to finish.  Despite a few missing parts (which turned out not to be missing after all), we made a good start, and will continue building later in the week.

Build day album on Flickr…

The recent EpiPen controversy led to lots of good conversations this week with various faculty about “medical making,” either as a new class in our upcoming MAKR certificate, a semester-long sort of focus, similar to things like One Book, or as some focus within the larger construct of Making + Doing, which is an idea we’ve been kicking around as a way to intertwine making and service learning.  One of the projects that emerged from those conversation is Enabling the Future, an “amazing group of individuals from all over the world who are using their 3D printers to create free 3D printed hands and arms for those in need of an upper limb assistive device.”

Jennifer Kraemer (ECE) is interested in working such a project into the Making in ECE course she’s developing, so we decided to print up one of the hand systems, specifically the Raptor Reloaded. We set up a job on both the Ultimaker 2 Extended+ and the Form 2, so as to compare time and print quality.

A Tale of Two Printers

11ish hours later for the Ultimaker…

Raptor Reloaded on the Ultimaker

8ish hours later for the Form 2…

Raptor Reloaded on the Form 2

Here’s the initial build of the Form 2 version. The Form 2 resin creates a really nice finished product that takes well to fine tuning with a file.

Initial Assembly

Here’s the initial build of the Ultimaker version.

Initial Assembly - Ultimaker

I still need to get the screws and wire for the “tendons” to finish them up, but the initial results are promising.

X-Carve Build Day - Chopsticks and Scissors

Spent much of today with a few of my primary collaborators: Diane Carlson (bottom left – she of Making Social Change fame), Max Mahoney (top left – he of molecule making and molecular visualizer fame), Jennifer Kraemer (top right, she of various making in ECE projects like the building system interoperability activity) and me (bottom right) putting together the new X-Carve.

Jennifer fine-tuning a pulley for the Y axis:

X-Carve Build Day - Fine Tuning

Diane and Max strategizing:

X-Carve Build Day - Diane and Max, Getting it Done

We ended the day with most of the structure built, and will meet again next week to tackle the belts and electronics.

X-Carve Build Day - A Day's Work

More photos from the X-Carve build day…

Students in Jennifer Kraemer’s ECE 312 – Child Development class had the opportunity to explore interoperability of proprietary building systems, with a little help from 3D printed interface pieces.

A Lesson in Interoperability

LEGO + Tinker Toys. Why not?

LEGO + K’NEX + Tinker Toys + Lincoln Logs… why not?

Lincoln Logs + LEGO + Tinker Toys.

Making doesn’t (and shouldn’t) end in High School.

Photos by @jenniferkraemer

Jennifer Kraemer (Early Childhood Education) and I are collaborating on a “Making in ECE” class, which will be one of the capstone/MAtC classes in our maker certificates.  As part of that Jennifer has been working with a LEGO MINDSTORMS set, and recently built a little robot.

Jennifer Programs Robots

We sat down the other day to work with the EV3 Programmer app. It reminds me some of Scratch, with a drag-and-drop interface and functional blocks, and we set out to address a classic Logo sort of challenge: have the robot draw/drive a square.

Lego Mindstorms EV3

Having never before used the app, and having no prior programming experience, Jennifer was able to program the sequence, complete with looping logic, and topped off by a few embellishments!

Jennifer Kraemer (ECE) Removing Support Material from 3D Printed Parts from the Free Universal Construction Kit

Jennifer Kraemer (Early Childhood Education) was in the lab today, printing up some new connector pieces from the Free Universal Construction Kit.  I used the K’NEX-to-Lego connectors in a workshop over the summer, and Jennifer is planning on printing many more pieces for use next week for activities with her ECE students.

Jennifer Kraemer (ECE) Printing Parts from the Free Universal Construction Kit

Side note – I’ve been really impressed with the performance of the Printrbot Simple Metal. It’s been getting a fair amount of use lately, with the aquaponics nozzles and Max’s molecules and molecular visualizer and the picavet parts, and it just seems to go and go without being fussy. That said, I have my eye on a Formlabs Form 2. I’m especially interested in the castable resin. It would be great to get a metal pour going in the fall!

Professor Jennifer Kraemer (Early Childhood Education) and I recently collaborated on a lesson plan to use 3D printing in the ECE classroom.  Specifically, the project uses the Free Universal Construction Kit, a set of printable interfaces that bridge 10 common proprietary building systems including Lego, Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys and K’NEX.

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The full lesson plan can be found here:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GVfIXhJFxgTq3lA5-n3uwT9XyLTdKMayLcqPaE36VCc/edit?usp=sharing

We hope to test it out in ECE 342 – Constructive Math and Science in Early Childhood Education.