MaKey MaKey

The “banking concept,” as termed by Paolo Freire, is essentially an act that hinders the intellectual growth of students by turning them into, figuratively speaking, comatose “receptors” and “collectors” of information that have no real connection to their lives.  (http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/171/re-envisioning-paulo-freires-banking-concept-of-education)

Freire’s description of a child as an empty vessel waiting to be “filled” with information from the teacher portrays a really a dated version of teaching, yet the reality is that when visiting schools, one might still find children in rows memorizing facts and rules. Similarly Duckworth (1972) demonstrates a concern for the stunting of children’s intellectual development. Duckworth asks, “What happens to children’s curiosity and resourcefulness later in their childhood? Why do so few continue to have their own wonderful ideas?”  Duckworth contributes this stunting to the following two reasons:  

1.    Student’s intellectual breakthroughs come to be less and less valued in educational settings. By discouraging children from exploring their own ideas and to make them feel that they have no important ideas of their own.

2.   Wonderful ideas do not spring out of nothing.  They build on a foundation of other ideas. If children are sitting in rows memorizing facts and formulas how are they building the foundation?

Something within the institution of schooling teaches children to shut off their creativity and stop building the foundations necessary to build wonderful ideas.

With the onset of new creatively designed products like MaKey MaKey, it is my hope that more teachers will begin to value the process over the product and allow children to tinker with learning, creativity, and designing.  This would provide the “foundation” that Duckworth (1972) called for.

This week I was able to take home the MaKey MaKey kit from the SOE Mill space.  It became a wonderful tool for me to uncover new learning about ways that circuits work while tinkering and working through frustrating set backs. David Hawkins (as cited by Duckworth, 1972) wrote, “You don’t want to cover a subject: you want to uncover it.”  This is exactly what happened as I tried to master the MaKey MaKey.

First, I attended a brief ‘how to’ session on MaKey MaKey in the Mill, this session proved that MaKey MaKey should be pretty fool proof, yet when I arrived at home with the kit and hooked it up to my MAC I found that it didn’t work.  I tried making a banana space bar adaptation for my computer without success.  I thought maybe my banana was bad, and replaced it with a riper one.  Next, I detached everything then re-hooked it up.  No luck.   

So, I decided it must be a case of a bad banana.  To try out my hypothesis about the bananas being the source of failure, I opened a new play dough jar and attempted to use the playdough in place of the banana.  Still nothing.  I called in back ups…my children.  They couldn’t get it to work. They lost interest and abandoned me.  

Feeling a bit discouraged I turned to the Internet.  I was problem solving and determined to get this thing to work.  I became convinced that it was my computer.  I Googled, “Why doesn’t my MAC work with MaKey MaKey?” I found a blog post that mirrored my experience with nothing working, and at the end of the blog it said, “I tried another MAC and it worked perfectly.”  I decided to abandon my computer and try to set up the MaKey MaKey system to my daughter’s MAC. As soon as it was set up to the new computer… Voilà I had a banana space bar!  

Things really picked up from this point.  I felt successful and ready to try something more difficult.  I got out the play dough again and transformed it into arrow keys.  This success brought back my children; the play dough keys sparked their interest.  We got more and more confident and tried out different apps  on Makey.com.  We made a piano, bongo drums, and ultimately the night ended with a concert as we hooked up to the concert piano app and played along with a concert pianist.  It was great fun and an intense problem solving process for me.  I never did find out why it didn’t work with my computer…

Ultimately, if schools looked toward objects to think with that focus on creative processes (like MaKey MaKey) rather than standardized “banking” education and outcomes, we would have students who were much more capable of wonderful ideas.  Duckworth writes,  “The having of wonderful ideas, which I consider the essence of intellectual development, would depend instead to an overwhelming extent on the occasions for having them.” Makey Makey may be one more way to help kids think, explore, create, design and continue to have wonderful ideas.  

Duckworth, E. (1972). The having of wonderful ideas

Sewn Circuit

E-Textiles

This e-textile project was the perfect blending of sewing, tinkering, collaboration, electronics, and fun.  Having time to play with the circuits before building the bookmark was very helpful as a reminder of the importance of tinkering with a project to learn valuable lessons on our own.  By having this time to put together different circuits I was reminded of the principals of circuitry that I would need when switching to the conductive thread.  Had I just jumped into the sewing project it might have caused great frustrations to have to sew and re-sew something.  This design choice was a good one for this project.

After tinkering around with the circuits making one circuit then hooking up multiple LEDs in a loop,  we set out to begin our bookmarks.

This became a very collaborative process.  My classmates offered their assistance and help, as we planned our bookmark layouts and designs.  Most of us decided on creating bookmarks that would fold over to cover the electronic aspect of the bookmarks.  When it came time to sew, some interesting things occurred. Consistent with with the Buccholtz et. al. (2014) research findings,  when it was time to begin sewing,   people in my group began to assume historically gendered roles at our table.  One of the male participants declared, “I’m going to need a lot of help with this sewing!” This declaration taken up by a  female participant quickly taking a leadership role, offering to thread his needle and help him and others with sewing.  Buccholz’s study found that “e-textile toolkits offer female youth expanded access to materials and tools, resulting in opportunities to take on project leadership roles in highly technical STEM areas.” I watched as this very thing happened at my table.  At the time I didn’t think much about it, but after reading this study, I realized this very phenomena played out at my table. Buchholz explains that “e-textile toolkits successfully flipped the gendered scripts about who had hands-on access to electronics materials and tools by honoring girls’ historic maker practices and, in doing so, expanded the ways into complex electronics and computing content.”  (pg. 18).  This article combined with the activity helped me to understand the transformative power of how the tools we offer people and children really do matter.  The histories matter.

I learned more about circuits through this project, and I experienced the fun of working with a collaborative group with all different experience levels, it really supported my learning.  I really relied on my tablemates to help me, one even offered me his glasses so that I could see, and when I couldn’t thread my second needle, our “female leader” offered to help.  I created a great book mark that lights up, but more than that I experienced the power of collaboration.  This makes me wonder why traditional classrooms remain so eerily solitary in their design.