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<div id="CDEA7760A2B94FDE8201884048059BCC"><div><br></div>-- <br>Al Jigong Billings<br>http://openbuddha.com<div><br></div></div>
<p style="color: #A0A0A8;">On Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 9:00 AM, William Macfarlane wrote:</p>
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<div id="quoted-message-content"><div><div>I've been sitting on this email for a little while, and actually</div><div>stupidly sitting on a bunch of similar emails related to</div><div>kids+stem+hackerspaces that I write in response to every thread on</div><div>this topic but usually don't send. I'm travelling right now and</div><div>time/attention are resources that are in short supply. This is dumb.</div><div>And even my tl;dr is too long. Ugh. Still.</div><div>tl; dr: I want to keep this conversation going -- I have opinions</div><div>about what I think are the most reasonable and useful ways for</div><div>hackerspaces to engage with young folks' education, but I am more</div><div>interested in sharing experiences and resources and figuring out what</div><div>I/Parts and Crafts/youth-oriented hackish organizations can do to</div><div>smooth the path for other hackers/hackerspaces who want to be involved</div><div>with youth and education but don't know how...</div><div><br></div><div>Content below:</div><div><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div>BTW, all of this may cost way less money than $10 million.</div><div><br></div><div>Mitch.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes!</div><div><br></div><div>This is the best-smartest thing yet said on this thread (which doesn't</div><div>have any shortage of good stuff being said at all).</div><div><br></div><div>I co-run an hackerspace for kids. We started out as a anarcho-techy</div><div>summer camp and this coming year are starting a</div><div>school-alternative/homeschooling resource center. We have drop-in</div><div>open-shop hours, run classes and programs in our space, and work with</div><div>some folks in some of our local schools to run afterschool programs</div><div>there, as well.</div><div><br></div><div>We started super-small and have grown steadily and quite quickly for</div><div>the last couple of years. In addition to running our programs, we've</div><div>done some curriculum design for some folks looking to start a school</div><div>with some funding from NASA, and started and fallen woefully behind on</div><div>a kit-a-month subscription thingy that we called Community Supported</div><div>Education.</div><div><br></div><div>For the latter, we got some money from the Awesome Foundation and also</div><div>used kickstarter -- this was reasonably effective.</div><div><br></div><div>We get a few thousand dollars from MIT every year because our programs</div><div>give MIT undergrads a way to do community outreach. We also get a</div><div>small amount of money from our local arts-funding grant organizations.</div><div> We've applied for a grant or two with The Public Lab, and probably</div><div>will continue to do so.</div><div><br></div><div>But most of our money comes from running programs -- classes, summer</div><div>camps, etc. We charge folks on a sliding scale to come to our stuff,</div><div>and we let people come for free if they can't afford to pay. This</div><div>works great as a funding-method, but doesn't actually work that well</div><div>as an outreach method -- it turns out that outreach to diverse</div><div>communities is super-hard, and having money to offer stuff for free</div><div>(and in multiple languages) is necessary but far from sufficient to</div><div>make this work. More on that later.</div><div><br></div><div>The main thing I'm getting at is that there is money out in the world</div><div>for people who are interested in doing stuff in STEM/tech/hackish</div><div>education for kids. The fact is that we're a little bit ahead of the</div><div>curve -- the institutions that want to fund hackerspaces for kids</div><div>don't, by-and-large, exist yet. Or, more accurately, they don't yet</div><div>know that hackerspaces for kids are what they really want to be</div><div>funding. We need to show them that before we score the $5 million</div><div>Kresge foundation grant, or whatever.</div><div><br></div><div>But that's OKAY, because there are lots and lots of people, parents</div><div>mostly, and educators, who know that this shit is vital, interesting,</div><div>creative, fun, important, etc etc. And they're willing to give you</div><div>money to make it happen.</div><div><br></div><div>I was talking with a friend of mine recently who does the Boston</div><div>Science Club for Girls, and she said that people were always asking</div><div>her if there were jobs in science/tech/STEM education. And the answer</div><div>is "no, there aren't any already-existing jobs." But the further</div><div>answer is, "but there is a huge amount of demand for this kind of</div><div>thing, and it's almost entirely unmet. If you start an organization</div><div>that does interesting, hands-on STEM/tech education for kids, and you</div><div>don't fuck it up colossally, you can make yourself a job pretty</div><div>easily."</div><div><br></div><div>If you want to start developing good CC-licensed educational material,</div><div>absolutely the best thing to do is to start running a class for kids,</div><div>and document your projects and your experience thoroughly. If you can</div><div>find the right well-connected parent-or-educator types, it's trivially</div><div>easy to run an electronics, or computer-programming class that people</div><div>will pay you enough money for to make it worth-your-while both to do</div><div>the teaching and the documenting-and-sharing. Without any outside</div><div>funding at all, hackerspaces could probably quite easily start</div><div>producing high-quality pedagogical material just by running classes</div><div>and documenting projects as well as communicating with each other</div><div>about how projects go.</div><div><br></div><div>All of this communication/documentation work is the stuff that's hard</div><div>to actually manage to do, of course (as everyone involved in</div><div>open-source knows). At Parts and Crafts, though everything I said</div><div>about money being out-there is true, as a small-and-growing</div><div>organization, we spend a fair amount of time and energy hustling for</div><div>money and consequently thinking about the-next-thing instead of</div><div>the-previous-thing, and so routinely drop the ball on the "document</div><div>your shit so other people can use it" front. Or, even more</div><div>egregiously, we document it and then fail to post it anywhere publicly</div><div>accessible.</div><div><br></div><div>This failure-mode is something that the creation of a hackerspace-ed</div><div>organization/website/repository/infrastructure would at least strongly</div><div>mitigate. And if it could be "someone's job" to collect, collate, and</div><div>curate various streams of interesting course-materials, we could very</div><div>rapidly make a lot of progress on this endeavor. It's also something</div><div>that money would actually be super-useful for -- saying we have this</div><div>(even relatively modest) amount of money for people to use on the</div><div>condition that they not only run their programs/classes/whatever, but</div><div>document them in an accessible fashion for wider community use</div><div><br></div><div>We, Parts and Crafts, would certainly be psyched to participate in</div><div>such a group and provide what materials we have and create.</div><div><br></div><div>I've also long-fantasized about having a Parts and Crafts fellowship</div><div>for hackers and artists interested in education, where we would</div><div>provide an environment for teaching-and-learning with some kids and</div><div>adults, room, board, tools, and materials, for you to work on an</div><div>education-related project (either specifically developing tools for</div><div>teaching, or just making something cool with an eye towards how</div><div>non-experts can participate in the making) under the conditions that</div><div>you document what you're doing and make it publicly available.</div><div><br></div><div>-----</div><div><br></div><div>All that said, I'm not sure that "producing high-quality pedagogical</div><div>material" is the problem-to-solve, here. Maybe it is. But it seems</div><div>to me that the real point of this organization would be to figure out</div><div>ways to get this material used, somehow. There is so much great</div><div>information on the internet already, and it's, by and large, not hard</div><div>to find. Certainly some work curating and collecting it would help</div><div>make it easier+better, but I think that, in addition to producing this</div><div>material, we need to be creating spaces where it's likely to get used.</div><div> Your local hackerspace is one of these spaces, if you can all agree</div><div>that it would be cool to run a program for kids on Saturday or Sunday</div><div>mornings (pro-tip: weekend mornings, 10:00-12:00 are a wonderful</div><div>combination of kid-friendly and grumpy-adult-hacker-unfriendly, and so</div><div>make a great time for hackerspaces to run kid/family programs).</div><div><br></div><div>Parts and Crafts is another example of a kind of space for doing this,</div><div>and it's a model that's entirely replicable. If you look hard enough</div><div>you can probably find the hacker-friendly science teacher in your</div><div>school district and talk to him or her about running programs in</div><div>schools. Most afterschool programs really really want to do more</div><div>hands-on STEM-themed stuff (because, in America at least, the</div><div>standardized testing in schools pushes most of the awesome out of</div><div>in-school science classes) -- I've found it to be really easy to</div><div>contact an afterschool program coordinator and tell them that I want</div><div>to teach kids electronics and have them give me (relatively small)</div><div>amounts of money to do so.</div><div><br></div><div>I mention these things because it's really really hard to develop</div><div>pedagogical material/curriculum without actually having a venue for</div><div>testing it out and working with actual kids and figuring out ways to</div><div>do so, and to get materials to groups of kids is pretty vital. There</div><div>are also organizations like boy and girl scouts -- most of these big</div><div>national organizations have local chapters which vary widely according</div><div>to whoever is running them, so mileage will certainly vary</div><div>commensurately.</div><div><br></div><div>---</div><div><br></div><div>I've been sitting on this email for a little while, and actually</div><div>stupidly sitting on a bunch of similar emails related to</div><div>kids+stem+hackerspaces that I write in response to every thread on</div><div>this topic but usually don't send. I'm travelling right now and</div><div>time/attention are resources that are in short supply. I want to keep</div><div>this conversation going -- I have opinions about what I think are the</div><div>most reasonable and useful ways for hackerspaces to engage with young</div><div>folks' education, but I am more interested in sharing experiences and</div><div>resources and figuring out what I/Parts and Crafts/youth-oriented</div><div>hackish organizations can do to smooth the path for other</div><div>hackers/hackerspaces who want to be involved with youth and education</div><div>but don't know how...</div><div><br></div><div>sorry this email is too long.</div><div>_______________________________________________</div><div>Discuss mailing list</div><div>Discuss@lists.hackerspaces.org</div><div>http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss</div></div></div>
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