[hackerspaces] Spark 181 – Mitch Altman says hackers could raise $10mil

[William Macfarlane]

I've been sitting on this email for a little while, and actually
stupidly sitting on a bunch of similar emails related to
kids+stem+hackerspaces that I write in response to every thread on
this topic  but usually don't send.  I'm travelling right now and
time/attention are resources that are in short supply.  This is dumb.
And even my tl;dr is too long.  Ugh.  Still.
tl; dr:  I want to keep this conversation going -- I have opinions
about what I think are the most reasonable and useful ways for
hackerspaces to engage with young folks' education, but I am more
interested in sharing experiences and resources and figuring out what
I/Parts and Crafts/youth-oriented hackish organizations can do to
smooth the path for other hackers/hackerspaces who want to be involved
with youth and education but don't know how...

Content below:

> BTW, all of this may cost way less money than $10 million.
>
> Mitch.

Yes!

This is the best-smartest thing yet said on this thread (which doesn't
have any shortage of good stuff being said at all).

I co-run an hackerspace for kids.  We started out as a anarcho-techy
summer camp and this coming year are starting a
school-alternative/homeschooling resource center.  We have drop-in
open-shop hours, run classes and programs in our space, and work with
some folks in some of our local schools to run afterschool programs
there, as well.

We started super-small and have grown steadily and quite quickly for
the last couple of years.  In addition to running our programs, we've
done some curriculum design for some folks looking to start a school
with some funding from NASA, and started and fallen woefully behind on
a kit-a-month subscription thingy that we called Community Supported
Education.

For the latter, we got some money from the Awesome Foundation and also
used kickstarter -- this was reasonably effective.

We get a few thousand dollars from MIT every year because our programs
give MIT undergrads a way to do community outreach.  We also get a
small amount of money from our local arts-funding grant organizations.
 We've applied for a grant or two with The Public Lab, and probably
will continue to do so.

But most of our money comes from running programs -- classes, summer
camps, etc.  We charge folks on a sliding scale to come to our stuff,
and we let people come for free if they can't afford to pay.  This
works great as a funding-method, but doesn't actually work that well
as an outreach method -- it turns out that outreach to diverse
communities is super-hard, and having money to offer stuff for free
(and in multiple languages) is necessary but far from sufficient to
make this work.  More on that later.

The main thing I'm getting at is that there is money out in the world
for people who are interested in doing stuff in STEM/tech/hackish
education for kids.  The fact is that we're a little bit ahead of the
curve -- the institutions that want to fund hackerspaces for kids
don't, by-and-large, exist yet.  Or, more accurately, they don't yet
know that hackerspaces for kids are what they really want to be
funding.  We need to show them that before we score the $5 million
Kresge foundation grant, or whatever.

But that's OKAY, because there are lots and lots of people, parents
mostly, and educators, who know that this shit is vital, interesting,
creative, fun, important, etc etc.  And they're willing to give you
money to make it happen.

I was talking with a friend of mine recently who does the Boston
Science Club for Girls, and she said that people were always asking
her if there were jobs in science/tech/STEM education.  And the answer
is "no, there aren't any already-existing jobs."  But the further
answer is, "but there is a huge amount of demand for this kind of
thing, and it's almost entirely unmet.  If you start an organization
that does interesting, hands-on STEM/tech education for kids, and you
don't fuck it up colossally, you can make yourself a job pretty
easily."

If you want to start developing good CC-licensed educational material,
absolutely the best thing to do is to start running a class for kids,
and document your projects and your experience thoroughly.  If you can
find the right well-connected parent-or-educator types, it's trivially
easy to run an electronics, or computer-programming class that people
will pay you enough money for to make it worth-your-while both to do
the teaching and the documenting-and-sharing.  Without any outside
funding at all, hackerspaces could probably quite easily start
producing high-quality pedagogical material just by running classes
and documenting projects as well as communicating with each other
about how projects go.

All of this communication/documentation work is the stuff that's hard
to actually manage to do, of course (as everyone involved in
open-source knows).  At Parts and Crafts, though everything I said
about money being out-there is true, as a small-and-growing
organization, we spend a fair amount of time and energy hustling for
money and consequently thinking about the-next-thing instead of
the-previous-thing, and so routinely drop the ball on the "document
your shit so other people can use it" front.  Or, even more
egregiously, we document it and then fail to post it anywhere publicly
accessible.

This failure-mode is something that the creation of a hackerspace-ed
organization/website/repository/infrastructure would at least strongly
mitigate.  And if it could be "someone's job" to collect, collate, and
curate various streams of interesting course-materials, we could very
rapidly make a lot of progress on this endeavor.  It's also something
that money would actually be super-useful for -- saying we have this
(even relatively modest) amount of money for people to use on the
condition that they not only run their programs/classes/whatever, but
document them in an accessible fashion for wider community use

We, Parts and Crafts, would certainly be psyched to participate in
such a group and provide what materials we have and create.

I've also long-fantasized about having a Parts and Crafts fellowship
for hackers and artists interested in education, where we would
provide an environment for teaching-and-learning with some kids and
adults, room, board, tools, and materials, for you to work on an
education-related project (either specifically developing tools for
teaching, or just making something cool with an eye towards how
non-experts can participate in the making) under the conditions that
you document what you're doing and make it publicly available.

-----

All that said, I'm not sure that "producing high-quality pedagogical
material" is the problem-to-solve, here.  Maybe it is.  But it seems
to me that the real point of this organization would be to figure out
ways to get this material used, somehow.  There is so much great
information on the internet already, and it's, by and large, not hard
to find.  Certainly some work curating and collecting it would help
make it easier+better, but I think that, in addition to producing this
material, we need to be creating spaces where it's likely to get used.
 Your local hackerspace is one of these spaces, if you can all agree
that it would be cool to run a program for kids on Saturday or Sunday
mornings (pro-tip: weekend mornings, 10:00-12:00 are a wonderful
combination of kid-friendly and grumpy-adult-hacker-unfriendly, and so
make a great time for hackerspaces to run kid/family programs).

Parts and Crafts is another example of a kind of space for doing this,
and it's a model that's entirely replicable.  If you look hard enough
you can probably find the hacker-friendly science teacher in your
school district and talk to him or her about running programs in
schools.  Most afterschool programs really really want to do more
hands-on STEM-themed stuff (because, in America at least, the
standardized testing in schools pushes most of the awesome out of
in-school science classes) -- I've found it to be really easy to
contact an afterschool program coordinator and tell them that I want
to teach kids electronics and have them give me (relatively small)
amounts of money to do so.

I mention these things because it's really really hard to develop
pedagogical material/curriculum without actually having a venue for
testing it out and working with actual kids and figuring out ways to
do so, and to get materials to groups of kids is pretty vital.  There
are also organizations like boy and girl scouts -- most of these big
national organizations have local chapters which vary widely according
to whoever is running them, so mileage will certainly vary
commensurately.

---

I've been sitting on this email for a little while, and actually
stupidly sitting on a bunch of similar emails related to
kids+stem+hackerspaces that I write in response to every thread on
this topic  but usually don't send.  I'm travelling right now and
time/attention are resources that are in short supply.  I want to keep
this conversation going -- I have opinions about what I think are the
most reasonable and useful ways for hackerspaces to engage with young
folks' education, but I am more interested in sharing experiences and
resources and figuring out what I/Parts and Crafts/youth-oriented
hackish organizations can do to smooth the path for other
hackers/hackerspaces who want to be involved with youth and education
but don't know how...

sorry this email is too long.