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

[Nils Hitze]

Wow - thanks for your insights and ideas.

2012/5/13 William Macfarlane <wmacfarl at gmail.com>:
> 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.
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-- 
Nils Hitze

Email: nhitze at gmail.com
Mobil: +49 179 9429701

Blog: silberkind.de
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Twitter: @kojote