It was an absolute pleasure to spend two days with a crop of science and technology educators at the Design, Make, Play meeting hosted by MakeMagazine, the New York Hall of Science, and the White House. What an incredible range of teachers, administrators, and researchers working in a range of settings to advance STEM learning in K12 education. There was an enormous amount to learn and share – I want to capture of few of the most salient insights that resonated with me – and I hope can drive my practice as an artist-educator going forward.

There are three basic areas for reflection that I picked up on during the 1.5 days of workshops: a heavy reliance on pre-designed and built technology platforms and a resulting focus on abstract thinking and outcomes over nuts and bolts basic skills; and the challenges of unpacking traditional science experiments from how term “making” is used; and finally something akin to cognitive “leaping” that takes place when big shortcuts are taken, and whether there need to be intentional efforts to “back fill” the potential learning gaps – are they even recognized as important today?

Perhaps each of these can be framed as critical tensions in using “MAKE” approaches to tackle STEM outcomes. Here’s a swing at them:

• Tools vs platforms.  There has been an explosion in both the availability of incredibly rich, immersive learning content as well as platforms for delivery (iPads to whiteboard, projectors and laptops to Arduinos. At the same time low-cost developer tools and open source software have introduced new levels of sophistication into the kinds of learning “products” children are able to assemble in the classroom. As exciting as these opportunities are for their ability to capture and maintain the attention of nascent learners, I worry that the acquisition of fundamental skills may be overlooked – at a young age children are encouraged to keyboard over development cursive writing; children manipulate three dimensional objects within a computer application before they learn to draw them. These are, if nothing else, huge cognition and motor skill leaps that are discounted (think about concepts like “visual literacy” before “computer literacy”). As a high school instructor who taught urban studies and graphic design, I was aware that a) students were coming to me with very poor coordination skills and b) a much greater resistance to learning them than they would have had in primary school. So my work was doubly hard! My conclusion is to teach the basics first; they’ll have plenty of time to encounter and learn all about computers down the line – and these basic skills will transfer upward much better than high-tech skills transfer downward. So this swift movement toward platforms – robust “do it all” systems that the computer enables – over incremental skills development.

  An example might include basic geography exercises in which, on the one hand, students are asked to explore natural and man-made boundaries using maps. One group relies on sophisticated “21st century” tools like SimCity or Google Earth to explore and develop representations of place. With the rich interaction tools that emphasize a sense of “immersion” over concepts of scale and proportion, essential mapping skills are subverted to the paradigms of the technology.

• Hands-on learning and making. I can easily get confused understanding the difference between traditional hands-on learning – the kinds of science, craft, and art activities we grew up with in school – and the activities being described as “making” in the classroom. Perhaps, in fact they are the same? I distinctly recall activities like powering a digital clock with a potato; constructing papier maché masks with wire frames, balloons, and other frameworks; plexiglass cubes to demonstrate the water cycle – and many more! All important ways of learning about science in hands-on, outcome-oriented ways. What makes “making” qualitatively different? Some of the ideas that come to my mind are the self-reliance of makers, our ability to appropriate materials, a willingness to use history as a resource, an appetite to share, and even a disestablishmentarian point of view.  Are these values important to the classroom? Can pre-packaged activities satisfy the maker ethos? In any event, if these are essentially the same activities, we might do well to learn why they have disappeared and work to shore up those gaps, and if they’re not the same we should be able to explain why.

  For example the difference between a teacher providing a set of materials and instructing children to create an object – for example providing glue, Borax, food coloring and water and instructing the children about polymer chains as they make a colored slime vs the teacher who instructs two teams of children to build the tallest free-standing tower in 5 minutes, gathering only materials of a certain kind – say paper, tape – from around the classroom. Can they produce qualitatively different learning outcomes as a result of how the activities are set up? Are these important?

• Lasting skills and short-term outcomes. The workshops really got me excited to think more about how learning can be staged, both within a classroom, across a grade, and within a school. The idea is, a fantastic STEM curriculum will be one that builds competencies (techné) alongside knowledge understanding (episteme)  in a progressive, recursive manner. It was the talk of Saturday’s keynote presenter Kevin Crowley over at the University of Pittsburgh who talked about activation – in his case of a passion for higher order problem solving. But what it got me thinking about is how technology acquisition and presentation in schools seems much more ad hoc than progressive – more about technology as a platform to deliver content acquisition outcomes than skills (aka techné). In other words, new technology isn’t being introduced as a tool to be mastered upon mastery of a previously introduced technology cum tool as much as it is being introduced as a platform, irrespective of its place along a continuum of progressively more complex technologies. This has many problems I think, but requires an entire paper to unpack. Zoom out from the level of a classroom to an entire grade-level (and ideas about mastering a technology cum tool across content areas, and then one order farther out which would be a “ladder” of mastery progressing from grade to grade. This would require thinking and design from the ground up, from the classroom curriculum to the school-wide pedagogy. Given how teacher-centered many of these decisions are, it seems exceedingly difficult to come up with a consensus approach to technological skills development, and this seems like a profound missed opportunity.

  For example a lesson requiring the use of a web-based browser application to enable children to render three dimensional objects easily and then print them to a 3D printer. This is very exciting to do, and quite easy – and its easy to see how this can be translated upward into sophisticated exercises like, say, prototyping musical instruments. But how about “lower order” skills like conceiving and rendering three dimensional objects on paper using a pen, aka sketching? Shouldn’t this be a pre-requisite to computer-based rendering?

In a nutshell, my take-away is that I’ve got to be careful about technology integration – maintain an essential focus on the “effective” (“I can do it!”) qualities learning over the “affective” (“I love it!”) qualities. Its easy to get caught up in the excitement around new tools for learning – cool gadgets that grab and maintain attention in the classroom and produce a high amount of positive emotional energy, but may not produce lasting development of fundamental skills.

I guess my overall caution to myself as an educator is to avoid a certain sloppiness in instructional design – a lassitude in learning – that affords the “productization” of teaching. In many ways, the search for more exciting, more captivating pre-packaged solutions to the teaching challenge is antithetical to the DIY “maker ethos.” Perhaps that’s something for another reflection on practice – where the DIY curriculum might begin in a formal setting – if it has a chance at all.