“I met the challenge and I succeeded”

As I was leaving the house tonight on an errand, I passed my neighbor on the porch.  He’s an older guy, late 50s or early 60s.  The years… hmm… have not been kind.  He looks hard-ridden and put away wet, as the old expression goes, and run down.  Normally he’s out on the front stoop of the building smoking a cigarette in a posture that suggests that it was a hard day, and he’s not going to have too many more like it before there’s a closed-casket ceremony at a funeral parlor with only one person attending.

Tonight he was more animated than I’ve ever seen him.  He had his cellphone out, and he had no cigarette in his hand, and he was overjoyed at whatever it was that he’d achieved, and he was shouting into the phone, almost, but joyously, “No, you don’t understand… I met the challenge, and against all odds, I succeeded.  I made it work.  Me.  I did it.”

I have no idea what he was doing or what he did to succeed — I was, as I say, on a somewhat urgent errand, and I didn’t have time to stop and talk to him.  But I think this is the essence of what we want kids to experience after a Design Thinking or a Makery experience: the indomitable joy and fierceness that comes from completing a project, even in the face of difficulty and indignity, and succeeding anyway.

My neighbor achieved that yesterday. What can I do to help my students achieve that sense of themselves tomorrow?

Revisiting the Watchtower, as design exercise

This post has been getting some notice recently, from back in 2007. I wanted to highlight it, and set it in some sort of common relevance, as a possible design exercise for a medieval history class. You could do something similar, I suppose, with almost any era in history. Here’s the constraints:

1. You’re a medieval engineer. You work for a king (or maybe a queen like Eleanor of Aquitaine). You’ve been tasked with building a castle. Not really a castle. A tower — your king/queen doesn’t have a lot of money for construction right now, and getting this tower built is a priority. There’s fast, cheap, and good… pick any two you like.
2. The tower has to be between forty and sixty feet tall. It’s going to be a watch tower, and the main part of the roof has to have a signal station on top of it, in the form of a large pile of sticks to be set on fire if something goes wrong. All those sticks, and that fire, have to be high up — and the knight and his military force with him have to have a place to live, and from which they can see the surrounding country.
3. The story of a building like a tower has got to be about 10 feet high — so this tower is four to six stories tall. It might have a low-ceilinged area, like a basement (maybe two); and it might have a high-cielinged area like a great hall. The tower isn’t going to be a grand construction. The base can’t be any larger than 30′x30 feet, and it can’t go more than 10′ deep in the ground.
4. There’s going to be a knight assigned to the hall. He’s going to have two squires, who will be young men between 15-18. He’ll have maybe four pages, who will be between 7 years of age and 15 years of age. There will be somewhere between 8 and 15 additional men (some infantry, some archers who will want more private quarters because they are more likely professional soldiers) stationed with him, of varying rank and social station. The knight has a wife, who will want some private quarters for herself and her husband; and they have a household of 6-10 servants.
5. The walls are going to have to be ten feet thick at the base to support the weight of the upper levels, and they can rarely be less than three feet thick because the building material is stone.

Now here’s the challenge:

• Using graph paper at a scale of 1 square = 2 feet, design a plan and elevation for the tower.
• Include — stairways between levels; cooking, eating and activity spaces like a great hall, sleeping, and (ahem!) elimination facilities for the residents, including private or semi-private living quarters for the knight and his wife; storage for food and essentials for the household for up to 4 months (winter + siege supplies); defensive positions to protect the tower-house against attack; support columns from basement to upper floors (to support the weight of the watchfire on the roof); show the position of doors and windows; positions of heating elements like fireplaces and chimney flues; water-storage capability for long sieges or winter, for cooking and cleaning.
• Do not include: technology too advanced for the time period, e.g., electric light or water-driven plumbing.
• Use David Macaulay’s book Castle as both inspiration and guide to certain construction techniques
• Conclude with an estimation of the labor force needed to construct your proposed tower, and a rough outline of the project calendar, (e.g, dig foundation in March, make foundations in April, build 1st floor in May, etc.) Remember the limitations of the era’s technology in designing the workforce estimates and project calendar.
• Extra Credit: Build a model that shows the outside of your tower.
• SUPERDUPER  Extra-Special credit: Build a model of your tower that includes both internal and external structural detail.

And… Just because I’m nice, and because I want to get used to the idea of publishing and then editing, and building up a library of tools and projects: DT Medieval Engineer <- Here’s that whole exercise, pre-loaded into a PDF, ready to hand out and use in class.

Shout-Out to Brainstormers

There are a lot of people who think I’m very smart.  I’m never sure that I agree, though.  I mean, I like being told that I’m smart (doesn’t everybody?), but deep down I have an insecurity about it, which is rooted in the basic fact that I can only think a problem so far before I have to act on it; and acting on that problem may or may not solve it to anyone’s satisfaction… least of all mine.

Moreover, all real problem-solving is social.  It’s not achieved through announcements or declarations of good intent, or bosses standing menacingly and offering difficult threats.  It’s solved through people of good-will agreeing to work together to achieve something from their wide ranges of skills, talents, abilities and mindsets.  So while MakerFaire was really cool, and all the machines and gadgets were amazing… to teach kids broad-based problem-solving, requires something more.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that a team of people can think the pants off of me, and kick me to the curb, every time.  Tonight, a colleague and I developed what I think is a tremendously interesting design challenge for November 3, 2012, during the weekend before the election. I’d come up with an OK idea, which would have worked, but poorly, had I actually been able to implement it.  BUT… But…. but… there were lots of reasons it wouldn’t work.

And so I did what any sensible designer would do.  I invited a knowledgable, smart, capable colleague to dinner tonight, and I treated.  And I asked… humbly… for help.  My colleague — who had no reason to invest even a moment’s thought in this program, uninvested in it as she is — had the brilliant idea on how to really make it work, and make it a powerful learning opportunity for adults and kids alike.

And in my mind, she’s the hero of this story.  Because she found the pieces that made something work amazingly well, that before would have functioned only haphazardly.   If the program goes anywhere, it will be her doing.

Never forget that two heads are better than one, and the two right heads unlock and open doors like mad.  And, if you’re a designer, bow before that wisdom, and give full credit there, because it’s due.

Making t-shaped people

“The product of design labs is designers.”
—Andrew Carle

I must admit, I found my conversations with Andrew Carle (@TieandJeans on twitter, and author of the TieandJeans blog) initially deeply discouraging. I mean, here was a guy who is runninga program similar to mine, but they’re building stuff, and my classes are not. Part of it is the difference in our training. I’m originally a philosopher and a Latinist and a teacher and a failed minister — and he’s a tried-and-true geek. He grew up in the age of BBSes and high nerd culture, with some practice building and making stuff, and learning to code, and I didn’t. It was hard not to believe, as we went to MakerFaire in Queens together, and I watched him navigate this community of makers and builders and creators, that my school had hired the wrong person to do this job of running the design lab. My bias is toward thought, not action. Andrew’s a deeply thoughtful guy, but he reflects of the learning after the action, not before.

But in the few deep conversations I had with other people, I realized that design is the bridge that joins the humanities and the sciences, and I think there’s a place for me here, between the teachers who say, “write this paper, this way”, and the teachers who say, “build is project… No, I have no idea. Figure it out.”

This “portfolio trade” game that I’ve developed has real potential to help both sides of the equation. Young makers in schools can build models and machinery and simulations of both the problems and the solutions, but humanities students and humanities teachers can help show how the solution is or isn’t human scaled. F. Buckminster Fuller said something like, I always consider many solutions in the course of finding an answer to a problem, but if my solution is not beautiful, I know it is the wrong one. (italicizes because I’m drinking bad coffee in a coffeehouse that is not my own, and has for-pay Internet, and so I can’t look up the exact quotation).

The goal of a design lab, as Andrew Carle says, is to create designers. And all the designers I know are what Dave Gray (@davegray on Twitter) calls t-shaped people: people who have deep knowledge in one subject area (the vertical of the T), and broad knowledge across many other subject areas (the crossbar at the top of the T). And real designers work with other t-shaped people to find solutions to big problems.

And that, I think I can help with.

Teaching Scratch: If statements & broadcasts

I don’t know how to program well. If you asked me to build a computer program, I’d probably fail. But I do understand how to write Scratch scripts so that the little figure of the cat, called a “sprite”, moves things around on the screen. And I understand how some of the operators work, and some of the variables. It doesn’t take a huge amount of time to learn the basics of Scratch: a few afternoons at most, for a competent adult going about it in a systematic way. You can learn what most of the components do in a few hours, enough to learn how to do 80% of the programming tasks,

Maybe there’s an easier way to teach kids how they all work than the method I hit upon, but I gave my class two tasks on Friday:

1. build two radically different actions
• e.g., play a song
• do a little dance
• tell a story
• move around
• draw a picture
2. create a command so that one command causes one action to be performed, and a different command causes the second action to be performed.

It was a hard task, but an interesting one. One kid taught the computer to play notes so that the Sprite played “Twinkle Twinkle” and “three blind mice”. Another made a little dolphin swim around, releasing bubbles as it went. A third designed a little “connect the dots” drawing game. A fourth created a little animation that shows a poor woman getting hit by a bus (I asked him to modify his program for next week). Another has built a little program where you tell it your favorite NFL player, and it insults or praises you for picking the wrong or right one.

The thing that amazes me is how many ways they found for doing these various tasks. Some used if-then statements, some used if-else, some used if-forever statements. Some used mouse clicks, some used keyboard letters…. Each kid is gradually building up a sense of how different code functions work, and learning their way around Scratch.

What’s not happening is that they’re not learning this in a systematic way. Kid Y is not learning the same snippet of code that Kid Z is learning, and they’re not learning variables or lists yet. Nor have they learned to build equations into their little programs yet, although they’re starting to get an idea of how that works.

What should next week’s challenge be?

I’m a Game Designer … again

So today, while I was out at the local YMCA camp with my school — and the kids were playing all sorts of games that teach the value of cooperation and responsibility and kindness and generosity and all those good school values that make working together so much easier, I had this insight about my work as a designer, and as a designer of design curriculum.

I am a Game Designer.  Again.

I last did serious game design back in the 1990s for White Wolf Game Studios, when I worked (briefly) on the Vampire: Middle Ages game series in their World of Darkness.  Thanks to the kindness and generosity of Geoff Grabowski and John Chambers, I switched over to the Exalted game system, and later on to the Scion line.  I don’t know that I wrote half-a-million words of game books over the years, but I know that I broke several hundred-thousand: Exalted’s second edition, a number of the world books. What I wrote, basically, was a lot of explanation of the societies and cultures of the Age of Sorrows.  I always avoided trying to deal with the mechanics of games, though — the statistics and the dice-rolling, the stats for individual characters, and all that sort of thing — because it wasn’t something I understood very well at all.  Instead, I was interested in stories, and how stories interacted with the world.  And I like to think that was one of my major contributions to Exalted: that these were real people in a real world, albeit a world very different than our own.

Designers, though, play games with the real world.  They think to themselves, “wow, I’ve noticed thirty problems with the world… I have the time, energy and resources to fix two of them, maybe.  That eliminates these twelve from consideration: they’re too big for me to solve with the time and resources I have.  I also need the help and support of other folks to solve these other eleven… That leaves me with nine problems to solve.  Of these nine, I don’t have the technical expertise to solve these five.  Which leaves me these four.  Of these four, one bores the heck out of me.  Two are interesting to me personally, but they’re side projects for me, because I can’t get any help.  This one, though… it’s interesting to me, it’s interesting to others, my resources can handle it, and I have the right amount of time.”

So, my boss asked me to create two events for middle schoolers this year: a repeat of the New England Design Symposium (NEDS) on April 6 2013 during this school year, and a new event in November 3, 2012 (this year).    I’ve been going back and forth with him on the design of these events, and the other day he basically told me that my designs weren’t compelling enough. “People’s school schedules are full,” he said.  ”Andrew, if people are going to come to an event, they want to be challenged, they want to be excited, they want to use all their intellectual and emotional brain power, and they want to win.” And although we had some more chit-chat after that, effectively the meeting was over.  I’ve taken some notes and written some ideas and made some drawings since then, but really I haven’t had a good sense about what comes next.

Except today, walking back from playing a game of “Atlas!” I had this key insight:

My boss is talking about GAMES.  He wants me to make GAMES.

Part of me genuinely doesn’t understand why I failed to realize this for so long.  I’ve been kicking myself since about 11:45 this morning, wondering why I couldn’t have seen this in August, or last June. Or why my boss didn’t see it, or my friends and designer colleagues didn’t see it.  And frankly, part of me imagined that that portion of my life had closed forever. I mean, I stopped hearing from White Wolf about the same time that Iceland’s economy collapsed briefly back in 2007-08, before their revolution and constitutional convention re-made the country.  I figured I wasn’t wanted any more.

But apparently I spoke and thought too soon.

I’m a game designer again.  Designing games for kids to play in and at school.  Why?

• To teach creativity
• To teach generosity, community, kindness, cooperation.
• To teach sideways thinking and empathic problem-solving
• To save the world.

Wow.

The First Week of School

It’s an unusual September this year: We have a local agricultural festival taking away a Friday, the two major Jewish holidays fall on weekdays this year (and my school chooses to close school for both of them), and we also have Labor Day. Then there are other days of school that we lose for various professional and social commitments, as well.  What with one thing and another, we don’t really have a full week of school until much later in the school year. As a result, the three days my school was in session last week, were effectively the first week of school.

What did you teach your first week?

I’m looking back on my first week, and I’m pretty pleased with what I taught in my lessons taught across five different classes:

In my two Latin classes I taught:

• How to pronounce Latin words;
• How to study and memorize vocabulary;
• How to study vocabulary with someone else;
• How to take notes in a language class effectively;
• How to use a foreign-language dictionary;
• How (we think) human memory works.

In my two History classes I taught:

• How to ask a teacher or adult for help;
• how to take notes in a history class;
• how to write an effective summary sentence;
• How to create and use timelines;
• nine types or categories of historical event;
• the arrival of human beings in North America (both some official and ‘unofficial’ reasons, Gordon).

In my Scratch class just posted yesterday, I taught:

• How to use control-type commands
• How to use pen-type commands
• How to use motion type commands
• how to make a square appear on your screen.

Given that some of these classes only met twice, and one met only once, it was a heavy week of learning for everyone.  I felt like I got a lot of good teaching done, and I feel like my classes learned a lot from the three days they were in school. They also got to do some socializing, as well, so from their perspective it was a great return to school.

But I think that I should try to keep myself honest for a while, and make a list of what I taught during the previous week, and post about it. It surprises me how often what I teach has to get as specific as making flash cards or teaching kids to memorize things, or how to take notes, or how to set up a notebook.  It especially surprises me when I get to do THAT, and talk about Clovis-style spearpoints in the same class.  But I don’t think most people have much idea how specific we have to get, sometimes, in our classrooms, and maybe peeling back the curtains a bit will help.

Building the Loom

Today, while sorting papers and putting things away, I came across a scrap of paper with this drawing on it, on the right.
You can see from the drawing that

1. My drawing skills were not very good, and
2. I didn’t really draw so much as create symbols, and
3. I had no idea how to draw what I was seeing or thinking, and
4. I had a cruddy sense of what I was trying to create.

But, from this drawing, I was able to make the loom that you see here below, and on the left. It doesn’t look anything like the drawing, actually. There are radical differences in form between one and the other.  The plates in the drawing on the sides of the loom, the ones with the four curved grooves in them, are completely missing from the model below.  The box-like shape of the drawing is missing from the final version, and the cross-bars that help stabilize the ‘drawing of the loom’ are actually created in the ‘loom that was built’ by alternating the height of the left-right pieces and the top-bottom pieces. Maybe the words I’m typing here don’t make any sense.

But LOOK AT THE PICTURES, MAN!

the loom-as-built

I assure you, the drawing on the right (although only photographed today) was the basis of the design of the loom that you see on the left. The loom that’s been working in, and serving, my school’s second grade class for more than a year.

This is design thinking in action. My friend Matt and I looked at a bunch of photographs of looms, and tried to figure out the simplest possible design we could envision.  And then we drew it a bunch of times, and then we simplified that… All it is is a simple frame of wood held together with screws, a spacer rod to create tension at the bottom, and a heddle to separate the warp and weft threads at the correct arrangement to weave the cloth.

Deeply simple. Simply deceptive.

The drawing does not match the device.  But without the drawing, there would be no device.  Matt and I would not have understood how to create the physical object without the 2-d, flat description.

I hope that this brief demonstration helps to convince you, O reader, of the importance of teaching visual literacy skills to your students.  It’s not enough to help them learn to read a graphic, or understand a picture, or interpret a Renaissance painting. That’s part of visual literacy, yes.  But if you’re not teaching them to make back-of-the-napkin drawings, at the very least, you’re preventing them from becoming true citizens of the 21st century.  More than that, you’re preventing them from becoming builders and dreamers.

Sure, I know.  It’s not on the test. Even though the nature of the real test is changing radically.

But teaching them Dave Gray’s Semigram (Flows, Forms and Fields) in the first week of school, how will they know that visual literacy is important?

Clawing Up the Learning Curve by Amazon

More than once this summer, I’ve tried to learn something, and more than once, I’ve succeeded.  My secret methodology?

You might think, Google!  You might think, Bing! You might think, Yahoo!

You’d be wrong.

Amazon.com is increasingly my second go-to source of information after Wikipedia.  How did a book store, of all things, become my key source of information-gathering on the world wide web?

See, I am an adherent of the Harmione Granger school of thought.  Her personal motto should be ite ad bibliothecae! Go to the library! Except that there really isn’t a library in the world that is as good as the digital catalog of Amazon.com.  And here’s how it works:  Pick a subject, any subject.  Make it somewhat unusual.  I did. Add the words “for dummies”. I did.  And I found a whole chunk of relevant resources, but most of all, I found the specific “X for dummies” book that I was looking for.

Only, it turns out that dummies don’t buy those books. Really smart people buy the “For Dummies” books.  Because the parallel recommendations are all the top-notch textbooks and major guides by the big-name players in the relevant fields.  People buy the “for dummies” or “The complete idiot’s guide to” book, because they use that as an overview to the main thing they want to study, which is… financial accounting. Or starting a small business. Or jewelry making.  Or any of a dozen or sixty other skills they want to acquire.  BUT, and this is the important bit, they also tend to buy the major books in the field, or at least Amazon.com pretends that they do, because those tend to be big books with big-ticket prices.  Still, those books are by critical authors, and if you really want to get a solid grasp on a given subject, like film making or screenwriting or puppetry or modern dance, you may want to consult these volumes in the process of making your own study of the subject.

So Amazon.com yielded about thirty titles. And looking through the parallel ‘recommended’ lists revealed a range of related subjects that I needed to be thinking about. Not just financial accounting and small business, for example, but whether to start by opening my own business ($100 startup, for example), or whether to buy someone else’s.  Amazon.com helped me to ask questions about personal finance and how to investigate opportunities for a small business loan; but it also helped me understand the difference between opening a manufacturing company and a retail operation and a service operation.   In short, the twenty titles that Amazon.com gave me the option to browse helped me realize what questions I needed to ask about what I was trying to learn, instead of floundering around for a while.   And instead of asking obvious questions, I could leapfrog to more complex questions.

And Amazon helps you ask excellent questions.

It’s important to note:  I wasn’t investigating starting my own business.  And I wasn’t really interested in financial accounting. That wasn’t what I was investigating today. These examples are just metaphors for the larger issue I WAS researching.  But the thing that I researched, if I can get a colleague to really buy into it, could change the way middle school is taught — not just at my school, but just about anywhere.  We can revolutionize how we teach kids to approach learning.

It’s also worth noting — I didn’t buy any books today.  I don’t need to. I’m doing a first pass-through here of research, finding out what I need to know to get a colleague interested, and wrap my head around the whole big topic.  But when I enter the wave here, I’m going to be entering it much higher on the learning curve than I might otherwise do, and I’m going to be bringing my colleague along for the ride.

Herein lies the real power of design:  I used a pre-made component (Amazon.com) to leverage what I already knew, and some key research skills (Amazon.com’s recommended lists), and some simple Google searches of authors’ names, to confirm that I was finding the right materials and asking the right questions.  And I’m just getting started.

When you start learning something new… are you starting at the bottom of the wave, like a tourist on Hampton Beach? Or are you paddling out a ways from shore, so you can ride a big one, almost all the way to the lifeguard’s chair?  Leverage your research skills:  Search Amazon.com as well as the more typical offerings.

Taiji day 151: lost post

I wrote a great post this morning about how I had a wonderfully sweaty tai chi session this morning. And something has eaten it. I’m not sure what happened, but it didn’t make the site. Nor did another piece about kayaking on the river at low tide, all the way to the dam, and being fifty feet below the upper river, instead of twenty.

I’m not sure if they’ve been eaten or misfiled, but I’ll be looking into it. More anon, once I’ve checked into what’s going on.

Update: Found part of it. See below, in italics.

Back in my old bedroom this morning, and back to doing what I think of as standard pattern — Five Gold Coins, Eight Pieces of Silk, and the form.  It’s hot enough that I’m just sweating.  Hard.  I’m not even working at doing the form with any particular fierceness or fire, but at some level this is happening often.  Maybe I’m burning through particular energy.  Maybe my musculature has built up to a point where it requires more energy burn to do this work. Maybe I have too much energy, and I have to sweat some of it out. Maybe it’s just too hot and humid.

Whatever the reasons, the last few days have been sweaty… water dripping through the clothes, sweaty.  Ugh.  On the other hand, it doesn’t matter how oogy I feel when I start the tai chi routines — by the end, I feel great.