THE TINKERING STUDIO

THE TINKERING STUDIO

 

Warm Demanders and Making Faces
18

Feb / 21

18 Feb / 21

Posted by Tinkering Community
Casey Federico

 

Guest post by Casey Federico, an early childhood educator based in San Francisco. Her passions include supporting Bilingual and Bicultural families, teacher-led professional development, fighting for equity in early childhood, and tinkering for all ages. Casey works with Ryoko, Steph, and Karen in twice weekly Zoom tinkering sessions with Mr. Limata's class in Oakland. 

I have had the honor of studying Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain with the i3 Institute, and am newly committed to the tenets of Culturally Responsive Teaching. Years ago I learned the phrase “warm demander” from a professional development workshop as a synonym for “tough love”, and I see now I learned that phrase all wrong! In Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain I am learning the true meaning of the phrase: a teacher who connects deeply with students, with real regard for their lives and experience; who celebrates their brilliance AND holds them to high standards as independent learners. 

In my work with the Tinkering Studio, I have had the honor of joining Peter Limata’s 2nd grade class at Emerson Elementary twice a week. Together with Tinkering Studio colleagues, I have gotten to know Peter’s class and his special teaching style. Peter has a way of celebrating a child while pushing them just a tiny bit more. The other day I got to witness him supporting a new reader reading a long sentence with new vocabulary. He kept reminding her, “you’ve got this… that’s right…” without filling in the next word when he knew she’d get there. The words came into my mind again, “warm demander!”

During our tinkering sessions with Peter’s class I have wondered about the role of a visitor in pushing student’s thinking, especially with open-ended tinkering explorations. Often I have questioned whether to ask for more from a student’s explanation, wondering if I have enough personal capital with that student. With those questions in mind, I was so taken with our visit from artist Hanoch Piven.

 

Making Faces

Hanoch Piven shares his creative approach to “drawing” with found objects in a series of children’s books. In Making Faces, Hanoch shows how faces can be created with meaningful found objects that speak to personality and identity. During his visit to Peter’s class, Hanoch introduced his art and told the students, “when we make art we are allowed to think for ourselves.” As he demonstrated his technique he created an immediate rapport with the students. He made a self-deprecating joke about talking too much, and a talkative student jumped right in: “I don’t think you talk too much at all!”

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As students began creating their own faces with objects from their homes, Hanoch invited students up on screen, spotlighting their work as they created. What struck me about his facilitation was his combination of enthusiasm and… you guessed it… high expectations. When a student showed a large person he was creating with objects on the floor, Hanoch shared, “Great job - I love it. Now let me see how you can include the vacuum behind you to create something even bigger.” With another student, Hanoch said, “this is a truly great beginning, now show me how you could use those shells to change the expression.” Without knowing the students before the session, he was able to create connection and push them towards a next step.

After this session with Hanoch, I am feeling inspired to try out a new balance of enthusiasm and high expectation for the brilliant learners I get to explore tinkering with. How can I share my genuine delight in their creations while supporting their next steps and experimentation?

 

Teacher Shoutout: Rhonda Alexander

Now that I have this new understanding of the warm demander, I can identify the teachers I have had the privilege of knowing in San Francisco who use just this approach. Rhonda Alexander, a preschool teacher at Wu Yee Head Start, is a warm demander. Over the nine years I have known Rhonda I have seen the deep relationships she develops with families, her eye for the unique talents of each child, and her commitment to making their brilliance shine. When children graduate from Rhonda’s class they not only know “The Gingerbread Man” by heart, they know what it is to be seen and truly celebrated by a teacher.

Online Workshop Facilitation: Shadow Remix
08

Feb / 21

08 Feb / 21

Posted by Deanna

While sheltering-in-place, our Tinkering Studio team continues to experiment and explore ways to facilitate hands-on making experiences at a distance. Recently, we lead a Shadow Remix workshop at PLAYfest 2021 where participants were invited to reimagine shadows using both physical and digital materials. We've been exploring remixing and reimaging shadows since last summer and continue to be impressed with the tinkerability of the activity. I wanted to share some of my big takeaways from facilitating this workshop over Zoom and how we designed for a playful, learner-centered environment.  Learn more about the activity Shadow Remix on its project page.

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Participants turned their webcams toward their workspace.

Hands and Eyes

Webcams are a great way to connect with participants remotely, but the pictures they paint can be misleading. Cameras only provide a partial picture of the tinkering that's happening, so we try to find workarounds given easily accessible tools. While working, we want to be able to see each others' work when possible and ask participants to tip their laptop screens down so the webcam is centered on their workspace. This often results in more questions freely being asked, both from facilitators and participants, and sparks conversation. At this time, we also ask participants to keep their microphones open to keep conversations happening freely and to hear ambient noises of their workspaces in the background.

Support Divergent Directions

One of the unique qualities about Shadow Remix is that there are so many different ways to engage. This tinkering experience was designed to support wide walls, a phrase used by Mitchel Resnick in his book Lifelong Kindergarten. In addition to low floors (easy activity entry points) and high ceilings (possibilities to go deeper), Resnick explains the importance of wide walls in activity and technology design. Read the full chapter on Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play here.

"It’s not enough to provide a single path from a low floor to a high ceiling; it’s important to provide multiple pathways. Why? We want all children to work on projects based on their own personal interests and passions—and because different children have different passions, we need technologies that support many different types of projects, so that all children can work on projects that are personally meaningful to them."

- Mitchel Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten

Shadow Remix supports wide walls by offering multiple entry points into the experience. Getting started requires only a light source (like a flashlight, the sun, the flashlight on a phone, etc), a shadow-making object, a pen, and a piece of paper. Draw on top of your shadow and make something new. This can be done inside or outside, even with chalk and sidewalk. We call this direction analog shadow remixing because it's using materials and tools that are physical and low-tech. 

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How many paths? There are many!

Another direction to take the activity is with digital tools and technologies. We call this digital shadow remixing. Use a smartphone or tablet to take a photo of a shadow and use software to draw your design. One benefit of this style of shadow remix is the ability to share your shadow with someone else. That's where the name Shadow Remix originates - take a shadow, draw your interpretaion of the shapes, and share your shadow for someone else to remix. This style of collaboration opens up many directions for designing a workshop. Participants can start with the same shadow and remix, or everyone makes their own shadow and remixes a shadow from someone else. Sharing shadows and seeing everyone's unique interpretations is one of the joys of this activity.

Like the digital, but also like the tangibility of analog? Try printing out a photo of a shadow and remixing it with pen and paper. A black-and-white print on copy paper works great, and is another possible avenue for the experience.

 

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Check out our shared workspace on Padlet.

Provide a Shared Workspace

When tinkering remotely, we miss sharing a physical space together and look at one another's work across the table. Tinkering is social, and we look for ways to add collaboration back into the digital world. We're big fans of Padlet for its ability to share photos and text easily without an account and creating a common workspace. We encourage participants to share tentative ideas and their works-in-progress, as well as build on the ideas of others. 

Process Over Product

In the Exploratorium, we invite visitors to stay as long as they like in our space. The landscape of hosting workshops online often requires that we cap our workshop experience to 90 minutes, 60 minutes, even 45 minutes in length. This can be challenging not only on facilitators, but also on participants, because tinkering takes time. During online workshops, we focus more on the process of tinkering and encourage participants to keep tinkering even after the time together concludes. Providing outlets to keep the conversation going is another way to keep the conversation going. We encourage participants to add to Padlet even after the workshop ends, or to share on Twitter or Instagram with the tag #ShadowRemix.

 

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Documentation

As a group, we look for ways to grow our facilitation practice, and we decided to explore documentation during our PLAYfest workshop. How do we capture what's happening in a workshop? Can we highlight the different ideas shared and directions people take? Our Tinkerer-in-Residence Celeste Moreno captured a sketchnote of the workshop to document participants work and facilitation strategies.

We would love to hear if you host a Shadow Remix workshop and ways you support learners tinkering in an online context. You can find us on Twitter @TinkeringStudio where we share ideas, learn from one another, and continue to tinker.

Light Painting Glove
22

Jan / 21

22 Jan / 21

Posted by Tinkering Community

This is a post from Tinkerer-in-Residence: Celeste Moreno. For more about Celeste, check out her profile on our Tinkerer's Page.  

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As a tinkerer-in-residence at the Exploratorium I’ve been playing with putting a computational spin on tinkering activities like light painting. When I started to tinker with light painting, I kept thinking about traditional painting tools: What sort of brushes or stamps could I make? Could I finger paint with light? How do you make a paint palette using light? 

I decided to go the fingerpainting route and to make a glove with a light attached to the fingertip. Here’s where the magic of code and computation comes in; by attaching a micro:bit (a programmable microcontroller that can connect to lots of inputs and outputs) to the light on my fingertip I can control the color of the light, the pattern and timing of the light, and I can use different inputs like button presses or the movement of my hand to control the light. Now I have my own fully customizable finger painting, light painting tool. Here are some tips if you want to make a light painting glove: 

 

 

Materials I Used 

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☐ 1 glove

☐ 1 small piece of fabric or elastic

☐ 2 Velcro dots

☐ 1 micro:bit

☐ 1 micro:bit battery pack

☐ 3 pieces of wire

☐ 1 neopixel (a programmable RGB LED light)

☐ Some thread and a needle or fabric glue

☐ Scissors

 

 

Making the Glove

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First I glued a strip of fabric to the glove to secure the micro:bit to my glove. I only glued down the left and right sides of the strip. The top and bottom need to be open so that wires for the light and battery can be attached to the micro:bit.

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Next I cut one neopixel light off of a longer strip of lights and glued that neopixel to the tip of the glove finger using hot glue. I had to make sure that the neopixel was facing the right direction,  the little arrow on the neopixel should point away from the micro:bit, or away from the rest of the glove.  

Then I measured and cut three wires to connect the neopixel to the micro:bit. After I double checked to make sure they were the right size I soldered the wires. I chose to solder because I knew I would be using this glove more than once. Later, I’ll share an example of a light glove made without soldering. 

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After that I found my battery pack and attached two velcro dots to the pack and two velcro dots to the back of the glove. I could’ve made another pocket like I did for the micro:bit but I found that this works really well and that the battery pack stays put when I move my hand around. 

Finally I downloaded a test program to the micro:bit and plugged in the battery pack to make sure that the light and the micro:bit were working like I expected. 

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Programming the Glove

To make the light change colors based on a button press or the movement of my hand, I programmed the micro:bit using MakeCode, a coding website for micro:bit. I tested lots of different light programs before I found my favorites. My final glove had 4 “modes” that I can switch between by pressing the “A” button on the micro:bit. 

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Here’s what the code looks like for Mode 1.

Mode 1: change the light color to red if my hand is tilted to the right and change the light color to blue if my hand is tilted to the left

Mode 2: turn the light yellow

Mode 3: turn the light green 

Mode 4: show warm colors like yellow, orange, and red when my hand is moving slowly. Show cool colors like blue, green, and purple when my hand is moving fast. 

If you want to see more of the code here is the whole program.

 

 

Light Paintings

Here are some test paintings I made with this glove. I used a digital camera on a tripod to take these photos. 

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This red and blue flower was made using “Mode 1”, I started with red for the center of the flower and then I tilted my hand to change the color to blue to make the petals. 

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I also tried pointing my light at objects in my room (like this door)  instead of pointing the light directly at the camera. This painting was also made with “Mode 1”, I think it has a nice space or galaxy effect. 

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This scribble shows how fast my hand was moving. I used “Mode 4” to make this painting, so the yellows and oranges mean that my hand was moving slow, the purples and blues mean that my hand was moving fast. 

 

 

Take It Further

This is just one way to make a light painting glove. Cate Heroman made a light painting glove that uses a tricolor LED, alligator clips, and the micro:bit (no soldering required). 

 

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You could add extra parts to your glove like a buzzer and use it for another activity. Or you could add a whole strip of lights to your glove. 

And maybe, it doesn’t need to be a glove at all. What would it look like to make a light painting tool that you wear on your head? Or that you attach to your shoelaces? 

 

Tinkerer-in-Residence: Celeste Moreno

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Celeste designs and researches creative learning experiences for learners of all ages that combine tools and ideas from multiple disciplines such as computing, art, and science.

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