When we list the four P's of creative learning,
projects, passion, peers, and play,
we tend to list projects first
cause in some ways, projects form
the foundation of the creative process.
And when I think of a project,
I think about people making and creating things.
In fact, creating is at the root of creative.
So, I think we see creating projects
as a core activity in the creative learning experience.
So, it's great to have with us, for this conversation,
Andrew Sliwinski, who's been involved in several websites
that were specifically designed
to support kids in creating projects.
Right now, he's working as the Engineering Lead
with us on the Scratch Team, here at the Media Lab,
but he was also the co-founder of a great
kids maker site, or DIY site called diy.org
that's really where projects are at the core of the site.
So, maybe you can tell us a little bit about diy.org
and some of your motivations in developing the site.
Sure, so diy.org really is a place where we wanted
any 12 year old who had an obsession with,
you know, bugs or programming or any subject
that they were really passionate about
to be able to connect them to projects and to other kids
who are passionate about those same things,
to build creative confidence and sort of grow
as a creative learner within this community
of people who are all kind of exploring their passions,
exploring their interests around projects
and around building projects.
Maybe give us some examples of some
of the types of projects that...
Sure, so kids build everything from giant cardboard
theater sets that they do stop motion animation with, Sure, so kids build everything from giant cardboard
theater sets that they do stop motion animation with,
to building farms and little gardening plots,
to doing rocketry, to collecting bugs,
to programming, you kind of name it.
We have about 120 different skills
that cover a really broad range of topics and areas
and interests for the kids on the site.
In terms of motivations, one of the earliest experiences
that I had that really made me reflect
on project-based learning as a potential approach
was in 2001. I moved to Detroit, and I had the opportunity
to go to a local elementary school
that was prepping for Michigan Standardized Testing,
and they asked me if I would come and help them,
help tutor the kids in math before the standardized test.
And I came in and I saw this entire classroom of kids
that were incredibly disinterested and felt incredibly
pressured by this sort of impending test.
And it sort of made me reflect on, there's got to be a way
in which we can contextualize mathematics,
that we can contextualize the subject matter
in a way that can be more compelling
than doing worksheets and solving word problems.
And so that was this moment for me
when I reflected on my own learning and how I best learn,
which is definitely through projects
and not through solving word problems,
and started to kind of build a curriculum
and build a process with these students
at this local elementary school
that was around projects and around learning the math
that they needed to solve problems that were relevant
to them, to solve problems that were important to them.
You then started some maker spaces in Detroit...
Yeah.
To give kids a place to work on those projects.
Exactly, and it just kind of snowballed over time.
You know, before I knew it, I found myself
going to Harbor Freight and buying cheap screwdrivers.
And over time, what we found was that
when we could build these kinds of spaces
where a kid felt safe, a kid felt secure to explore
the things that were interesting to them,
the things that were personally relevant to them,
to solve problems that felt important to them,
all of a sudden, learning could kind of
take shape in a way that we weren't
seeing happen in the classroom.
And so that just kind of kept going over time,
building hacker spaces, working with kids more,
until I met up with a group of other like-minded folks,
and diy.org took shape from that.
Yeah, so it's basically from the individual
neighborhood maker space, trying to make
a worldwide maker space of letting people
share their maker creations with others.
Yeah, which in some ways was kind of
a crazy naive thing, right?
Like, thinking of, "Well, it works for these 30 kids."
"Why not, you know, 300 thousand?"
Or however many, so yeah, that translation process
was definitely really interesting
and there was a lot of work that went
into understanding how to do that at scale,
how to do that outside of a more controlled
physical environment, but I think a lot
of the things stayed, in terms of the values
of building a safe space, building a place
where kids could iterate, building a place
where kids could synthesize lots of interests
and many different skills, and use projects
as a way to kind of piggyback
and go between various different subjects
to build knowledge, to build community,
to build the things that they care about.
This contrast between projects and problems.
Right.
And again, I always put projects at the center,
but it doesn't mean that I'm against problem solving.
Problem solving is a good thing,
let's go on the record to say I believe in problem solving,
but I do think I sort of feel that problem solving
becomes relevant when it's in the context of a project.
Exactly, yeah.
And, you know, that's one of the things
that's always really interesting with kids,
is sometimes you'll find kids who have a really strong
association with, "I want to solve a problem."
And then you'll have other kids who want to tell a story
or want to do things in different ways.
And so one of the things that I've always found
important to building these kinds of spaces
or building this kind of experience for kids
is finding ways to sort of be inclusive
of all of those different ways of thinking about projects.
Like, a project could be a story,
it could be solving a problem that a kid
really wants to solve, or it could even be
something that's more peer oriented,
building something for someone else.
Maybe there's an example from diy.org
about how someone's work evolved over time
and the types of projects they worked on.
Sure, I mean I think one contemporary example
has been this maker on the site named Emma Shoe.
And Emma's actually a newer maker in the DIY community,
but she really started out building
simple objects out of cardboard.
She just kind of gravitated to that as a medium,
and one of her first projects
was just a simple cardboard camera.
And you can kind of see in the project,
she's doing some interesting things.
She's peeling apart the cardboard
to create some different textures,
but the craft isn't, you know, it's not stellar yet,
but she's really starting to show some
real creativity around building sets
or building objects or creating characters.
And over time, you start to see her
kind of go into different areas.
So, she takes some time away from cardboard,
and she goes and explores sewing.
And then she'll take some time away from that
and she goes and explores stop motion animation.
And then she takes some time away from that,
and she explores video production.
And she kind of goes through all of these different skills,
and then all of a sudden, there's a couple moments
that started to happen pretty recently
where you see all of these different skills,
all of these different projects sort of synthesize
and culminate and kind of come together
to build something completely new.
And she started to build these
cardboard Jim Henson-esque worlds
that are amazing.
They're just truly amazing creations.
But that's from this synthesis of knowledge
where I think one of the things that I really appreciate
about project-based learning is that this synthesis,
or this association between skills creates
really cohesive sets of knowledge,
whereas disassociated learning can often
create sort of islands of knowledge.
Yeah, too often, a lot of schools today
are organized that way, that you learn sets of concepts,
you don't know how to connect them...
Right.
... or to then, you know, link them together.
But there's some challenges with
the project-based approach.
I know one thing is you're not,
oftentimes the school things are set up
that you know exactly what the kids are going to learn.
A lesson is designed to help them
learn a particular concept.
Usually with projects it has
a somewhat different feel to it.
Almost always.
(laughing)
Yeah, so I think it's interesting in that
I think a lot of times, the motivations and interests
and passions of the kid can often lead
to sort of unexpected outcomes in a project.
So, a kid might be exploring a very specific subject area,
like sewing or coding, and come out of the process,
instead of learning something about control structures
and operators as high level programming concepts,
they might learn something about friendship
or learn something about creating characters
or something much more on the creative side
of the spectrum, and that sort of non-deterministic
relationship between a project and the learning outcomes
that happen, I think is a wonderful thing,
but can cause problems in certain contexts.
For me, maybe the most important thing
that kids learn as they work on projects
is about the whole process of making projects.
Cause I think in our lives,
we spend a lot of our time making projects.
When people grow up, if you're a journalist,
writing an article is a project.
If you're a marketing manager, putting together
a marketing campaign is a project.
If you're an auto mechanic, fixing a car is a project.
So, and there's a certain type of process
that goes through of exploring the possibilities,
trying something out, modifying based on what happens,
asking others for advice that are true
to all types of projects.
So I think, for me that's one of the most important
things that gets learned, and usually through
different projects, you learn different pieces
of the process and it comes together over time.
Yep.
I think, right now, as you've shifted over
and started working with us on the Scratch Team,
there's new types of projects that are supported
in the Scratch community, where in maker spaces
it's oftentimes focused on physical making.
In the Scratch community, it's focused
more on virtual making, of making
interactive stories and games.
What do you see as some of the ways in which
this all fits together as seeing the coding
that goes on the Scratch website
as a new type of making and project?
So, I think one thing that I find interesting
about the Scratch community and the DIY community
is that they're so unbelievably similar in that
both communities have this deep intent
around allowing kids to be creative or to create.
It's really around a productive philosophy
or a productive sort of perspective
on kids' capabilities in the world.
And so in that way, you know, the fact that DIY,
a lot of DIY happens sort of outside
or away from a computer screen,
and the fact that a lot of Scratch happens
in front of a computer screen,
I don't actually distinguish that,
that big of a difference.
The intent is very similar.
It's about having a very productive relationship to media.
Yeah, I agree.
I think too often, you see a lot of parents and teachers
these days will focus on how much screen time do kids have,
and to me that doesn't make sense.
It's not the medium that's most important,
but what the kids are doing with it.
And kids could do creative activities with wood
or on the computer screen make an animation.
And what's important to me is that they
go through that creative process of imagining,
creating things, sharing with others,
modifying, reflecting upon it.
You can do creative things in both of those worlds,
or uncreative things in both those worlds.
Right, yeah.
So, to me it seems more important
how can we support kids doing creative expression,
regardless of what medium they're using.
Yep.
I think for me, I often like using the analogy
with writing, that the same way that we don't expect
everyone to grow up to become a professional writer,
but writing is something that everyone can use
to express themselves, and I do think the same thing
happens with the making that goes on at diy.org,
the programming that goes on with the Scratch site,
is kids are learning to express themselves,
regardless of whether they're going to grow up
to become professional engineers or computer scientists.
But it's just a new way of expressing themselves.
Yeah, and I think understanding a very broad definition
of what it is to be creative, what it is to create,
I think leads to kids who not only have more confidence
to sort of address the problems that happen
as they grow up, but also the sort of exploding complexity
of different things that are coming up, right?
It's very hard to train kids for a world
that doesn't exist yet.
And so building a really thoughtful and a really
thorough basis around creativity in a broad variety
of contexts can help prepare them
better for that sort of world.
Yeah, well it's been great working together with you
on these ideas, both in helping to open up
these new possibilities for kids.
So, I look forward to more creating projects together
to help kids create projects together.
So, thanks a lot for joining us to talk about projects.
Happy to be here.
No comments:
Post a Comment