AnnMarie Thomas- Thoughts on design, engineering, and education

Buying Tools for My Daughter

Recently, I wrote a short article for Make: magazine about my experiences looking for "real" tools for my daughter.  I thought I'd share what happened next...

I put off the actual buying of the tools for a bit, but when the holidays rolled around, my oldest (almost 4 years old) daughter asked an elf to tell Santa that she wanted a "wood set with tools."  (I was amused that she didn't ask Santa directly. This was possibly becuase (a) she'd already asked Santa for three things, which is our family limit, (b) the line for Santa was long, or (c) as she put it "the elves are the ones who use tools.") Now that it was an official request, I figured I better start looking more seriously!

I started by going to a local "big box" chain hardware/home-repair store.  When I got there, I figured I'd ask a sales clerk for suggestions.  I asked the man in the tools section for some help, and couldn't help but notice that he looked uncomfortable when I said I was shopping for a child. He waffled a bit about how they didn't really sell things for children, and then he asked how old my daughter is. Here I must confess that I lied.  I started to say "four," and stopped myself. I then said "eight."  (I figured that if they couldn't help me shop for an eight year old, a four year old was out of the question.)  The reply?  He looked at me a bit wide eyed and said. "Eight? That's really young. I didn't have woodshop until my last year of middle school, and that school doesn't even do that anymore. Eight?"  This is when I knew that this shopping excursion was going to be a challenge.  I said that I thought eight (thinking four) was a good age for a hammer, nails, saw, and hand drill.  (They didn't have non-powered hand drills, though.)  After watching him uncomfortably look at saws I thought I'd throw him an easy request.  "How about safety glasses? Can we just get a pair of kid safety glasses?" The reply "We don't have those."  I guess I could have picked my own hammer or nails at this point, but decided to leave.

Later that day, I was in a small shopping district buying some other presents. As I walked to my car I noticed a small hardware store on the corner.  On a whim, I went in, not expecting much. However, when I said that I was trying to buy tools for my daughter, two of the sales clerks jumped up. The first suggested I look at the smaller hammer that they had just sold to a dad and son, the other started walking me down the aisles pointing things out.  Then they asked "the question."  "How old is your daughter?" When I said four, they nodded and said that was a bit young, but that was all. And who knows, perhaps four is a bit young, but my daughter asked, and I'm willing to supervise.  I'm happy to say that I was able to pass my shopping notes on to some elves, and that there was a saw, hammer, nails, hand drill, tool box, safety glasses, and wood under the tree a few weeks ago.

 

Mini Maker Monday #1: Kiddo's First Skirt

I'm currently working on a writing project looking at the changes, over the last century, in how kids are taught hands-on skills.  It has made me more aware of my responsibility to teach my own children to be makers, and thus I am starting a new series of posts on projects that I am working on with my kids.

As I've been trying to get my 3.5 year old more comfortable creating things, we've been slowly adding sewing to our repertoire.  

After making clothes (without a pattern) for a few of her dolls and stuffed animals, I figured it was time to try our hands at sewing clothes that she can wear to school.  Thus, we made two trips this weekend to one of my favorite fabric stores, Treadle Yarn Goods.  Kiddo was absolutely delighted by the wide array of fabrics.  Alas, I wasn't fast enough to get her to go straight to the sale rack, so we will be making her a dress later this month with a beautiful, but expensive, print that she picked out.  For our first project, though, I convinced her to pick from the abundant sale racks. We ended up with the bright cotton print below.  As it's been over five years since I've sewn clothes for someone over two feet tall, I limited her to the "It's So Easy" line from Simplicity.  She picked pattern 2083, which is a bouncy toddler/girl sized skirt.

 

For the sake of saving fabric, I replaced the binding (that the pattern has you make by cutting up another yard of fabric in a contrasting color) with two packs of double sided bias tape.  Kiddo picked out bright pink tape.  One of the highlights of the weekend for me was, upon realizing the single pack of tape we bought was not enough to edge the entire skirt, back to the fabric store.  I was so proud to see her go off to the bias tape display in search of a color match for the little sample of the tape we had already used on the skirt. 

The skirt took us about 1.5 hours to make. It should have been about an hour, but I didn't always manage to get the bias tape firmly attached to the skirt's edge, and had to tear some stitches out.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What I did:

• pattern cutting
• pinning
• "steering" of the sewing machine

What kiddo (age 3.5) did:

• selected pattern
• selected fabric
• selected bias tape (for edging)
• handed me pins as needed, and returned pins to the pin cushion
• worked the sewing machine's pedal

What I learned for next time:

• Have another project at the table that kiddo can work on while I do some of the more tedious things like pattern cutting.  Next time she will work on beading a necklace while I do this part of the project.
• We're getting better at the "mom steers, kiddo pushes the pedal" sewing technique. That said, if you try it you definitely want to plan ahead and pay close attention to your child's rhythms. When working on fidgety parts of a project, not having control of your sewing machine is tough. Occasionally, kiddo would space out and when I'd tell her to "Stop" she would keep her foot on the pedal.  

Squishy Circuits on facebook

One of my research lab's projects focuses on creating tools to allow children (and adults) to explore engineering in a fun, playful fashion.  A few years ago we set out to see if we could develop a way to create sculptable circuits.  The result of this inquiry was Squishy Circuits, a set of conductive and non-conductive homemade play doughs that can be used with electronics components such as motors and LEDs.  We're happy to say that the project has taken off beyond our wildest dreams and is now used by teachers, parents and kids around the world.

We've been getting lots of great suggestions from users, and have set up a Facebook community where users can share questions, suggestions and pictures.  Please join us! Based on email requests that we have been receiving, we will also be launching new educational material on our website (videos, activity guides, and a basic electronics primer for beginners using squishy circuits) this summer.

PS: Recently, I gave a short demo on the project:

   

Why are we afraid of math?

One of the things that I love about living in the Twin Cities is our community education program.  You want to learn to swim? There are classes.  You want to learn to speak a different language? Check.  Need to learn how to write a will? Check.  A class on Czech Kolaches? There are more than one. Hundreds of classes are available. Amongst the ads for cooking and gardening and Spanish classes, I saw the following course description.

I have mixed feelings about this.  My first reaction is that I'm happy that this class exists for people who want to improve their math skills.  However, the wording troubles me.  Literacy training is approached in a different way than mathematics.  Many who are illiterate are afraid to admit it, whereas a fear of, or self-proclaimed incompetence in, mathematics can be joked about.  It's almost cool to talk about how bad you are at math. 

At first it may seem that joking about being afraid of math, or how hard math is, is harmless.  Remember "Math class is tough" Barbie? Multiple people had to have thought it was a good idea.  It takes more than one person to get a toy to market, so multiple people, people who probably had college degrees complete with math classes, had to have thought that this was the perfect thing to have a kids' toy say. Scary, isn't it?   Then I heard the story of a high school student who mentioned that she really liked math until a teacher kept stressing how hard it was. After a while, she began to believe it.  Sadly, I suspect that that teacher was using the "this is hard" statement as a friendly lead-in to the lesson.  A "we're all in this together, even though it is hard" approach.  I wonder if the results would be different if a "this is fun" approach was presented instead. 

A few months ago, I posted about how I have a hard time calling something engineering if it doesn't have any explicit math or science in it.  A friend, who disagrees with me on this point, pointed out how wonderful it would be if everyone could create things without having to understand the math and science behind them.  I agree that giving everyone the tools to create is an important goal.  That said, we can't ignore the fact that behind every microprocessor or cool new robotics kit is someone who really understood the math and science. So my goal these days is to figure out how to make the basic math and science that lie beneath the surface as exciting as playing with the cool toys the math and science produced.  Parents are urged to read to their kids, and doctors give out books.  What would this early intervention look like from a math perspective? We approach reading and writing as something that everyone, with the right training, can do.  I really think we need to treat math this way as well.  So back to the class.  I think it should exist.  However, I think we can aim higher than "coping" with everyday math. 

Design vs. Engineering Design

As someone who teaches engineering design to college students and K-12 teachers, I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a design project an "engineering design" project. This has been on my mind this past year as I have been asked many times to advise schools, museums, and other educational organizations on their curricula for teaching engineering to kids.

"Design" is a word that is thrown around a lot these days in discussions of education, particularly as it concerns engineering.  As a professor who teaches at least three classes with the word "design" in the title, and once taught at a college with "Design" in its name, I'm thrilled to hear these conversations. However, I think we have to think long and hard about what our goal is. "Design" is not unique to engineering.  Many fields can claim design as a critical part of what they do.  Industrial design, interior design, graphic design, interaction design, cooking, fashion design, architecture, etc. all involve design.

The general steps that I've seen listed for engineering design processes (roughly: understand the problem, do research, come up with solutions, compare your solutions, select an approach, build a prototype, refine your prototype) are pretty general.  This is the process that is followed by almost anyone who creates anything, from a new type of cake to a new layout for a retail store.  To me, it is the use of math and science that transforms this into the engineering design process.

I am always dissapointed when someone shows me an "Engineering Design Process," particularly one that they hand out to kids and teachers, that never used the words "analysis," "math" or "science." (I've seen more then one example of this.)  When I point this out, I'm usually told that the important thing is creativity. Yes, engineers need creativity. Without creativity we would not have planes, computers, water purification systems, or EKG machines.  That said, creativity alone is not enough.  If you are going to build a bridge that my daughter will walk across, or a medical device that will go into my husband's body, you better be able to prove to me that it's safe and will do what you said it will do. That's where the engineering comes in.  Using the laws of physics and the language of mathematics, an engineer can predict how a device will work and analyze what went wrong when a machine fails. 

Engineering education at the pre-college level has many purposes, among them improving students' technological literacy and exposing them to a field they may want to pursue after high school. If you are teaching "engineering design" partly to better prepare students to study engineering in college,  we can't ignore the numerous research studies that show that students who succeed in undergraduate engineering programs are tyically the ones best prepared in math and science.  Thus, if you are using design projects to get kids excited about engineering, it is a bit misleading not to at least try to use these projects to see how math and science tie into the design process.I am not anti-creativity! Far from it.  I'm the professor who advises her students to take a drawing class.  I've taken my engineers to the circus for inspiration, and to a day care center to play with kids and dream up new toys.  That said, I worry a bit when students tell me about "engineering" projects they've done that didn't involve at least some discussion of math and science. I had a conversation with a student once who was unhappy with an engineering class and said that s/he would prefer to "just build stuff." When I asked how one would know how to design a bridge without analysis, the reply was that you sort of "know" where the forces should be. (Upon reflection, s/he then admitted that this might be a bad idea.)

Perhaps creativity is the heart of engineering design, but math and science are the blood.  We need to teach kids to embrace math and science as tools. Why not use engineering design projects with children to inspire kids to want to learn more about math and science?  Once, when I pointed out to an educator that their "Engineering Design Process" never mentioned math or science, I was told that the reason was that s/he worked with little kids.  I don't buy this as an excuse.  Even toddlers have number sense and can be taught basic (and sometimes not-so-basic) science.  You don't need to know calculus to "do math." Even involving counting in a design project establishes that numbers have something to do with building.  Kids aren't inherently afraid of math and science.  I challenge you to stick the words "math" and "science" onto your Engineering Design posters (if you have one) as a way to inspire students, even little ones, and remind them that using math and science we can learn to build even better things.

I can't end this without also mentioning that design doesn't need to be "engineering design" to be valuable.  Many teachers have been teaching creative problem solving to their students.  This is an incredibly valuable tool to have, regardless of the field you go into later in life. Letting kids design habitats for their pets or new clothes or new board games is incredibly rewarding for everyone involved. I don't want readers of this post to leave thinking that Engineering Design is the only thing we should teach our students. Rather, it is just one flavor of design.  But this flavor has a recipe.  Math and Science are to engineering design as chocolate is to Rocky Road ice cream- a necessary part.

I suspect many of you reading this think that I am getting a bit bogged down in semantics.  However, it breaks my heart to see kids who get to college excited about engineering, but utterly unprepared for the calculus and physics classes that they will need to take.  There's got to be a way to get them not only excited about making, but also about learning the analytical tools that will help them succeed as engineers.

Campus Collaborations

Looking back on the past few years of teaching, one  of the things that I am most proud of is the number of unusual collaborations that we have organized for our students.  I strongly believe that engineering students benefit when they get a chance to apply their new knowledge and skills to real world.  In the past two years,  my classes have collaborated with a circus school (for dynamics lab), with a daycare center (for a product design class focusing on toys) and with various agencies for older adults (for a seminar on designing products for older adults.) I'll try to post soon about the lessons that I've learned from all of these collaborations.

After the circus collaboration, we were contacted by the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts  about whether my freshmen level design students ("Engineering Graphics and Design") would be interested in participating in their Campus Connections program.  Through this program, the class was given a chance to work with the renowned dance troupe, Diavolo.  Over the course of a semester, the engineering students designed set pieces that could be used by a dance group from Macalester College and the University of St. Thomas that was training with Diavolo.  Given that the students in the design class were freshmen, and most had not had Physics yet, the project was much more of a concept design project then an engineering design project.  However, giving students the chance to work with real clients was a great experience.

The design created by student Thomas Flake was chosen by representatives from Diavolo and the student dancers to be built and have a dance choreographed around it.  The final piece was so successful that Diavolo may be incorporating it into their own traveling repertoire.  To see the final dance and design, watch this video.

Note that I will be presenting a paper on the details of this collaboration at the ASEE Regional Conference in October.  If you'd like a copy of it, please let me know!

The challenge of "high tech" tools

I was once approached by a school that had purchased a lovely 3D printer, but didn't have anyone who knew how to use CAD (computer aided design) software to create the files to send to it.  The machine came first. At that point, I'm happy to help teachers learn to use the software and the machine, but I wonder sometimes whether we've tried so hard to introduce kids to the "high tech" world of making, that we've undervalued the amazing things that can be done with some hand tools.  Not too long ago, manual arts training (later called shop class, or industrial arts class) was standard in most schools, along with a stocked shop (typically wood or metal working).  This is no longer the case, but many schools, in hopes of incorporating engineering into their curriculum, are looking at using tools like 3d printers and laser cutters to "get kids interested in engineering." 

I'm not completely convinced yet that high-tech equipment is necessarily the right way to go, especially for younger kids. While 3d printers definitely elicit "oohs" and "ahs," and some neat objects to put on the family bookshelf, most kids can't go home and use the skills that they just learned. If the main goal is to make kids comfortable building and taking things apart,learning to work through failure, there is beauty in simple, cheap tools. The nice thing about basic tools (such as hammers, saws, glue guns, etc.) is that they have a low entry barrier.  It doesn't take long to teach a six year old how to use a hammer safely, and it's pretty hard for a child to break it.  Thus, it's fairly low risk to let them use one.  Part of the joy of a basic woodshop class is that many of the kids can go home and have access to basic woodworking tools (or purchase them cheaply.)  They've learned a skill that they can practice regularly, and on their own (with appropriate supervision as needed.)  I suspect that I'm not the only engineer who can think back fondly to my first home "woodshop."  I got it for Christmas when I was about 8.  It was very cutting edge: hammer, nails, handsaw, more nails, some wood glue, and assorted wood odds and ends.  I remember building cars and doll furniture.  With the exception of the time that I left the glue gun on overnight and, in the words of my mother, "almost burnt the house down,"  I didn't do anything particularly dangerous.  Most of the cars I built weren't exactly speed racers, and the doll table was uneven.  Nonetheless, I was incredibly proud of them, and spent hours in the basement building (though I did have the hot glue gun taken away after the above-mentioned incident.) 

"High tech" prototyping tools, on the other hand, are less likely to be open for kids to use anytime.  They are often put on a special shelf in a locked room.  There's the fear that they could be broken, so rules and regulations are put into place about who can use them, and when.  They may be used as part of a class activity, or school sponsored program, but they're less likely to be something that a kid can just show up and use to try out an idea (particularly one that is likely to fail.)  It's easy to understand why a school, which is probably having to make budget cuts, would be super cautious about who uses a piece of equipment that costs, typically, tens of thousands of dollars.  Even "cheap" 3d printers aren't "cheap" when you look at them in terms of the typical public school budget.

So am I against 3d printers and laser cutters? No, not at all!  If you can give kids access to them and let them iterate, and try things out (even things that might not work), go for it!  But if you are on a tight budget, I'm convinced that buying a slew of hand tools and soldering irons (and lots of junk and scraps to play with) is likely to have more of an impact then a single 3d printer for which you must ration out build material. The ability of a hammer and nails to empower a kid to "build their own solutions" to problems is amazing.

OK GO and SyynLabs: Complex Simplicity

It's not every day that you can justify watching a music video in a college engineering class.  However, it's also not every day that you find as stunning an example of creative design as the new OK Go video for their song "This Too Shall Pass," done in collaboration with the artistic engineers at SyynLabs.  I love that they used the constraint "no magic" to use seemingly simple methods to create a stunning feat of machine design.

There are also some good "making of" videos available:

• Ignite talk from Adam Sodowsky on the process of designing the device
• 
  

Why Making Matters (from TED2010)

Below is a "transcript" of the short talk I gave at TED this year (short= 5minutes).  Of course, given that I didn't use notes, I'm sure the actual speech I gave varied a bit from this one. If the video is ever posted, I will let you know. (Note  that this is from the "TED-U" portion of this year's TED, not the main stage!)

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(February 12, 2010- Long Beach, CA)

I truly believe that the one of the best ways to have an impact on the world is to give as many kids and young adults as possible the tools they need to change the world.  In a quest to do this, I’ve read a lot of biographies of engineers and inventors whom I respected and began to see an obvious trend.

• ·   Paul MacCready, one of my heroes, designer of human powered aircraft and champion for more sustainable modes of transformation, grew up building model airplanes on his family’s ping pong table to the extent that at the age of 14 he set the world record for flight duration of an autogyro.

• ·   Dean Kamen, who went on to develop the iBot wheelchair and LUKE arm, redesigned the lighting system for Manhattan’s Museum of Natural History using Radio Shack parts, while still in high school.  So it’s probably fitting that Dean went on to found FIRST which introduces young people to science and technology.

• ·         The Wright Brothers, after breaking a toy helicopter given to them by their father, tried to build their own, larger version, and had a business selling their homemade kites to their friends, and even built their own lathe. Not surprising, given that their mother, the daughter of a wagon maker, was said to be the mechanical one in their family and created toys such as a superfast sled for her children.

It seems unlikely that these early making experiences didn’t, in some way, lead to these individuals' successes as inventors and engineers.  So, I found it a bit scary recently when a report conducted by the Nuts,Bolts and Thingamajigs Foundation of the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, Intl., found that 72% of the U.S. teenagers they polled had never taken an industrial arts or shop class. 

But maybe that’s not too worrisome- all of the examples I just gave were of “out of school” making. Surely kids are still making at home?

Well, the same study found that 83% of these teenagers reported spending less then two hours a week working on working with their hands on projects like woodworking or model building.  (27% reported spending no time on these activities.)  Compare that with the amount of time most children watch TV or play video games!

We can think of this as an experiment: What happens to our culture of innovation if we stop introducing kids to the art of making things?   We wouldn’t expect a musician to be successful if they were only taught theory and then not handed an instrument until college.  The same holds true for making.  You’d be surprised at how many engineering students colleges see who have never really built anything. 

So why are kids making less?  Is there not time in the school day for industrial arts class?  Are we afraid to let kids build?  In a world where some schools have banned recess as being too fraught with peril it’s perhaps unsurprising that the concept of kids working with sharp blades and tools could cause concern.  But are kids really so incompetent that we must keep them away from real tools?  One of my favorite school examples comes from the turn of last century when educator John Dewey founded the Chicago Laboratory School which had a strong emphasis on learning by doing.  Children studied the manual arts at every level of their education.  Dewey championed the need for children to be allowed to build real things, with real tools. Thus, when the kids decided they wanted to build a playhouse, they got some advice from teachers and did it themselves.  A two story playhouse, custom furniture, complete with the appropriate building permits, designed and built by children under the age of 14.  Jump forward 100 years and we have a generation of kids, many of whom may never be taught how to make things with their own hands.  I’m not suggesting that we give a two year old a chainsaw (mine still has a plastic tool set), but that we acknowledge that, like playing an instrument, making is a skill which takes years to develop and is best started early.

There’s another important lesson to be learned through early exposure to building and creating.  It’s that making often fails.  Any of us who build stuff for a living have had our share of failures.  If inventors and engineers stopped at their first failure, we wouldn’t have the airplane, the lightbulb, or countless other great inventions.  Learning to work through failure is painful, and best learned early.  If a child’s only building project is for a class assignment where failure means a poor grade, it’s understandable why they might not be excited about building things- failure’s scary.  But if a child is taught the pleasure of making, failure becomes part of the process.  The early helicopters that the child Wright brothers built failed, which allowed them to learn some basic principles of flight. Innovative companies recite phrases such as “Fail Early, Fail Often.”  Are we exposing kids to this same acceptance of persevering through failure? 

Thankfully, there are a lot of great organizations and individuals who are reaching out to children and teaching them the joys, and challenges, of making.  Based on the numbers I just cited, though, we clearly need to expand these efforts.  The good news is that getting kids started in making isn't hard.  Hand them a screwdriver and teach them how to use it!

Once upon a time, spaceships resided primarily in movies, books, and the dreams of children.  Some of whom, after spending their teenage years working on their cars and tinkering, grew up to become the men and women who made manned spaceflight possible.  We must ensure that we give today’s children the tools and skills they need to make their dreams tangible.

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References:

• Code Name Ginger by Steve Kemper
• More with Less: Paul MacCready and the Dream of Efficient Flight by Paul Ciotti
• Nuts,Bolts and Thingamajigs Foundation of the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, Intl.
• The Elementary School Record No 7, The University of Chicago Press (1900)
• U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission (information on the Wright Brothers)
• They Made America by Harold Evans
• Organizations pictured in the slides I used:
• • Leonardo's Basement
  • The Works Museum 
  • University of St. Thomas STEPS Camp
  • The Learning Technology Center of the Science Museum of Minnesota
  • University of Chicago Laboratory School

Thoughts on Women In Engineering

Over the last few years, I've gotten a lot of requests to discuss what it's like being a "woman in engineering."  I'm always a bit conflicted about this, since I don't think of myself as a "woman in engineering."  Rather, I think of myself as an engineer.  In fact, I'm almost embarassed at how little I thought about my gender as a student because, bluntly, there weren't many other women around.  I was the only woman my year in my major (Ocean Engineering) at MIT, and in my 9 years of undergrad/grad training, I had only one female professor, and that was for a music class.  Thus, I sometimes feel ill-qualified to discuss what is "best" for women in engineering.  (Someone once told me that most women engineers, when asked about their experiences, start by saying "I have an unusual story." )  Definitely, there are some questions that should be addressed: Why aren't there more women in engineering? Are women choosing not to go into engineering because they're not interested, or because they don't consider it an option.

For more of my thoughts on this topic, please see a guest editorial that I wrote for Make: magazine. 

Recently, PBS and TPT launched a new show titled SciGirls.  In the past, I've turned down opportunities to be in reality TV.  This time, however, I found the show too compelling to say "no." Thus, my daughter and I can be seen in the episod "Puppet Power."  (I served as the engineering mentor to a group of girls building a puppet for the Heart of The Beast's May Day Parade. My daughter served as "cute baby girl inspecting the puppet."  The episode can be found here.