AnnMarie Thomas- Making Makers

"Playing with Creativity" links and annotations

Last month, I had the opportunity to give a talk at TEDxUCLA. The best part? It let me highlight some of the amazing people that I've gotten to collaborate with (and even a chance to collaborate with a brand new partner... during the talk). Alas, the stage time is short, so I want to use this blog post to share more information about the awesome people and places and organizations that I mention in the talk!

 

• The theme of TEDxUCLA 2017 was "Gravity" 
• Here is the music video for "Gravity" (the "Engineering Dynamics with Circus Lab" theme song... written by the amazing Mischa Suemnig and his band Mighty Fairly)  The labs for this class were held at Circus Juventas.
• The Playful Learning Lab is the University of St. Thomas research lab that I run, full of amazing students! 
• Squishy Circuits were invented by my former student Sam Johnson and I. The Squishy Circuits store is the company whose products I use, and it is run by my former student Matthew Schmidtbauer.
• People who show up in pictures and stories:
  •  Chef Eric Rivera, who I met when working on the "truffle project" with the Alinea Restaurant Group. Eric went on to create amazing food for the party we threw to open our "Projects of the Long Now Foundation" exhibition at UST.
  • Chef Kate Sigel is my pastry partner in crime for all musical and exploding cake projects. She is a sorceress with sugar, and is the executive pastry chef at Scout/The Nest in Seattle.  She and I make up Cake andCapacitors.
  • The singers we worked with on the Code+Chords project are Cantus.
  • People who helped on the exploding cake include Rachel Gehlhar, John Angeli, John Edgar Park, Erin Kern, and Shane Foss.
  • The exploding cake and musical cupcakes were for the Factory of Imagination led by Adam Montadon and Steffie Limere
• Thank you so much to Damian Kulash of OK Go for being my "surprise guest" and answering questions about their Upside Down and Inside Out video. (I met Damian at TED in April, where he and the band gave an amazing talk about their creative process. I invited him to join me the following month for the talk about and he kindly said yes.)
• Thank you to the Roadrunner pre-school class and my ENTR490 students for writing questions that I used in the interview.

Thank you all for watching!

 

 

Post-semester note to my students

A week ago, I submitted final grades for the undergrad students in my "Environmental Sustainability and Innovation" business class.  As I read their final reflection papers, in which these young engineering and business students wrote about their thoughts regarding environmental sustainability I was hopeful. Most of them were leaving the course concerned, but hopeful. Aware of the challenges we face, the science behind it, and the role that individuals, governments and corporations play (and have played, and must play in the future) in this space, these students were optimistic about the role that they personally could play in protecting our planet.

We studied Life Cycle analysis. We ran footprint calculations. We looked at government regulations. We cheered the Paris Accord. We read the newspapers. We talked, and talked, and talked... trying to look at as many sides of the issues we could.  We watched politicians state that climate change might not be real... but then we read the papers and looked at the data, and felt that research and education would prevail. I did my damnedest to prepare my students to be global citizens and to empathize with or fellow humans and our shared fate.

And yesterday I watched as the president of the United States willingly told the rest of the planet that we don't care about that shared fate. And I cried. However, as a parent, as a human, as an engineer, as a teacher, as an American... tears aren't enough. Now we need action.

If the US government isn't going to take care of our planet, we clearly need to take care of it ourselves- and seriously reconsider what our government should look like. If you don't agree with the current actions? Elect people who you do agree with. Better yet, help get those individuals elected. Applying for jobs after last week's graduation? Start asking future employers tough questions about their environmental impacts and actions.  

To my students: Grades are in. Homework is no longer graded, but all the actions we discussed in our Environmental Sustainability and Innovation business class? It's time for you to do them all. Because you care. Not because I put it in an assignment. It was an honor to spend the semester with you. I'm looking forward to seeing what you all do with your careers- and with our shared planet home.

So here is your final ENTR490 assignment: Il est maintenant temps de prendre soin de notre planète parce que nous devrions, non pas parce qu'on nous dit que nous devons le faire. Bonne chance.