AnnMarie Thomas- Making Makers

The Maker Movement Doesn't Need Czars

As an MIT alum, I always like reading through the campus updates they send out and, given my interests, I often find the ones that involve Makers and campus Makerspaces interesting. However, after reading a I realized that something has been bothering me about how my alma mater is approaching this work. My point of concern at first seemed, even to me, like a small thing- the university title given to the head of these efforts. For the makerspace efforts on campus, MIT named a "Maker Czar."  Their choice of person makes sense- Dr. Culpepper has long been passionate about making and encouraging students to create things. What strikes me as odd though is the title. It's used prominently (such as here, on the MIT Project Manus website.) 

Oddly, this term is being used at other places as well, including Intel: "Intel has had a problem in the past communicating with makers, and appointed a "Maker Czar" to tackle that issue." (from this article  by Agam Shaw.) Like MIT, Intel picked an amazing, well-qualified, person for the role. That said... when asked who would make a good communicator to individuals in a grass roots movement, I generally don't think of a czar.

The maker movement is something I care a lot about.  I even wrote a book on it as I truly believe making, and the current use of it as a way of gathering people together, is important and has the potential to do a lot of good. I have spoken, more times than I can remember, about the powerful trends such as generosity and collaboration within the movement. Helping each other... leveling playing fields... and so on. Thus, I am truly confused as to how a number of leading organizations see "Czar" as the appropriate title for someone nurturing this mindset in their organization.

How did a word associated with Russian monarchs (and other Slavic Empire leaders) seem like a good choice? I never thought that my research on makers would have me digging into Russian history, but this might be a good point to mention that Tsar/Czar was the title given to Ivan the Great of Moscow who gained the Tsar title (technically "Tsar of All Russias") in 1547.  You may remember Ivan from your history classes as "Ivan the Terrible." Monarchies and the Maker Movement seem, to me, as things that should have very little to do with each other. Interestingly,I have yet to find an organization with a "Maker Czarina." Not only is Czar a word that is typically associated with dictatorships, it is also a gendered word. And yes, I do know that the US Government has a history of appoint Czars for various topics- again, makers using government naming conventions seems equally odd.

As leaders in many maker circles, MIT and Intel are organizations that are often emulated by others. I sincerely hope that this is one action that is not copied. The appointing of "czars" is something best left to history books, rather than in our spaces encouraging learning and collaboration.

The Maker Movement needs collaborators, mentors, and enthusiasm. The Maker Movement does not need Czars. 

PS: (9/26/16) While researching for this blog post, I came across the following quote, from MIT's Maker Czar. “Making is no longer just an MIT thing." (Making it Real, 6/12/16 )   My reply? Making was never just an "MIT thing."

Announcing: Playdates for Educators (of all sorts)!

One of my favorite things about leading UST's Playful Learning Lab and teaching in the Center for Engineering Education is the opportunity to meet and collaborate with incredible people, many of who are educators in a formal, or informal sense.  I've been thinking that it would be wonderful to have an opportunity to bring together a diverse group of people in the Twin Cities who are interested in Playful Learning and STEAM/iSTEM. Thus, I am delighted to announce that the Playful Learning Lab will be hosting monthly, free playdates for educators, artists, and makers who want to discuss, share, and try out, new ways of bringing joy and learning to our students. Details below:

Fall 2016 Playdates at UST

Who is hosting? AnnMarie Thomas and the  UST Playful Learning Lab

Who is invited? Formal and informal educators of all sort. Care about play and its role in learning? Then you are invited!

When will they be happening?

• Wednesday, September 21, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm
• Wednesday, October 26, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm
• Wednesday, November 30, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm
• Wednesday, December 14, from 7:00 to 9:00 pm

Where will the playdates happen?

We will be in the makerspace in the first floor of the Anderson Student Center on the St. Paul campus of the University of St. Thomas.

 What is a playdate? 

Each session will include a hands-on project led by Playful Learning Lab students, as well as ample time for discussion. We will also have a Show and Tell and we invite you to email us if you have something you'd like to share! We will also have a snack and lots of time to meet each other.

 How do I sign up?

Please email me ([email protected])so that we know how many people to set up for.

 

 

Project Notes: Cake and Capacitors

As summer comes to a close, I'm going to try to get a few posts up to show various projects that students in my Playful Learning Lab and/or I have been working on. The first one is... rather sweet. (TL;DR : Cake and Capacitors is a collaboration between my friend Chef Kate Sigel and I, in which we create custom interactive cakes.)

One of the great things about the collaboration our lab had with the Alinea restaurant group in Chicago was that it led to my meeting Chef Kate Sigel, an incredibly creative pastry chef. As I was collaborating with her husband Chef Eric Rivera, then head of research at Alinea, I got to spend time with Kate and to see the Sweet Tooth Cake Company. A few months later, when it was time to plan the food for the art exhibition my lab had curated, I knew we needed Kate to make a cake. But... what sort of cake does one make to open a show celebrating long term thinking and a clock being built to last for 10,000 years? Kate amazed us all by making a sugary version of part of the clock, complete with a sugar orrery ~1 foot in diameter. Yes, those silver rings are made of sugar, as are the gears. Even better, the cake was delicious.

 

Then Kate moved to Seattle, where she is now the executive pastry chef at Scout/The Nest at the Thompson Seattle. During my fall 2015 sabbatical, I went out to visit her and see what she and Eric were up to and we spent some time playing with cakes and electricity. We had fun figuring out which icing recipes were the best insulator and mixing conductive, metallic, edible traces.

                                        

As all things seem to, these experiments led to our playing with a Makey Makey. Experiments included a cake where each layer mapped to a different note, and using a thin (grounded) knife to cut it. We also turned some chocolate cakes into drums triggered by touch.

 

Around this time, I agreed to give a talk on Play at the "Factory of Imagination" conference in Denmark. The curator, Adam Montadon, saw the video above on Facebook and made a joke about how I should bring that idea to the factory for my talk. Kate and I talked it over and decided that this would be the perfect excuse for us to try out, for an audience, some of the techniques we'd been working on. (Of course it also meant we'd get to travel together to Denmark which didn't seem like a bad idea. Yay LEGO Land!) 

The best way to see what we ended up doing is to watch it in the FOI presentation- AnnMarie Thomas (if you're also willing to hear my presentation on play). To meet Adam's musical cake request, machinist/designer John Angeli made me the fanciest MaKeyMaKey interface that I have ever owned- friends now refer to it as a BlingyBlingy out of wood and brass. When we placed cupcakes on them- and grounded the user by handing them a balloon with a silver string cord- the pastry became a keyboard. I used some simple Scratch code to map the keys to the notes in "Happy Birthday" (and wrote the note order on my hand as a cheat sheet.)
 

However, I also wanted to have some pastry that allowed Kate to show off her crazy sculpting skills. As a surprise to the conference organizers, we also made a cake (working in the amazing Coworking Odense space for a few days) that matched the factory theme.  It ended up being a bit of a challenge to travel internationally with the ingredients needed to make, and bake, a beeping, light-up, exploding cake. That said, despite all of our luggage getting lost (then found) en route, we pulled it off. Pictures below.  

Kate and I have plenty of ideas for more interactive cakes so if you are interested in hiring us to create one (or teach a workshop on interactive cakes) please reach out! 

   

                         

Salon: Creating a monthly "play date" across time zones

In the fall of 2013, a friend surprised a group of us with a night out to see a show and have dinner together. It was wonderful and two of us (myself and Eric Rosenbaum) decided we wanted to find a way to return the favor. Our friend, however, wanted no part of that, and told us instead to "pay it forward." While we liked that idea, we wanted to pay it forward and backward at the same time. We decided to host a monthly gathering of some interesting people we wanted to get to know better, despite living in different time zones. We toyed with the idea of a virtual book club, but knew that none of our friends had time to read an assigned book each month.  I'm pretty proud of the solution we came up with...:

Short Version of salon: Once a month, on a google hangout, a group of 10 of us gather and simultaneously open the mystery package that one of our members has sent to each of us. We then spend an hour chatting and completing an experience that incorporates the packages contents. Each of the 10 members leads once, and we end with a gift exchange.

Detailed Version (in which the magic is found...):

Someone to organize (and be first host): I recommend a pair of hosts. For the 2014 salon group, I hosted with Eric Rosenbaum. For 2016, I am currently hosting with Lenore Edman. The co-hosts plan the invite list, handle inquiries, and generally assist all of the salon members with logistics.

Time/"Place" : I suggest that the two co-hosts pick a monthly time that works for them and uses that as a starting point. For example, "the second Monday of the month, at 6:30pmPT/7:30pmMT/8:30pmCT/9:30pmET." I use Google hangouts to run our salons.

People: I have limited the cohort for the 2014 and 2016 salons to 10 people. That works on Google hangouts, and is big enough to have really interesting discussions. For both of the cohorts that I've had, we used the following guidelines for deciding who to invite:

• One of the co-hosts should know the person, and be known by the person, but it shouldn't be a co-host's close friend. The goal is to invite people that you wish you knew better.
• No more than one person from a given company.
• No more than one person from a given household.  
• The more varied the group, the more fun we'll have. We have had writers,  scientists, artists, a minister, CEOs, circus performers, singers, early childhood educators, editors, high school teacher, etc. 

Monthly routine: Whichever salon member is presenting that month is responsible for sending out supplies to the other members. Who doesn't love getting a surprise in the mail? But no peeking... salon members open the packages together at the monthly meeting. Our groups have kept a mailing list with everyone's addresses in a shared Google drive. 

Final Meeting (gift exchange): Celebrate the final meeting by having each salon member mail a gift to each of the other 9 members. This doesn't have to be fancy... it could be a letter, a book, a donation to a non-profit. Be creative!

One Year Only: Salon lasts a year. Only one year. Then the members are encouraged to start their own, new, salon cohorts. 

The Invitation: Here is the invitation I used this year.

Subject: Invitation: “2016 Salon”

Hello Friends and Friends To Be-

In 2014, a group of friends/artists/scientists, including the two of us, started a monthly virtual salon. It was a wonderful experience, and we’ve decided to start another salon group for 2016.

Salon ’14 began as a way to do creative things with creative people, even though we live in different time zones. A way to spend one night a month together playing, chatting, learning, doing and making. (Also: we love getting fun things in the mail. Don’t you?)

We would like to invite you to participate in the 2016 Salon.

We invite you to a monthly google+ hangout salon. Each month one group member will be in charge of the program, and of (optionally) mailing out materials in advance to everyone else. Yes, physical mail! It could be some crafts materials, a mystery box to open during the salon, a weird food item, a papercraft kit, pigments to mix, a thumb drive, dried flowers… what will you send out?

WHAT: 60-90 minutes, hosted by a different group member each month.

WHEN: 2rd ___day of the Month (Starting 1/12/16) at 6:30pm Pacific, 7:30pm Mountain, 8:30 pm Central, 9:30 pm Eastern. (1/12/16, 2/9/16, 3/8/16, 4/12/16, 5/10/16, 6/14/16, 7/12/16, 8/9/16, 9/13/16, 10/11/16, 11/8/16, 12/13/16)

WHERE: Google+ Hangout (so we can all see each other.) You will need a gmail address for this to work.

WHO: You, of course. A total of 10 people, as broad a mix as we could come up with between us of artists, technologists, scientists, humanists, and everything in between. To help us pare down the list, we decided that we would only invite a single person from any given company, organization, or household.

Are you in? We hope so.

What's required of you:

• ATTEND! Each month. (Yes we all travel. We know you'll likely miss one or two over the year, but we wish you wouldn't. We promise that all salons are designed such that you can do them from a hotel room. :-) )

• HOST! We’ll each host one salon in 2016. Hosting means planning a way to engage the ~10 of us for 60-90 minutes. Be creative. (But also be respectful of everyone's time. We're not a book club. Pre-meeting prep for participants should take no longer than 30 minutes.) Want to teach us a math puzzle? Debate a topic? Teach origami (if so, send some paper in advance)? Have us taste some interesting edible thing? Collaboratively write a story?

• SIGN UP! Reply to this invitation by December 31, 2015 to let us know if you'll be participating. Please send us: your gmail address, your mailing address, and whether you have a preferred month to lead the salon. (January and February are already booked.)

Sincerely,

AnnMarie Thomas and Lenore Edman

 

 

The Trouble with STEM (at the university level)

This month I attended both TED and the inaugural ED FOO at Google. This meant that I got to have a lot of incredible conversations with other attendees and, unsurprisingly, many of our discussions had to do with education. (Good luck getting me to talk about other topics!) As I've said before, I wholeheartedly believe in the transformative power of education at all ages and all levels, formal and informal. As has been the case in most US-focused education discussions of late, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) was a hot topic. As was student college debt. Having these two conversations in parallel, repeatedly, made me think a lot about something that has been bothering me:

The expensive college education we are encouraging students to get in STEM is often, if not usually, delivered by professors who have no training in, or knowledge of, learning and pedagogy.

Most people would be upset if they found out that their child in a K-12 school was being taught by a teacher who had no education training whatsoever. In the US, though, that is unlikely to happen. Our public school systems require teachers to be certified, which involves testing and classes on education. (This is not the post where we will discuss the details of teacher certification.) Somewhat ironically, though, it is unlikely that the professor who teaches a STEM subject to that same student at the college level has ever taken a formal course in how to teach. A typical American PhD program in STEM does not require the student to teach a class on their own, or even as a teaching assistant (TA). In some schools, students only TA if there are not sufficient research funds for them, making teaching experience almost a consolation prize.

Knowing content doesn't mean that you automatically will be able to help others learn that same content. While it might be awesome for bragging rights to have a professor who has won a prestigious research award, that doesn't necessarily transfer to that same professor being able to successfully teach CHEM/PHYS/ENG/MATH/etc 101 to a room full of young adults who are often paying a lot of money to be there. The hiring process for faculty, particularly at universities known for their research programs, typically only includes a cursory evaluation of teaching. Similarly, while most university tenure committees have very rigorous external and internal review processes for the Research component of a professor's portfolio, I have heard colleagues from more than one school state that the teaching review essentially consists of little more than making sure they're not awful in a classroom. Even worse (as I touched on in this post) those professors will also only rarely have been taught how to help students with different learning styles and varying levels of academic preparation.

To be clear: There are many excellent educators teaching STEM at the college level. That said, there isn't a solid mechanism to ensure that, and rarely have I heard high school students (and their parents) told to investigate the teaching quality at the universities they are looking at. As this country loudly tells students how important it is for them to study STEM, to the point that we encourage them to accrue debt to pursue those degrees, we should also be asking whether they will be getting a quality education out of this endeavor.

 

why I don't embrace failure (ED FOO lightening talk)

My friends know that I'm very particular about the talks that I give. I am picky about pictures, slide layout and messaging. I never use notes.  I plan. And I had a plan, earlier this week, for the talk I'd give at ED FOO tonight (a <5 minute "lightening talk.) It would be on my disliking the celebration of failure, but I planned for it to be a fairly light talk. However, after attending sessions at the event I realized that the talk I had planned wasn't the talk I should give. So I wrote a new one in the notebook conference attendees were given... and read my essay, from notes, in front of 100 or so attendees tonight. Below is the text- first time I've had a "script," so it's a pretty close to exact transcript. 

Fail fast.

Embrace failure.

Fail fast to succeed sooner.

Early in my academic career, as a young engineering professor who also taught educators, I was excited by this concept. Personally I've failed - literally, gotten "F"s in more than my share of academic challenges- so the "learning to embrace failure" message was, at first, exciting and reaffirming.

I was wrong and naive.

These phrases are thrown around at conferences and on stages by people most of us would consider very successful. And now this verbiage has travelled to K-12. I've seen "embrace failure" written on classroom walls and have even been asked by a school district to develop a curriculum on embracing failure. (How do you grade that? Pass/fail? If you "pass" do you "fail?")

I think this whole concept is lying to kids.

The school that has "Embrace Failure" written on the wall in the design space rarely, if ever, has a mechanism to embrace the child who gets an F in math class. I pointed this out to an education researcher who quickly replied that "kids know the difference between types of failure." Really? I work with kids in settings where, to quote a youth social worker, "they are born into failure"- that there are many kids who have failed fast by birth. The data doesn't show that that leads them to "succeeding faster."

So I can't cheer the celebration of that word. How dare we, as those with voices at conferences, tell a child we support failure in one room of a school house but then let them walk into a room where an F means they lose a scholarship or are punished at home.

Embrace failure? No. Encourage exploration, risk taking, making "fantastic mistakes" [to borrow a phrase from author Neil Gaiman] in certain settings.

But let's stop lying to kids about the F word.

Our school systems don't embrace failure, and it seems cruel to be asking kids, particularly vulnerable kids, to have to navigate what "good failure" is.

I think I understand your sentiment, but your semantics worry me. Language matters. I don't embrace failure.

Addendum to "Notes from a C Student": Let's talk about Gender

(You might want to read the original post first: HERE ).

When I wrote the "Notes from a 'C' Student" blog post on Monday, I didn't realize how many people would reach out to me with "me too" comments. I have to admit that, even now, it made me feel better to know that I wasn't the only "C student" and that many of the successful engineers I know were also part of this club.

I intentionally left something out of that post, thinking at the time it wasn't critical. Last night I read articles about sexual harassment of graduate students, by a professor, at the school that I was a "C graduate student," and realized that I couldn't leave my story incomplete. [For the record: I consider myself incredibly fortunate that I had two wonderfully supportive graduate advisors, and realize what an amazing situation that was.]

What my post Monday should have been was "Notes from a Female C Student." You see, of the three people I mentioned in that elevator conversation, I was the only woman. I've written before about my experiences as a woman in male dominated tech fields. Getting through graduate school, particularly when things are graded on a curve, means that study groups become crucial. If the study group is all male, and you're new to the school or you don't know them well, that means you are meeting up in an empty building or someone's apartment. At 1 am when you are in an empty building working on problem sets with people you barely know, it's hard not to notice being the only woman. I'm fortunate, I had a great group of study partners (almost all male, since most of my classes were all male.)

I also had reason to be nervous at times in graduate school. In the first month of graduate school, had  a male student overhear that I didn't have plans that evening. He then showed up at my apartment door (I'd never told him where I lived) and insisted we go on a date since I didn't have plans. I went because I didn't know what else to do. I insisted we walk to a crowded restaurant, on a busy street and didn't let him into my apartment.  This all sounds naive now but... keep in mind that I was in a tiny graduate program. We were supposed to form study groups, I knew no one, and was worried that if I slammed the door on him I'd be accused of over reacting. I was uncomfortable that entire dinner, and if I'm honest "scared" is probably the correct word. I spent a year avoiding this person in our building's hallways.

To get my experiments done, I worked (usually alone) in labs and offices. Sometimes at night. My parents warned me against this, as did some of my friends (and my boyfriend-then-husband), but honestly... if you can only graduate if you get your dissertation done and the only time you can get equipment is in the middle of the night or on weekends, or by working in basements, well that's what you do. Grad school rarely lasts less than five years and I sure as heck wasn't going to drag it out for extra years. I was also convinced that I was less skilled than the other students and had to work extra hard to catch up.

I once had an older graduate student, who often served as a teaching assistant for classes profess his extreme interest in me in person and in emails. Again, this is someone who knew where my office was and that I worked late. I managed to avoid taking a class where he was the grader. I'd be lying if I said that as I was sitting there for what I thought was a friendly coffee to talk about engineering, and realizing it was instead a chance to be told how much I was liked, that I didn't try to figure out if turning him down would have an immediate effect on my grades. In grad school... grades matter. I avoided having him as a grader.

As I wrote Monday "C students don't belong in graduate school" is something that I am still hearing, and I wasn't just a C student. I was someone who was working 17+ hour days to be a C student. You don't know anyone's entire story. Ever.

So if I'm honest about why I spoke up in that elevator... it was because as these male professors were so casually ruling out students based on their grades, I found myself wondering about the backstories. Clearly the university was allowing the students to get C's and stay, so why did these profs take it upon themselves to declare the students unworthy for PhDs? There's always more to that story... If you're going to say that a "C is an F" then give them an F, but don't make them jump over an artificial bar.

Notes from a "C Student"

Recently I was in an elevator at an engineering conference where another attendee made the comment "If you get C's in graduate school you don't belong in graduate school." The other professor in the elevator muttered in agreement. And I stood there debating whether to say something. My gut instinct was to say nothing, but I was at an engineering education conference and, well... I disagreed with what they were saying. Why? Because if they were right, I didn't deserve to be in that elevator. There I was, a tenured engineering professor, who had gotten some C's in grad school.

The best response I could offer at that moment though was "It depends on where you went." I was asked to name a school where this could be so, and mumbled my alma mater's name. I got a "C's are F's for grad students" reply. I let it drop. But... as we walked to the conference dinner he turned to me, with what I perceived to be a smirk, and asked me "What major did they allow you to graduate with C's in." He didn't reply when I answered "Mechanical Engineering, working in the robotics lab, at Caltech," and frankly I was glad the conversation ended because I felt myself falling into the pit of self doubt that I had repeatedly been in as a graduate student.

Did I get C's in grad school? Yes. I also got A's and B's. Typically if the class asked me to do a self-directed project, I got an A. (Software to calculate the Denavit-Hartenberg paramaters for different robotic hand configurations? I'm on it!)  Asking me to take a three-to-four hour long test on theory? Well, typically I'd panic and it didn't go well... hello C's. Stand alone in a classroom for an hour at a time in front of a panel of professors who could ask me whatever they wanted about Control Theory, Mechanical Design, and Complex Analysis, for my doctoral qualifying exams? Scary... but I passed. (Interestingly, you don't get grades on those. You pass or you don't. Which makes a lot of sense. If you know enough to do the research you need to do, who cares if you know it at Professor X's A level or B level?)

Yet, I've heard this elevator conversation and its variants repeatedly in academic circles. Do A's make you a better engineer, or do they mean you were able to pass that test? Keep in mind that few universities have absolute bars for what makes an "A" or a "B". Additionally, I know very few Engineering professors who have ever studied learning pedagogy or education. Yet they get to give those grades.  If it is agreed upon by some profs that "grad students who get C's don't belong in grad school" who do we lose? Should we only take the classes we'll get A's in?

Do I wish I had gotten more A's? Sure, that would have been nice. But I didn't give up. I worked hard in lab, I went to office hours,and  I picked classes based on what I was interested in and what I needed for a PhD... not on what would have been an "easy" A for me. At a time when we are looking for new perspectives on major problems facing society, I worry about the not-rare sentiment that the only ones who "should be" Engineering PhDs are those who get A's in classes taught by people who aren't necessarily taught how to teach. Some of the best students who've worked in my research group were (undergraduate) students with mixed grades, others were straight A students. I haven't found that the grade itself is what determines how a student will function in a real-life engineering situation. Persistence, that means a lot. Also a curiosity about the world, coupled with a willingness to try things that they may not be an "A student" at.

 

 

 

 

Sponsors Wanted: Engineering Education for Educators

{TL;DR: We are considering dramatically increasing the number of classes we offer in Engineering Education at UST, based on the hundreds of applications we have received in the last 2 weeks from Educators around the country. Thanks to Google, we can offer our current spring/summer classes with full scholarships, but we are looking for additional sponsors so as to increase our capacity!}

Hello blog reading friends!

I've never done this before, but I'm going to use this forum to ask for some help. As hopefully all of you know, my passion is working with educators, and through the UST Center for Engineering Education I am part of an amazing team working to bring high quality integrated STEM/Making/Engineer professional development to formal and informal educators at a low cost.

Thanks to the amazing generosity of a sponsorship from Google, our classes this Spring and Summer will be free of cost to teachers. These are graduate-credit bearing courses taught by some incredibly motivated and talented faculty from our schools of Engineering, Education, and Business.

The amazing thing is that now, only two weeks after this was announced, we have hundreds of teachers from schools and libraries throughout Minnesota, the United States and even the world, who have applied. The applications are incredible, and the letters we are receiving make it clear that our program is quite unique. Our graduates of the program have spoken highly of it and we are confident that we can continue to deliver high quality immersive experiences to educators.This is where you all come in! I've been speaking to the staff and faculty at the university and everyone is on board to start increasing the number of classes we have. At the current rate of applications, we are on track to have over 200 applications for 24 spots in our Spring design class. Each of these applicants is an educator willing to take this class on top of their normal workload, and spend one weekend a month in our labs and classrooms learning content and pedagogy to bring back to their students. We have 100s more applications for our summer courses ("Engineering in the PK-12 Classroom," "Digital Electronics and Computing Systems", and "Material Science and Engineering." We also have requests to add another "Engineering Design" course this summer.)

My dream is that we continue to be able to offer scholarships to teachers even beyond this summer (and for additional classes), and our CEE team is working to make this a reality. However, we are also trying to speed up our timeline.

If you, your foundation, or your company would be interested in joining Google as a scholarship sponsor, please reach out to me ([email protected]) or Dr. Deb Besser (director of the UST Center for Engineering Education, [email protected] )

 

 

2015 Ends: Gratitude and Graduations

Somehow it’s January again, thus marking the end of another calendar year and, with it, my first academic sabbatical. Fall of 2015 gave me many opportunities to realize how incredibly grateful I am for the amazing students and collaborators that I get to work with through the Playful Learning Lab and the UST Center for Engineering Education. Alas, one sad part of a semester ending is that it inevitably means some of our lab members will be graduating. The lab’s two fall 2015 graduates were instrumental in starting major new initiatives so I wanted to take a few moments to share their work here.

Brynn Kasper (Mechanical Engineering, BS)

 

When Brynn applied to join the lab, it was originally for a position working on Squishy Circuits. However, over the course of her interview it became clear that she was passionate about her studies in American Sign Language. I asked her if she’d consider helping start up an engineering education outreach program to Metro Deaf School. Not only did Brynn say yes, but as of December 2016, two separate groups of students at Metro Deaf School have gone through the “Engineering Exploration” afterschool program that she designed, working with other students from the Playful Learning Lab.  As Brynn leaves UST, we are laying the groundwork to possibly expand this program to other schools, and finishing up a research paper on the first two cohorts to go through the program. This video is a wonderful introduction to Brynn and her work.

Brynn will be beginning her career at the 3M Company in February as a Project Engineer. 

 

Alex Kermes (Art History, MA)

 

Alex has the distinction of being both the first graduate student to join the playful learning lab and the first Art History student to work with us. Which is fitting since Alex created an art exhibition space and curated it’s first show. “Designed to Last: A Look at the Projects of the Long Now Foundation” opened on September 8, 2015, and will be up in the UST Facilities and Design building (3^rd floor) through May 2016. Alex led this entire process. From flying out to San Francisco and meeting with Alexander Rose and Laura Welcher from the Long Now Foundation to choose artifacts for the exhibition, to working with a sign installation company to put a 200+ square foot photo mural on the wall of the new FDC building… Alex was up to the challenge. It was amazing to watch how fearlessly Alex went about learning new skills and coordinating the efforts of woodworkers, installers, shipping companies, and UST staff to make this show a reality.  Not to mention, he did this while writing his dissertation on the  18th/19th century portraitist Joshua Johnson.

How We End a Semester

It has become tradition for the Playful Learning Lab to do something to celebrate the ending of the semester. In the past this has usually meant a group flying trapeze lesson! However, this year’s party coincided with the “Ferran Adrià: Notes on Creativity” Exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Our lab has collaborated a bit with the team behind Alinea restaurant and we got a chance to work with Chefs Kate Sigel and Eric Rivera for the above mentioned September 8 art opening. Thus, it seemed fitting to celebrate a successful semester with a visit to this incredible exhibition, and a dinner at Saffron.

Onward to 2016!