Week 2

Welcome to Week 2!  Now that we’ve kicked off our semester we started week 2 eager to learn more and keep exploring the maker-centered learning community.

We started the week off having lunch as a team!  This gave us the opportunity to get to know one another better and try a smorgasbord of different foods.

After meeting with our faculty to share our current research findings, we met with John Balash, the ETC’s Director of Educational Outreach.  John shared his experience developing after school experiences on the West Coast. He also spoke to his experience working in the MuseumLab at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.  These are some of the big take-aways from our conversation with John:

• John defined the maker-centered learning space as “using the material you have to make something new” 
• He reminded us that what we think is fun might not actually be exciting for the students and that we should follow their curiosity, reward it, and encourage them to keep pursuing mastery of a topic.  
• Technology can also be a good touch point because so many students are already familiar with it and understand how to interact with it.  
• It’s important to create an experience that incorporates facilitation and positive reinforcement or feedback.  He further explained how different the dynamic can be depending on who is facilitating the interaction.  
• Evaluating maker-centered learning can be tricky because of all the variables involved: what is the setting, the activity, what the student brings to the table, and who is facilitating.  Furthermore, when students are engaged, it can be hard to pinpoint when students have a breakthrough, or the breakthrough could occur much later, long after the interaction.  
• John believes there is room in Maker Education for more embedded play, deeper immersion into a subject, and incorporating the next steps after the initial interaction.  
• John helped put us in touch with Matt Chilbert from Bird Brain Technologies and Nina Barbuto from Assemble who we hope to talk to in the future.  
• He also shared his love of Legos as a platform for making and even shared the latest Lego Education Kit with the team!  

Thank you John for sharing your insights and help identifying ways to make our project more meaningful.   

The team also met with Jesse Schell, one of our BVW Instructors and the creator of Happy Atoms.  The team had the opportunity to try Happy Atoms at the STEAM Showcase and we liked how it combined digital technology with physical inputs.  (Our team is particularly interested in incorporating a physical component to whatever we develop.) Jesse also helped develop the MAKESHOP at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.  From Jesse we learned:

• Happy Atoms is successful because there’s a satisfying physical interaction with a meaningful digital interaction.  Both interactions serve different purposes but are equally effective
• It was designed for students working independently at home exploring chemistry
• It supports 3 different modes of interaction: students who want to know what to do, students who want to explore, and a quest system for students who want challenges but not always answers
• Happy atoms uses  rubber bonds between the molecules because they observed that playtesters wouldn’t put the molecules down
• They also found that players preferred to have more pieces to play with 
• Jesse cautioned us about picking a direction too soon and limiting ourselves by trying to fit into predetermined structure.  He described it as “having a solution with no problem” and encouraged us to look at what problems makerspaces have and what Maker Ed does successfully.
• He described two kinds of formats seen in makerspaces: step-by-step activities, and guest-directed invention with the biggest variable between the two being time.  Jesse encouraged us to look at the mode of interaction our guests will have

Thank you, Jesse for sharing your insights and sharing Happy Atoms with us!  As a team we enjoyed setting up a glucose molecule for the app to detect.

This week as a team we also delved into the Transformational Framework.  The Transformational Framework is a structure developed by Sabrina Culyba and Schell Games for creating games and experiences that are intended to be transformational in varying capacities.  The framework covers everything from what the goals for participant transformation are to what resources already exist on the subject and who should you talk to about the subject.  

(https://press.etc.cmu.edu/index.php/product/the-transformational-framework/)

As a team, the framework is especially helpful when it comes to parsing through our research and both identifying and answering questions about our project.  On Wednesday Dave gave us a crash course on the 8 topics of the Transformation Framework:

• Why is it important that your game transforms players?
• What is the ecosystem in which your game must create change?
• How will players be different?
• Why aren’t players already transformed? (What barriers are there and how do we address them?)
• What is essential to include in the game to transform players?
• Domain concepts or What is it that we are doing and what is it that we are not doing?
• Experts to consult with
• What can we learn from what others have done? (Papers, articles, products, etc….)
• How do we measure the impact?

And on Thursday we went to the Transformational Framework Workshop with Sabrina.  As a team we learned we want to know more about the development process different projects have gone through, what are subjects outside the norm of maker-centered learning that we could pursue, what subjects are our target audience interested in, and research into past projects.  

Following the workshop and crash course, Isabel and I determined what parts of the framework we wanted to immediately address as a team.  We asked our team to respond with post-its to the questions:

• What’s the benefit for the audience from this transformation? And Why is the project important to us?
• How will the players be different after the experience?
• What is essential to include in order to transform participants?
• What subjects are you seeing less in maker-centered learning?

As a team we identified that we are hoping to see more of a behavior/identity/emotion change as a result of our experience.  Instead of trying to teach players a particular skill, we hope that by participating in what we create players will gain a new perspective as a result of the experience.  We want the experience to be beneficial to our audience by providing them with a new experience that intrigues them and brings them joy. As a team we are excited about the opportunity to bring a project to life and positively impact our audience.  We realized that what’s essential for our project to be transformative is that it supports learning and exploration, is replayable, includes facilitation and feedback, and that our audience buys into the experience. We also identified sports, game design, advanced math, biology, and history as some of the subjects we have seen less of in maker-centered education.

As a team we also attended the Playtest to Explore Workshop on Wednesday.  This also gave us the opportunity to synthesize the information we have so far to gain a better understanding of what we still need.  We had the chance to solicit our peers about what they saw as important to learn about when it comes to game design. Iteration, defining the problem, and being open to a variety of ideas were all suggestions from our classmates that could be considered as educational goals for an experience centered around game design.  As a team it was challenging for us to put together our Composition Box. We are working to be diligent and intentional about our research, but it can be tricky to make decisions or set constraints without knowing who our partner will be. We are trying to gain understanding so that we can make informed decisions, but I know that we are all eager to make decisions in order to give ourselves plenty of time to iterate and refine our idea.

We ended the week visiting with Rebecca Grabman (ETC Class of 2012) and Sarah La Rue who run the MAKESHOP at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.  We had a great visit and seeing the MAKESHOP and their projects helped to broaden our perspective on what Maker- Centered Learning and Education can encapsulate.  The open-ended, scaleable, exploratory nature of the programming and projects was inspiring. Their respect for their audience at all ages and belief in their visitors to make brilliant things is exciting to see and something we hope to emulate in our own project.  In a conversation with Rebecca, Sarah, and two educators in the MAKESHOP, we discussed what Maker Education encapsulates, how it can be better, and what structure the MAKESHOP employs for their programming.  

• Everyone’s definition included exploration of tools, materials, and or processes to create something in a meaningful way.  They emphasized process over product.
• Internally they have reflection sheets to document activities and evaluate them.  They also agreed it can be tricky to evaluate due to the many variables involved
• They noted that overcoming the barrier of adult apprehension about students using different kinds of tools can be tricky, but when it can be done the impact can be substantial
• Something we could consider implementing (and something they’re also trying to improve upon) is having a more structured orientation to the activity to give students a better idea of what to expect
• They liked the idea of taking things a step further to make the process more intentional and to allow for greater creativity
• They also talked about the importance of a flexible facilitator mindset.  When asked what would be important to communicate to future facilitators using what we develop, they suggested the experience goals and the assumptions the design makes
• The MAKESHOP’s constraints are based on their own pre-determined “Principles of Practice” that include knowing it will be informal and accommodate an all-ages, intergenerational audience.  They cited their sewing programming as an example because it supports all levels of sewing- those who might have never used a needle or thread in their lives, to a skilled embroiderer
• They also recommended looking at the MakerEd Toolkit for making spaces, the Center for Creative Reuse, and the Hatch Art Studio.

Thank you to Rebecca and her team for the chance to have fun and learn about the MAKESHOP’s approach to maker-centered learning!

This week was a big week for team STEAMineer.  We learned lots of things, focused our efforts, and further connected with the Maker community in Pittsburgh.  Stay tuned as we identify our transformational goals, connect with more experts, launch our website, and create project artwork!