How to create a generation of happy, coding kids

By , 29 July 2015 at 12:10
How to create a generation of happy, coding kids
Digital Life

How to create a generation of happy, coding kids

By , 29 July 2015 at 12:10

There’s a lot of talk about getting girls in STEM -science, technology, engineering and math- and just getting kids into these areas in general. And there’s no doubt, even as a political science graduate turned writer and marketer, I learned loads by dissecting animals and running experiments and surely earned some valuable character points while I struggled through maths. Having a well-rounded education is essential to everyone.

But a lot of that talk is very economic – we have a huge labour gap in the STEM world, right? Well, not entirely. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, the only STEM category with far more job openings than respective university majors is CompSci.

As we continue to become mobile-dependent and as we move into the even broader world of the Internet of Things, the trend is only toward more jobs, yet still fewer students.

But how do we get kids into one of the most “uncool” professions out there? By playing of course!

The unique power of creating something, not buying it

Raspberry Pi has kids designing their own video games. Kano has them building their own desktop computers. Berkley’s Snap is a fun and simple, drag-and-drop programming language. The ability for kids to create has gone way past crayons and Legos.

Think about it, what if you were a kid and had an idea and were just given the tools and quickly taught the knowhow to create something straight out of your head? Heck, what about now? There’s no doubt there’s something powerful about building your own anything from scratch. That’s just what MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld had in mind when he built the first FabLab back in 2001.

fab kids

A FabLab – or fabrication laboratory – is “a library for a new kind of literacy,” where we actually get our brains active and our hands dirty. And that’s just what I found when I stumbled into a room of seeming chaos two doors down from my office – instantly overwhelmed by the sound of printers, lasers, motors turning over, and keyboards click-clacking.

After a lovely little girl showed me how she was 3-D printing a personalized iPhone case for a friend, I sat down with one of the few grown-ups, Matthieu Laverne to talk about his experimental makers lab for kids and its effect on the whole family.

“The parents are also going in and saying, ‘Wow that’s possible? My kid can do that? Does that mean I could do that’?” which fits nicely with Laverne’s long-term goal of creating a school of craft work and technology for kids aged three to a 103.

He looks at the makers movement as a lesson for kids of all ages that “Not everything that you need and that you can use needs to be made in China…Make it here and make it yourself and I help you figure it out.”

Think about it, what if you were a kid and had an idea and were just given the tools and quickly taught the knowhow to create something straight out of your head?

There’s of course a certain pride in making something by yourself, but Laverne thinks “making” has another importance for kids. “First you realize that if you really want something, there are other means than harassing your parents until they buy it for you. They also realize that whatever they learn has a direct application,” and start to think of the possibility to create things.

Instead of the more popular term STEM, he adds an A in there for the arts. STEAM works on bringing creativity into the mix, to help kids – and adults – realize that engineering is a creative science too where you are always designing and building something. He told me about a little girl who wanted to make a ladybug, which he said was fine, once she figured out what material she could use and how to integrate designing, programming and robotics into her plan.

But like all things involving STEM or STEAM, we tend to come back to the gender issue. “Parents have a lot of responsibility to offer kids different options like this, irrespective of sex.” Every week, the kids and their varying teachers work on different projects, like the Music Factory where they had to 3D design a guitar shape, cut it out with a laser printer, and then use Snap to write the program for the music in order to play it using simple circuits they wired to the thin wooden guitars themselves.

“Despite all of the excitement and energy around STEM, it turns out that when you exclude computer science from STEM, you see that the remaining STEM fields have too many students, and not enough jobs,” wrote Hadi Partovi, co-founder of Code.org, an organization to get kids into computing.

 

Music is pretty much a gender neutral endeavor, but when he talked about the prospect of doing a baking week with 3D designing and printing cookie cutters, a mom promptly responded that he’d only get girls.

Likewise, no girls decided last week to build their own Internet of Things car. But when’s the last time any of us girls were given a car as a present? He’s witnessed his own sons saying “That’s not for you” to their little sister trying to play with their toys. Beyond advertising that cars are for boys and Barbies are for girls, he admits that “If they say that, I’m probably partly responsible.”

Some makers specifically hold girls’ makers classes. “My dream is I won’t have to, but one day I can make a jewelry class and some boys join.”

How else is the youngest generation learning to make stuff for themselves again? Tell us below or tweet to @tefdigital!

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