Paper, please

Guest contributor Ken Hawthorn is back with a great art + geometry activity you can try with your family. Ken is the founder of Austin School for the Driven, a unique environment of experiential learning, the hacker mindset, and outdoor education, all curated by community. He is the author of Super Arduino and consults with both Austin Community College and the University of Texas at Austin on makerspace education and design.

Paper is a structural material that forms the basis for so many wonderful math, science, and art projects at school and at home. From slide rules to “sharks with frickin laser beams,” paper is an amazing place to start!

Today I want to share some recent explorations of pop-up card geometry and even provide you, dear reader, with the actual files we used in class at Driven so you can make the same project at home with a Cricut, scissors, or an X-ACTO knife.

The below picture is a prototype pop-up card design students constructed in the third week of school at Driven. The genesis of the idea was a collaboration between Adam Soto, a literacy teacher at Griffin School, and me, Ken Hawthorn. Adam works with his students to individually go through the process of writing their own novel. Adam and I were looking for meaningful project-based intersections that combined the makerspace and the novel-writing project.

We realized that cards people give each other are really about the story of two people and the relationship between them. A spouse purchases a card that has symbols and words that proclaim appreciation and love for a partner, mom might get a handmade card from a child with a drawing of the whole family, or a co-worker might select a card that expresses how good the recipient is at being an inclusive member of the team. Whatever the occasion, the well-chosen card will usually express not just a particular sentiment, but also images and words that reflect a relationship and shared experiences between two people. When a third party reads a card, originally given from one person to another, they can infer a lot about the story of that relationship based on the design of the card and the words used.

With this in mind, why not have students make cards that are not from one person to another, but that encapsulate the important parts of the novel they are reading or writing? In this case, students at Driven wanted to look at a fairytale castle. Below are the steps they took to create a pop-up castle card.

 
Here is a link to the svg file you can use for your own geometric explorations.

Ken Hawthorn | Austin School for the Driven

Now this really looks like an alligator!

Marie Catrett is back with another glimpse into the world of children’s learning and growth at Tigerlily Preschool in South Austin. Marie is inspired by Reggio Emilia and informed by her deep curiosity and many years of experience working with young children. This guest contribution is adapted from one of her regular letters to Tigerlily families.

5/4/2023

Marie writes:

Today is a fine example of how we can help children think more deeply about their work and loan them the use of our skills in a way that helps them grow their own.              

Marie (as we’re headed into the classroom, to R, a young three-year-old in our group): I have a question I want to ask you, about the alligator you made in clay yesterday.

R’s alligator is a flat face figure, with drawn-in eyes and a cheerful mouth, and this piece stands up because he added a nice big tail at the back in response to my asking, “Can you think of anything else your alligator needs?”

Today we look at Alligator together. It’s so charming as is, and doesn’t necessarily need any further embellishment if R doesn’t want to go further, but maybe . . .

Marie: Here’s a question I have for you. I notice you drew the alligator’s mouth, and I wanted to ask you something. May I look at a picture of an alligator with you?

We look at some pages from a well-known current story in our group, Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile.

Illustration by Julie Paschkis, in Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile, by Won-Ldy Paye and Margaret H. Lippert.

Marie: I’m wondering (this is me asking children about their work, are you satisfied?), sometimes people make an alligator and it feels important to show about teeth. It’s up to you (me, really working hard to make a yes or a no thanks be acceptable here, the maker truly is in charge, but the opportunity to add a meaningful detail is always exciting to me!), but if you’re interested in adding teeth to your alligator, that’s something we could think about together.

R looks at the pictures and announces that yes, his alligator needs some teeth.

My co-teacher, Lulu, has the excellent idea that it might also help to go look at the toy alligator that’s been such a popular player in the classroom this week.

From earlier in the week: the wild animals birthday party, no wilding allowed.

Re: no wilding allowed at the party, the alligators take a meeting.

Ah ha, looking back at play this week, it makes sense that thinking about alligators has been on R’s mind, enough to want to make one with the clay.

And while looking at images can help kids think more about what they want to do, touching an example of what they’re thinking about is even better.

R explores the mouth of the alligator. His first “face” alligator is also in the frame above.

I am imagining helping him add bits of clay to his drawn mouth line to make the wanted addition of teeth happen, but R now has a richer vision of how to make this alligator more alligator-y.

 R: I think an alligator should have an open mouth. And teeth. And a tongue that sticks out.

Marie: Hmmm. Wow. Okay. Oh! You know what, when my potter friend Jane came to show us about how she uses clay, she said starting with a pinch pot is a great way to make creatures. Would you like to try that?

Yes, says R, and we get a small ball of clay out to begin with a pinch pot. When it’s big enough, and turned on its side, R sees the shape he needs to decide it’s an open mouth. He adds eyes on top by drawing them on, in the way he’d done on the “face” version.

 Marie: I heard you say about teeth. I can think of two ways you could add those . . .

I take an extra bit of clay and show him some options to think about. You could use the tool to draw them in, as he’s done his eyes. Fingers could pinch up some teeth bumps maybe? Or . . .

Marie: These are just to show some ideas, but you’re the maker, so it’s up to you what you’d like to do.

R likes the idea of using his fingers to make “teeth shapes” out of clay. He places them where he thinks they need to go on the mouth, and I help him make them attach securely.

Marie: You know what, I bet you could also make a tongue shape like you’re wanting.

From left to right: R’s first and then second alligator.

As we’re looking at the finished work, an older child says, with admiration, of the second piece: “Wow, now this really looks like an alligator!”

One of my favorite things about striving to be a Reggio-inspired teacher is working with children like this:

I hear your interesting idea.
Let’s think more about this together.
I see a way that I can be a resource for what you’re wanting to do.
Here are some options to think about what feels right to you.
What do you think?
And, are you satisfied?

Marie Catrett | Tigerlily Preschool

The case for expectation-free, exploratory music learning

Grace Thompson is a voice and piano teacher based in Austin. She is a classically trained soprano who graduated from Kennesaw State University in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in music–ethnomusicology. A longtime advocate for the neurodiverse community, Grace joins us on the blog to discuss her nontraditional methods of teaching music to kids through the Groove Garden program at Eastside Music School.

Musicking: (v.) any activity that includes playing, performing, listening, writing,
recording, or sharing music.

Childhood music lessons. We’ve all been there before, or maybe you haven’t. A parent has signed you up for a music lesson—piano, guitar, violin, or maybe even singing—and you’re getting ready to demonstrate to your teacher what you were meant to have practiced in the time since your last lesson.

Only you haven’t practiced or didn’t get as much practice time as you wanted. Teachers always can tell when a student hasn’t practiced, and you know walking in that your teacher will pick up on your lack of practice. Does this make me a bad student? A bad musician? Will my teacher be mad at me? Or disappointed? Will I ever learn to play this instrument?

As you go to play your instrument, these fears and anxieties course through your still-developing brain and begin to distract you and tell you that you’re not good enough. Playing your instrument has now turned from a fun hobby after school to an insurmountable test. The traditional private music lesson environment can, unfortunately, breed these sentiments in students, eventually turning students off from music as a whole.

Now imagine yourself as an atypical learner. Traditional learning environments are already not geared toward you, and now there is compounded stress from not being able to meet the expectations set by your teacher. These expectations have been set from a hegemonic system of learning music that is centuries old. This system of learning does not reflect the modern learner and is, in part, creating more failures than successes.

As a music teacher, I define success as a student being happily engaged in their studies, followed by an improvement in their technical and theoretical abilities. To support this type of musical education, the environment must be conducive to every learner, and we can create these environments by leading exploratory-driven, expectation-free music classrooms.

Musicking is a life-long process that no one will ever truly master. It is the embodiment of “about the journey, not the destination,” so we should present to students this idea of a musical journey. Twists, turns, and unforeseen circumstances may occur on our journey through a musical life, and allowing students to explore for themselves will well-equip them to navigate these changes. Perhaps a violin student watches a harpist and becomes enamored with this new instrument, or a classical piano student wants to begin playing jazz repertoire. These changes in instrument or repertoire are not typically supported in a traditional music education environment due to the expectations to stay with and master one particular instrument or genre.

Taking out the expectations of a traditional music classroom environment gives students fewer restrictions to explore different areas of music they might not have been exposed to before, and more confidence to try without the fear of failure or rejection. Expectation-free learning passes the baton into the hand of the students to create and express themselves without any limitations. Autonomy is given back to the child, therefore creating a more enthusiastic student. Exploration-led classrooms also promote social growth through a free exchange of ideas between peers, unclouded by any pre-existing musical “rules.”

Music education is vital to all people, but especially children, as it has been linked with a plethora of brain-boosting qualities such as supporting language and reasoning skills, emotional intelligence, coordination and fine motor skills, memorization and imagination, and intellectual curiosity, among many others (see nafme.org). Learners who find themselves on the Autism spectrum or any other spectrum of learning differences can especially reap the benefits from any of these characteristics.

Music plays a part in many other fields of academia, and finding an interest in music can help support other areas of interest for students as well, such as math, science, visual arts, and history. Music also supports a social outlet for students who lack interaction with peers, whether because of developmental differences or more solitary forms of education such as homeschooling or virtual learning.

Eastside Music School’s Groove Garden is an inclusive music class for children of all ages, backgrounds, and learning styles. It’s designed for kids to learn and make music together in a way not normally offered in traditional music classes or private lessons. Parents are also welcome to join their students as parents play a fundamental role in the student/teacher relationship. We encourage exploration-based learning as well as expectation-free instruction. In this class, we aim to give students the basics of music education, such as rhythm, melody, harmony, and instrument types, while also allowing for independent and group playing as well as encouraging student leadership and autonomy. While children in traditional music education are often given very little voice, if any, in what they choose to study, at the Groove Garden, we allow students to have a say in what kinds of music to study and activities they enjoy.

The next Groove Garden class will be held on Thursday April 27, from 3pm to 4pm at Eastside Music School.

Grace Thompson | Groove Garden

Why I instruct my students in the art of lock picking

Guest contributor Ken Hawthorn is the founder of Austin School for the Driven. Students at Driven smash educational silos and question the premise of the question in their learning journey. Hawthorn is the author of Super Arduino. Outside of Driven, he consults with both Austin Community College and the University of Texas at Austin on makerspace education and design.

The Real Deal

Over the last eight years, I have offered my students instruction in lock picking. I am not talking about just sticking a paperclip in a hallway doorknob, but how to systematically pick the same locks you find on 80 percent of residential and business front doors. I offer this instruction starting in 5th grade. For students to get consistent at this skill, they need quite a few hours of practice. Why would I take class time to do this?

A Physical Analogy for Life

The person who does not know how to pick locks lives in a world where every locked door is a hard no. There is no choice to open that door. Having taught perhaps 400+ people to pick locks over the years, I have never had one student, child or adult, report back to me that they changed their behavior in any way after learning to do it. So why am I teaching this skill?

The answer is that there is a huge mental shift in someone who has learned to pick most of the locked doors that surround them every day. It’s a shift from “every locked door is a hard no” to “every locked door is a polite request to please keep out”—the choice is now up to the individual. This is really significant in the context of personal agency—the level of internal belief that you can change the world around you. When my students have learned lock picking and then have an idea in high school or college and someone says, “That’s a stupid idea,” they are more likely to reply with a “Thank you for your perspective; I will make my own judgment.”

We don’t normally raise our children with a lock on the cookie jar through age 18. Pretty early on, students need to know that they can open the cookie jar at any time and must use their executive function skills to do so when given permission and not count on a physical lock to deter them. 

I have found that around 5th grade is the right time to give students this lens through which they can see that the world is theirs to navigate and that they should have the knowledge and tools to go where they want—all the time doing so in the context of social rules and contracts that they choose to follow. From cars to kitchen knives, students going into high school will need to wield tools that require this commitment to using them correctly and within the social context they are navigating.

The Lock as a System

What is the nature of a lock? A lock is a system. Our goal is to turn the keyway in a lock. This requires that the internal pins of a lock line up in just such a way where each pin is held not too low or too high. For most front door locks, this means about 31,000+ possible key patterns to lift each pin into exactly the right position. Without a key, we need to use micro-tactile feedback with the pick and a turning tool to set each pin correctly and keep each pin in position as we are working on the next pin. This is difficult and takes concentration, but with practice, locks go from a black box to a well-understood system that can be opened with the application of skills and the right tools.

How to Learn More

Now that you know why I teach my students how to pick locks, let me leave you with the resources to learn this on your own.

Image Credit: Deviant Ollam / deviating.net

Deviant Ollam has a great set of open-source materials to learn lock picking. This link is a rabbit hole of knowledge. He came out and led a great workshop for students at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

In Austin you have a couple of free hands-on resources to learn lock picking:

• The Longhorn Locksport Club meets every other Saturday at Batch Brewery.

• Austin School for the Driven puts out a free table at the SFC farmer’s market every other Saturday (weeks Longhorn Locksport is not meeting).

My hope is that groups of students and adults learning to pick locks will start to be described as engaged in locksport vs. lock picking. Whatever you want to call it, I will continue to teach these skills because I have seen the benefits for my students.

Ken Hawthorn | Austin School for the Driven

Intentional tech use: Helping young people build immunity to persuasive technology

Photo by Fredrick Tendong on Unsplash

Alt Ed Austin is delighted to bring the work and voice of guest contributor Seth Bunev to our readers. Seth is a remarkable young writer, researcher, and educator whose new book, Screenfarers: Nurturing Deliberate Action in a Digital World, was released in paperback this month; both book and ebook can be found here. He has been rethinking education systems since age 7 and has participated in numerous forms of school, from Montessori to distance learning. Starting at age 17, he spent four years offline to better understand how digital technologies had shaped his experience and to try to experience something different. Seth teaches naturalist skills to children and is currently working with Turning Life On to develop a school program that facilitates a more balanced relationship with tech at a community level.

I grew up with the internet. In high school, I regularly stayed up till three in the morning watching YouTube videos. This was normal among my peers—it was also normal to have trouble remembering things, avoid eye contact, and be diagnosed with depression. It was obvious to me at the time that these things were, at least to some degree, related to our digital habits.

Why would we do this to ourselves? Well, in the moment, it seemed fun. Somehow, it seemed fun even when my eyes were bloodshot, I had a headache, and I had barely left my room for a week. There was always another interesting thing to read, or watch, just a click away.

While modern digital technologies are powerful, and can have many benefits, some of the less positive effects are increasingly obvious: the eye damage, attention disorders, compulsive behaviors, loss of social skills, even loss of a social fabric in which to practice those skills.

It is no accident that young people spend huge numbers of hours on digital media, with US teens averaging about 7.5 hours per day in 2019. Social media and video game companies carefully design their products to be as addictive as possible, because their business model usually depends on maximizing “time on device” to generate data and ad revenue, or encourage in-game purchases. On top of that, there is the cumulative effect of millions of people competing to create the most eye-catching and engaging online content.

As a result, compulsive tech use is rampant. If this were confined only to video games, or clickbait sites, the solution would be simpler—complete avoidance would be an option. But pretty much everything on the internet can create unwanted habits, from email to database searching to blogs. It is possible to live without digital media—I did so for four years, to better understand its effects on me—but at present that is not feasible or desirable for most people. Can we have the good things the internet provides, without the disruptive habits?

It would help to have cultural norms that restrict digital tech’s invasion of every aspect of life. Perhaps we can also hope for a digital paradigm that doesn’t aggressively leverage human psychology to keep people hooked. But those things will take time. While we work towards them, we need to help kids and youth develop the skills to take charge of their relationship with digital tech at an individual level—ways to build immunity to the nebulous thing variously referred to as habit-forming technology, persuasive technology, or behavior design.

The immunity-building regimen I have developed, through research and experimentation on myself and peers, involves three components:

1. Understanding how persuasive tech works, the underlying motivations behind it, and how to recognize it in digital interfaces

2. Practicing attention to one’s own digital habits and how they are shaped by design

3. Cultivating habits that facilitate intentional use of digital media

Together, these three approaches can interrupt some of the unconscious habits and habit-forming mechanisms through which tech use gets out of control.

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

How Persuasive Technology Works

The human brain works and develops by linking things together—neurons, words and their meanings, places and memories of them, stimuli and behaviors. These associations can form sequences, which become habits.

Drawing on the field of behaviorism founded by B. F. Skinner, digital platforms create associations that shape behavior. Specifically, they do this by linking something we desire or feel strongly about with an action the company wants us to take, according to Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. The desire for social connection can be linked to a behavior like checking notifications, which leads back to a social media site. Then, when someone takes the desired action, the habit is reinforced by a psychological reward—either one directly generated by the platform, such as an “achievement,” or one generated by other people using the options strategically provided within the platform, such as an exciting video or a “like.” Thanks to competition among companies, pretty much every human desire is now targeted by this approach.

The companies responsible for vast swaths of the internet use this type of psychological technique to maximize “time on device.” The net result is widespread compulsive use and many people of all ages spending more time on screens than is healthy or even desired (by them!). This is a difficult issue to confront for several reasons:

• The good things about digital technologies—availability of information, ease of connection with others, entertainment, convenience—are also what can make them addictive.

• Persuasive design accomplishes its goals by restructuring a person’s values, motivations, behaviors, and identity around using the platforms in question.

• Persuasive design is integrated into the very infrastructure that we currently depend on for many essential and valuable activities.

• Widespread dependence on digital technologies for nearly everything has destroyed the offline social fabric.

How can we navigate this complex situation? How can young people, whose identities and lives are often heavily invested in digital media, and who are immersed in a society where compulsive use of these technologies is the norm, be encouraged to find moderation, assess their habits, and be intentional?

Learning to Pay Attention

When I was a teenager slouched over my laptop, it was not helpful for my parents to tell me I was damaging my eyes, or to express any other kind of concern about the effects of my actions. I grew up in a culture that valorizes rebellion against authority—adults telling me to do something made me want to do the opposite, even if I agreed with them.

While it is helpful to tell young people about how and why digital tech is designed to shape their behavior—this is a fact of the world, which they can research themselves—it is not necessarily so helpful to tell them how they are affected by it. It can feel like an attempt to limit their freedom, creating pushback.

On the other hand, helping kids and youth see how designers of digital platforms are trying to control their behavior allows pushback to go in a more productive direction! Are the persuasive technologists succeeding? If so, in what ways? Better to ask the kids to figure that out for themselves, developing the habit of being more intentional with how they relate to devices in the process.

Photo by Peter Jones on Unsplash

One excellent way to do this is to encourage them to keep a journal of their tech use. Whether it is the number of times they touch their cellphone, the number of hours they spend on screens in a week, or how much of that time they are spending on each type of activity, writing down observations as objectively as possible can be revealing. It’s easy not to remember where the time went, but it’s hard to argue with one’s own record of it.

In addition to tracking their own behavior, young people can use journals to track the persuasive design features they find in their apps, games, and websites, and to asking questions about them. Why is this button here? Why did this message pop up at this specific time? What is this webpage trying to encourage me to do?

The more I observe consciously how I am impacted by digital tech, the more motivated I am to take charge of my interactions and ensure that they serve my goals, not Google’s or Facebook’s. And the more I look for persuasive design in the digital places I go, the less likely I am to simply do whatever a website prompts me to do without even noticing. The practice of observing and recording one’s tech habits is a way to wedge some conscious thought into sequences of behaviors that have become totally automatic.

Creating Habits of Intentional Use

Ideally, we should be helping young people create intentional use habits when such habits are the easiest to form—as soon as they have access to digital technology. But starting early is not always an option.

A “digital detox,” a period of time without digital tech, can be helpful for creating intentional habits. When I started using computers again after years offline, it was easy to stay on task and do exactly what I intended—my old habits had mostly faded into oblivion. Even a week can be enough time to create a sense of divide between habits-before and habits-after, and to give new habits a head start. Even a weekend would help.

One of the simplest ways to develop more intentional digital habits is to take a moment to decide on an intention before using a device, and practice sticking to it. The following exercise builds this skill:

1. Decide on a single purpose before opening a laptop, unlocking a smartphone, etc.

2. If straying from the original purpose, try to remember the origin of the distraction and return to the intended activity.

3. When finished, reflect on the difference between intention and behavior. Was there a gap? Why? What could be changed?

As with paying attention, practicing intention can be aided by recording the intention and reflection in a notebook. Over time, young people who apply this exercise to their digital activities will build up an understanding of their own minds, making it easier to anticipate and prevent distractions before they happen. The habit of sticking to an intention can help counteract the numerous sources of distraction.

Cultivating such a habit, combined with the practice of attention, a basic knowledge of how persuasive design works, and a grasp of what is at stake (their time—that is, their lives), can empower people to access the bounty of the digital age while reducing some of its negative side effects. 


Note: This guest post is the author's adaptation of an article originally published on INTENTA DIGITAL.

Seth Bunev | Screenfarers

Why should I take an art class? I don’t want to be an artist when I grow up!

Alison Pilon Nokes teaches art, among other subjects, at Huntington-Surrey High School in Austin. Her guest contribution here is adapted from her recent post on the school’s own blog.

After about ten years in the visual art education world, I feel pretty strongly that everyone should take an art class—every year, if possible!

Throughout my own educational and professional experiences, I have always felt freed by the opportunity for creative problem solving and exploration of visual media provided through the visual arts. I was, and still am, able to process many different parts of my life through an art outlet. And while I do, personally, as an adult, identify as an artist, I think the benefits of working through an artistic process—much like the experience of working with the scientific method in a science course—are worthwhile for everyone to experience as they venture through their education, no matter what they end up doing and becoming. 

We are living in a rapidly changing world. In many ways, we cannot even imagine what the work force and daily life are going to look like for our kids when they come of age. This year of rapid adjustment to virtual learning and social distancing has certainly given us all a taste of how flexible we need to be and how quickly our world can change. What we do know is that students who can think critically and creatively about a variety of complex problems are going to have the best chance for success in just about any setting. 

Not every student who is taking an art class is planning to apply to art school for college. In fact, most aren’t (just as not every student who is taking a biology course plans to become a biologist). It is with that in mind that I design lessons and projects for my art students. My lessons provide students with opportunities to play with materials they may not have used before, discover for themselves how those materials work, and consider how they can use them to meet their needs. My lessons present students with a problem, a dilemma, or an obstacle and ask them to come up with an out-of-the-box solution.

As much fun as it is for families and friends to walk into a student art show at the end of the year full of beautiful finished work, the reality of art is that most often what students make is messy and strange. For every finished work of art that is “pretty,” there are often several unsuccessful attempts (I’m purposely avoiding the term “failures”). Those unsuccessful attempts—those messy and strange drawings, paintings, and sculptures—are what show the important lessons of art: the processes of working out a solution to a problem. As a teacher of art, the most important thing to me is not what the final product looks like. Rather, I want my art students to put forth their best effort, maintain a good attitude about trying, and work through the hard process of solving problems in innovative ways with materials that may be new to them.

Alison Pilon Nokes