Open Space, Open Possibilities
For the Imaginarium, lunchtime is always bustling. Every day, 15 to 20 students pack the room to work on a project, bending pipe cleaners, cutting cardboard, sifting through pompoms, arranging popsicle sticks, and affixing it all together with hot glue. For the most part, Wednesday 06 November was no different, except this particular day a small group of third graders girls came in with a different plan.
These students weren’t here for regular maker time projects, they’d seen some of the bigger kids making things on the 3D printers and they wanted their shot at it. A bit preoccupied with the jostling for tools and erecting of projects at the tables, instead of explaining that they’d need to come back at a later time so Mr. Stevens could help them make the file, he just sat them down at the computer, opened up TinkerCAD, and after about a whopping 20 second overview, let them have at it. In many ways, this was almost an exact recreation of Sugata Mitra’s 2007 “Hole in the wall” experiment.
Checking in on them only sparingly, Mr. Stevens was able to offer them little more than how to use the “undo” button and how to find the arrow to moving objects along the z-axis. After about 15 minutes, just in time for lunch, it was about done. So they asked if they could come back after lunch to make a few finishing touches and begin printing. By the time the lunch period had ended and they had to return to class, they had created a simple model that had an unmistakable resemblance of a turtle.
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| Orthographic | Side view | Front View |
Of the innumerable projects that take place in the Imaginarium, this one stands out for a couple reasons. The first of which is it clearly answers the question that many have brought up about whether it would be developmentally appropriate to introduce 3D printing and design to students as young as third grade; these girls demonstrated the answer is clearly “yes”.
Second, while the long-established cognitive development models suggest this indeed was not developmentally appropriate, newer research and models show interactions with technology have changed how and when our brains develop, and this may very well be an example of that.
Lastly, this project stands out because it is exactly the kind of unstructured/student-initiated learning opportunities being advocated at the recent CUE (Computer Using Educators) conference. In advocating for these types of opportunities, one of the presenters shared the story of YouTube founder Steve Chen who recently revisited the Illinois Math and Science Academy to create these kinds of opportunities for the next generation. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell described a similar story in explaining the rise of Microsoft founder, Bill Gates. So don’t be surprised if the next article you read featuring these bright young ladies is in Bloomberg, Newsweek, or Fortune.
