Imagine you have to explain puberty to a kid. But you have to write it down in advance, so you don’t get to listen or see any body language. And wait–it’s not just one kid. It’s thousands. And you’re not just speaking for  yourself, but an institution you care about.

You can probably imagine why I procrastinated over writing about puberty for the Being Human exhibit. The topic was embarrassing, and my attempts to explain it were worse.

That’s where I stayed stuck until I realized I was trying to do the wrong job. The science centre isn’t a place that would ”explain puberty to a kid.” I had to find a way to include information about puberty without acting like the expert.

I considered trying a pilot (mocking up a version of the exhibit for people to try–our usual way of figuring out what to do), but pilots show how people react to an activity. I needed to know what people thought was important. I needed to crowdsource.

Crowdsourcing can mean a lot of things. The website Kiva.org crowdsources philanthropy by connecting people who are willing to lend money with aspiring entrepreneurs in developing countries. Threadless.com solicits t-shirt designs from users and sells the ones that get the most votes. Then there’s wikipedia. [All of these examples are from Jeff Howe’s book Crowdsourcing, which goes into way more detail than I can here.]

I decided to keep it simple. Being Human was scheduled to be the focus of the next Market Collective, so I made a big sign reading, “what should everyone know about being a teen?” and put out a thick stack of cards suggesting topics (zits, hair, hygiene, voice changing, hard-ons, periods, hormones and crushes–somehow I forgot to include breasts) along with straight pins so people could stick them on the wall.

The resulting notes were insightful, emotional, practical and funny. Here’s how we used them in the final graphic describing puberty for guys (there’s another for girls):

We also added a projector to the puberty area in Being Human and scanned the rest of the cards to make a slideshow.

Piloting and crowdsourcing have a lot in common. They tap into visitors’ knowledge and ideas. If you keep it simple they don’t require much time or money. They do require humility.

The differences are important. Piloting is all about how. How do people react? How does the exhibit work (or not)? How could it be improved? Crowdsourcing is better at what. What do people care about? What perspectives have you missed?

Knowing what question you’re trying to answer determines how to proceed. To pilot, mock up the final exhibit experience. When you’re crowdsourcing it’s often better not to approximate the final exhibit. When people perceive themselves as making an exhibit, they clam up or try to sound like a ‘science centre.’ But when visitors are intrigued by your questions and feel safe enough to respond honestly, they can be the source of some brilliant ideas.

–Katherine

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The International Children’s Festival has come and gone for another year and not without it’s share of rain, imagination, more rain, building, pouring rain, fun and play, and again more rain.

It was a soaking wet week and we came prepared for an activity that can be done outside – building with PVC pipes and connectors.  Giant structures.  Not only did lots of people participate, but they did so happily in the weather.  Luckily it wasn’t too cold and so the kids had a great time building and the volunteers cheerfully helped out.  (Here’s a picture of Evelyn and Alan keeping warm and assessing the structures.)

The part I love about building like this is that it’s open ended; things can be anything you imagine.  If you ask two kids what they’re building, it could be a submarine with a tree house and the other kid helping out will say it’s a candy store with a hot tub.  And they are both right.  The part I trouble with is that it can be anything they imagine; “Boys could turn a grilled cheese sandwich into a gun“, the Festival Site Manager quipped watching a group of boys battle it out with their makeshift weapons.

The thing about gun play is that I truly believe it less about violence and more about imaginative play and understanding power.  The idea having control over being the ‘good guy’ or being a ‘bad guy’, hiding, sneaking and the thrill of being caught – it’s an all out competitive release not unlike pirates with swords, jedi knights welding a light saber, or throwing a dodge ball to tag someone out of the game.  It still makes me very uneasy as a facilitator.  I understand that some parents berate this behavior, especially if they’ve done diligence to protect their child from guns.  So then, what do I do when a mass of young boys take over in an all out battle?

Our colleague Pat has come up with a brilliant solution:  let them be good guys and bad guys.  However, before they engage in all out war they need to build their forts; their lairs, camps, and hide outs.  Excite them with the possibility of the best fort with crawl through spaces, lookout towers, back doors for sneak attacks and escape routes.  It’s a diversion tactic without having to be the real bad guy (shutting down their participation).  It worked and we had hallways and doorways, a small competition of whose then could be the tallest, collaboration of switching out connector joints to make it more stable, figuring out lengths, and how some connectors let them build only in one direction while others let them build up and out.  I’m not sure they had completely forgot about their weapons, but these boys had run out of time before they could continue the fight against each other.

-stacey.

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Its been a while since we’ve had the Prorotype Lab open, but you can still be involved.

Come to this DIY Instrument and Circuit Bending workshop this weekend at Local Library!

We’ ll be exploring the weird and wild side of DIY technology, Frankensteining beloved childhood toys and making our joints sing in a series of afternoon workshops.

The New Science Centre team will be doing a Circuit Bending drop-in program that we’re planning for the NSC. Our pal Craig Storm will be showing us how to make Light Theramins. I’ll be helping people (somehow) hack circuits to our bodies to make a giant dance piano. And there will be a free tour of Cantos at the end.

Come play and learn stuff!

This Saturday, June 4th, 1-4pm
Local Library
131 7th Ave SW. Entrance is from the alley behind the church.

-dana

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#32 Listen Carefully:  Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine.  By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires or ambitions, we fold their world into our own.  Neither party will ever be the same.

When you take a step back and see the long view, it is easy to see why collaboration rules.  A lot was accomplished this week, but not without the help of many very helpful folks.  This week we were testing the Building for Sound Program for Grade 3, which integrates the ‘Building with Variety of Materials’ and ‘Hearing and Sound’ curriculum into one program. In this workshop students use an assortment of materials to create a sound proof chamber that must block the sound of an alarm, and then they must re-assess their materials to create a device that will make their alarm even louder than its original starting point.

Initially, I had some questions about using sound meters in programming which Devon¹ recommended I ask the ASTC listserv, and I got some very useful and resourceful answers from far-away folks (thanks Cricket², Anders³ and Kendall⁴!).  Cricket send me THIS NEWSWEEK article includes a brief description of how the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame School had their students develop their own designs to sound proof their school’s library: (1) amazing group project and (2) can you imagine going to school at the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum?  What an opportunity!

Next, I needed another sound meter.  My colleague  Alex⁵ had a digital meter kicking around his apartment, but I also wanted to compare this to an analog meter.  Alex had a contact at SAIT⁶, who then forwarded me to Laurie Johnson⁷ from the Film and Video Production Department.  I met with him on Monday next to flag poles by an interesting statue (his choice of meeting place), and he showed me the meter and then gave me a brief sound lesson via diagram – which rocked because I love diagrams.  Our collaboration was meant to happen.

Laurie's analog sound meter VS Alex's digital sound meter.

Laurie taught me that you don't have to point the sound meter towards the sound source because it has an omni-directional microphone.

An example of waveforms that cancel each other out i.e. sound cancellation...

What Laurie envisioned the students building, and how the sound would travel from their sound maker beyond their sound proof chamber.

Laurie's diagram for where he suggested students should obtain readings for their structures (we are just getting one reading instead but look at the person having a great time testing out their sound proofing!)

Laurie's diagram for how sound can attenuate (decrease in intensity) at a rate of 1 to the square root of 1 (technical and awesome diagram)

The squiggle towards the left corner shows us how sound can really be affected by reflecting off of corners in rooms.

The original diagram sheet where our entire discusion at SAIT lived. So awesome! Thanks Laurie you rule!

Collaboration continued in full swing when I heard back from our teacher contact at Langevin School⁸ (the New Science Centre’s next door neighbor) and we were given the go ahead to test with the students on Wednesday morning.   I ran the preliminary program with 3 sets of 20 grade 3-4 students⁷⁰, which was a nice way to assess what materials worked, what sizes  and quantities were best, whether students needed sound meters (yes), whether they could read the digital and the analog meters (yes, yes), and what types of challenges they could solve.  Three hours of testing and we’re at ahead count of 70 collaborators.

Then the next day we were testing at Elbow Valley School, which our VP of Digital IT⁷¹ helped us connect with (thanks Robert!)  Carly⁷² and Stacey⁷³ were also testing offsite this day, but we were short on vehicles so they drove me all the way out to Spring Bank before they headed off to their program.  Alan⁷⁴ came to test with me, which was incredible, because he helped facilitated these sessions and brought me lunch since there is nowhere near this school to get a snack!  He brainstormed some really great new building challenges for the students which we were able to test yesterday; this solidified our program, and added some parameters which made it simultaneously more fun, engaging and challenging for the students.  Amazing!

At Elbow Valley School we had 5 classes of roughly 20 students, their teachers and their principal for a total of 106 more collaborators for this program¹⁸⁰.  We wouldn’t normally do this in a program that is operational, but when testing we asked the first two groups how they could change this program for it to be even better.  The students said they wanted harder challenges, and some of the ones they thought of are as follows; Challenge 1:  Everyone has to create a device that can get their sound maker to balance at 75 dB.  Challenge 2:  Everyone can only pick ten pieces of two types of materials.

Overall I would say collaboration for the win (#collaborationFTW).  This is a new process for me, where in the past I’ve worked alone, and really, that is a pretty scary retrospective thought after seeing how much growth this program has had with each additional collaborator.

What a great way to end the week!   I still owe you guys a post about how the ‘Air Lab’ program is progressing, and I will write that up over the weekend/later!

-Claudia

p.s. If I forgot anyone in this post, I am totally sorry, and that would make it 180+ collaborators!  Great!

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If you haven’t read Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Growth, and you work in any creative or idea driven field, I highly suggest you read it NOW.  The Manifesto really helps steer me in a constructive direction when I need to refocus.  I’ve been trying to get several projects organized right now, and the blog seemed like a really great place to organize some of my thoughts.    With that in mind, today let’s focus on Manifesto Point #9:

“BEGIN ANYWHERE – John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis.  His advice:  begin anywhere”.

This notion is such a relief, and when starting a project, knowing that you can begin anywhere, and truck along towards progress is really the way to go.  This is the thinking behind how we developed our new grade 6 air program.  At the initial concept development stage for this program, I was super stuck.  These poorly drawn diagrams illustrate what direction this program was going in, but it didn’t feel right for several reasons.  So I discussed with various team members. 

Figure 1. Initial brainstorming...

Figure 2. More brainstorming and poorly drawn diagrams.

Everything brainstormed sounded like a) something a teacher could do in their classroom just as well as we could b) something that could lead to ‘fake science’ notions c) just tired and less relevant than the ideal final outcome.  My lab mate Katherine noticed my mental block and after chatting it out we discovered that a) I was stuck on learning outcomes instead of ‘cool things we can do with air’ and b) we needed to have a mini rig with the rest of the team. 
The functional definition of a rig may be floating around somewhere else on this blog, but just as a refresher:  RIG – Rapid Idea Generation.  For our purposes, we just got everyone in the lab, and they had one task that they had to do: prove to me that air exists.  They could use any of the bins in the lab, any material that was necessary to prove to me that air exists.  I told them I didn’t believe air existed because I can’t see it.  They found SEVERAL VERY AMAZING ways to prove to me that air exists. 

Figure 3. Alan said he could prove to me that air exists if I got into this plastic bag. I ignored common sense and jumped in...

Figure 4. Stacey helped arrange the plastic bag, while Alan got the vaccuum ready.

Figure 5. Alan gets his experiment on the go. All you need is one volunteer (me), a vacuum, and a plastic bag and you can really feel the change in air pressure as you are vaccuum sealed into a plastic bag.

Figure 6. This experiment was not as affective with two people in the plastic bag...but we were trying to see how many people could potentially be included in this experience.

Figure 8. Pat did not expect the sudden change in air pressure/intense quishing sensation. Thanks for trying it out Pat!

Figure 9. Look carefully at this photo! Alex made himself an 'air detector'. It was so great! Essentially a glorified headband with a propeller (red thing over his head) so you can SEE when air is interacting with it! Look at him go!

Figure 10. Stacey, Alan, myself and half of Alex's head watching the other developer's present their proof that air exists.

Figure 11. This photo does not need a caption.

From here we were able to hone in on some things that felt right, and were more in line with the direction I wanted to take the air program.  I really liked the idea of ‘air detectors’ as a concept.  Although the air detector hat Alex created was not the most tangible idea, I loved the idea of having students prove to the facilitator that air exists by doing their own experiments; having them use what they already know about air to prove its existence.  This created a concept to move this program forward, and the rest of the developers helped me select bins of materials I could use when testing.  They selected tons of great materials including aluminum foil, tissue paper, packaging peanuts, cellophane, coloured gels, Mylar, tinsel, Tygon tubing, other tubing, turkey basters, propellers, plastic straws, plastic bags, bubble wrap, Nalgene containers, balloon pumps, air pumps, other pumpy devices, gliders, turbines, dryer tubing.  It was awesome to realize that that as a group of developers, we moved this program from a good future program, to what may be a great future program. 

Figure 12. A much more exciting batch of programming ideas. Thanks everybody!

I know the above Post-It Notes scan is pretty blurry, which is intentional, to leave you in suspsense!  I’ll follow up on how this program pilot went shortly; in the meantime I will leave you with Manifesto Point#3

 “Process is more important than outcome – when the outcome drives the process we will only ever go where we’ve already been.  If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.”

-Claudia

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Recently I’ve been working on pilot testing a “Pipeline Challenge”, a program that challenges participants to plan, build and test a pipeline, while balancing technical, social and environmental factors. I ended up making several trips to different hardware stores to buy various materials, rarely for their intended purpose. This led to some interesting discussions with the salespeople:

“Hi, I’m looking for funnels.”

“What for?”

“Umm…”

“Hey Charlene, this guy is looking for funnels and he won’t tell me why! Are you looking for ones that work well for beer?”

“No really, they’re for this program I’m working on…”

“…cause these ones work great for beer. They’re the perfect size!”

As it turned out, the funnels I needed were a lot smaller, but at least I’d found the right section.

Before I started visiting hardware stores, I had done a lot of planning, but sometimes arrived without specific parts in mind. I was inspired by picking up parts, fitting them together, measuring them, testing their weight, and so on. I ended up doing some improvising, which was made possible by an innovative approach to purchasing approved by the finance department: I used gift cards provided by a corporate partner to purchase all the materials. While it’s not conventional, it did allow me a degree of flexibility that greatly facilitated the development of this pilot. In the end, few materials went unused, and those that did will be useful for future pilots.

-Alex

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