What’s a creative technologist, anyway?

My role at work is listed as “creative technologist” – what does that mean, and what is a typical day at work for me?

A creative technologist is a pretty new position that has emerged in the tech and creative field in recent years. It is an attempt to label a kind of general problem solver, someone who can design, program and build projects with a strong human experience component.

A creative technologist often acts as a bridge between a creative team and software development, helping communicate design intent from creative to dev, and making all teams aware of new possibilities.

For what a sense of what creative technologists could work on, these are a handful of my recent projects:

• A robot kiosk that pours you a perfect beer while you learn about international payment systems
• Projection mapping and a huge LED table are used to present a new building project
• Smart bracelets that guide guests through interactive games and displays
• A sophisticated multi-touch object detection table that teaches people about surgical robots by letting them try different surgical procedures

How did I get here?

I went to the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University, a programme at the leading edge of creativity and innovation throughout. The program describes itself this way:

We don’t focus on just teaching technical skills — there are other programs for that. Instead, we focus on critical thinking, creative exploration, and the ability to learn how to learn. We embrace failure — as long as you learn from it. ITP is sometimes described as an art school for engineers and at the same time an engineering school for artists. Perhaps the best way to describe us is as a Center for the Recently Possible.

After ITP, I developed exhibits at the Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco that’s famous for pioneering an interactive, hands-on, style of learning. It is also distinctive for developing its own exhibits in-house, and its very active workshop is very visibly located right in the middle of the museum.

The Exploratorium in San Francisco, USA. Credit: Sunset Magazine

One of the things that is less visible about the Exploratorium is its very capable Visitor Research program, which is constantly assessing the impact and effectiveness of the many, many interactive exhibits. Over time, the Exploratorium has developed deep knowledge of how engage, entertain and educate visitors. This is one of the most important things I learned at my tenure there!

In addition to universities and museums, you can increasingly find creative technologists in large and small companies, usually attached to innovation and future marketing teams.

A Creative Technologist’s Superpowers

GP and his colleague in front of a LED wall they built

Unlike some other jobs, being a creative technologist requires awareness and experience across multiple areas. Here are some of them:

• Research and innovation

  A key part of my daily work is keeping up with innovations in the field, and understanding how the team might use it. For example, I recently tried out a new feature in Adobe After Effects (a video editing program) that lets you automatically remove vehicles, people or other features from a video. I did some experiments to make sure I understood it, and then communicated the possibilities to the rest of my team.

• Code

  Software development is often the core skill. In addition to typical programming languages like Javascript or Python, you also work with tools specific to audio, video and interactive development, such as Touch Designer, Max/MSP or Unity. Many of these tools allow you go from idea to prototype very quickly, and then continue to build it into a final system.

• Electronics

  Building interactive experiences benefits from being able to offer new and different ways for uses to interact, and this means being able to connect different sensors and output mechanisms. Since these are often new and custom, a creative technologist needs to be able to conceptualise, design and build them. This requires a practical level of understanding of electronics. Knowing where to get parts is a key skill!

• Fabrication

  Since the software and electronics are novel, chances are that physically building a piece will be challenging. There is any number of little clips and adapters that have to be built from scratch! A creative technologist is often familiar with different prototyping and building techniques. 3D printers and laser cutters are usually not far away!

• Design

  Sometimes the best way to communicate what you are trying to achieve is by building it. It is important to understand that good design is not only about inventing something, but communicating it to others. Prototyping is essential for this!

• User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI)

  While UX and UI important to all software design, they are key to the kinds of things creative technologists work on, since they refer to the user! In creative technology projects, the types of interaction you will design are often very different from a mouse or keyboard, or even a touchscreen.

• Human interaction and experience

  At the end of the day, the projects a creative technologist work on are all about creating memorable experiences for people. By going beyond keyboard and screen to experiences that engage people with movement and all the senses, we have to have a good sense of what will work.

• Teamwork

  Given the wide range of skills involved in creative technology, it’s nearly impossible to be an expert in all of them. Therefore, teamwork is essential. In my daily working life, I work with other creative technologists with complementary skills sets, as well as specialists in other domains.

There’s no typical day.

The truth is that there is no such thing as a typical day in creative technology – challenges and tasks often differ from week to week. So instead, here is a composite of the kinds of things my work might entail in the process of creating a project involving 15 different interactive installations, tied together with the use of a smart bracelet that guests could use to navigate them.

• Meet with client, understand goals

  Creative technology is a customer-facing role. I listen to customers to understand what they are trying to achieve, and also proactively suggest possible ideas and experiences that might be relevant. Since we are often trying to do things that have never been done before, communicating ideas with renderings, drawings, prototypes and references is key.

• Break down components

  Creative technology projects are rarely limited to a single domain, eg. web design, software, etc. There will often be multiple interconnected components, and these need to be identified. For example, we might need to identify a supplier for smart bracelets, sensors that could detect them, and simple computers and software.

• Assess impact vs effort

  Based on the customers’ needs and a sense of what we need to do to address them, you need to establish a baseline of impact vs effort. It is important to focus efforts on those things that will maximum impact.

• Design user experience

  When building physical experiences, it’s critical to keep in mind the reality of humans and their bodies. For example, designing wearable bracelet sensors and interactions forced us to consider things like the distance at which they would activate, where the sensors would be placed, and how long a user would need to hold their bracelet against a sensor to activate.

• Make electronics

  As part of the project we wanted to have an LED ring light up to tell users where they could tap their bracelet, and if it had been successfully detected. In order to connect the LEDs to the Pi, we considered building our own interface board, but found a commercial product that fit our needs, so we bought that instead.

• Design enclosure

  Since wearable detectors would be widely visible and customer facing, we needed to make them look polished. I worked on designing a sensor housing that combined laser-cut acrylic with a 3D printed cabinet, and also managed the process of getting everything made.

• Program software

  I worked closely with other members of the team on software that would detect the bracelets, trigger LED patterns, and send messages to the software that managed the entire event.

• Communicate with team

  A typical day involves constant communication with other team members, both in formal meetings and via informal channels such as Slack and coffee breaks.

Advice to young learners

If this sounds interesting, here are some important things to keep in mind.

1. Focus on people

   At the end of the day, these experiences are being made for people and it’s critical to understand how it works for them. In addition to typical software UI principles, creative technologists need to understand the physical situation of a person, how and where they will approach the experience, who they are with and what they are expecting.

2. Teamwork and communication

   Since creative technology involves so many different skills, it is very difficult (impossible?) to master all of them. Therefore, being able to work and communicate with a team is key, and a huge part of successful team working is communication. Never underestimate the value of drawing, rendering, prototyping and clear speaking!

3. Innovation

   Since these are often very new projects, there has to be significant amount of research, innovation and prototyping. Don’t underestimate the value of play and undirected experimentation.

4. Coding as a tool

   Writing programs is the key to pulling together many of these projects. However, don’t focus on software alone, consider interaction and other ways of connecting with the physical world. Robotics is a great way to explore this!

. . .

This is part of a series Postcards from a Creative Coder – Dispatches from Silicon Valley; read more from GP, or check out our creative coding courses for curious kids.

The post A day in the life of a creative technologist | Postcards from a Creative Coder appeared first on Saturday Kids | Coding, Digital Literacy for Kids & Parents.

As part of our series Postcards from a Creative Coder – Dispatches from Silicon Valley, our Chief Tinkerer, GP, explains the link between learning and creative coding tools, and shares his shortlist of creative coding tools that you can tinker with to create real-world projects.

Coding is an important basic skill for students, and there is a lot of effort to build tools that allow learners to get started quickly. Your children are probably familiar with tools like Scratch and MakeCode. But an important question is: Can kids build real-world skills using those systems, and what can they learn next?

As it happens, there are a lot of programming environments designed for learners and non-coders to get powerful results. These fall in the category of “creative coding” tools, and include everything from code-based environments to multimedia and game development systems. In my work as a creative technologist, I’ve had the opportunity to use a lot of these. These systems are a great next step for learners, and are a great way to apply the skills learned from educational systems.

The connection between learning and creative coding tools

Creative technology tools are often designed to enable the “creative” side of the equation by making powerful technology available to artists, designers and creators whose primary focus may not be writing code. The focus is instead on getting something working quickly, and allowing for fast iteration.

There are many features these systems have in common with educational software:

1. Easy to get started: they all present high level modules that can be used directly, without a lot of setup
2. Iteration: the cycle of creating and testing is very quick, you can see results of your changes almost immediately
3. Very rich and responsive multimedia output: they all support high quality, live video and audio presentation
4. Extensible: they can all be extended to support new capabilities, in particular new and unusual input devices
5. Polished results: the presentation of output can look crisp and finished

Since creative coding tools have so much in common with educational environments, they are a great next step for learners – with real world applications.

Tools for creative coding

Here, I’ll explore three different categories of development environments that are used in the real world, that share a lot of the same heritage as those that students use to learn coding:

1. Multimedia creation environments

These are software tools designed to allow creators to build interactive works without writing a lot of code. They include ways of defining installations that use a graphical user interface, where blocks and modules can be connected on a screen to create an installation.

Other examples of multimedia creative tools include the famous Max/MSP, which has been around for 30 years and is now part of the Ableton family of creative tools. Max was one of the very first systems that allowed a user to create software by linking together modules visually. 

Another great coding tool is Touch Designer, by Derivative Inc. This tool is particularly well known for its visual quality and high performance realtime graphics. Touch Designer was first released in 2008, and is closely related to the Houdini visual effects program. It can integrate a large variety of physical sensors and other systems. When the built-in blocks are not enough, a developer can write programs in Python that extend Touch Designer.

In my work, we’ve used Touch Designer to build large-scale interactive video walls, and for playback of very high resolution videos. This giant living wall would respond as users walked in front of it:

2. Game Development Systems

Video game developers have many of the same challenges as creative technologists,  trying to express a creative vision that is immersive and responsive. In recent years, tools used for developing video games have become increasingly used for building interactive installations.

At Britelite Immersive where I work, we are big fans of Unity, a popular game development system. Unity is known for letting a developer build software once that can be used on a number of different devices, such as mobile phones, computers and video game consoles. Unity is also liked for its well-stocked Asset Store, an online market place for software snippets, 3D models and everything else that you could need to build a game. A strong point of Unity is the very strong support for AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) systems. It is possible to quickly build an interactive 3D scene and make it available to users of many different systems. Unity supports programming in C#, a modern language that is based on C++ but has many additional features that make it more robust and reliable.

We used Unity to build this robotic surgery simulation game, that was presented at the opening gala for a new hospital in San Francisco. For this project we used a special screen that responds to touch and to objects placed on it.

We also used Unity as the software to drive these automatic beer pouring kiosks. On this project, we integrated Unity with a variety of sensors, including a pressure map to detect when a user approached, an NFC (near-field communication) payment sensor and a depth camera for taking AR (augmented reality) selfies of a user wearing their favorite team’s colors as facepaint.

There are other game systems as well. We use Unreal Engine by Epic in situations where very a realistic rendering of 3D systems is required. It also offers a way to program without writing code, through what are called “Blueprints”. This is a node based system reminiscent of the creative coding systems like Max and Touch Designer. If you do need to write code to achieve something that is not possible with Blueprints, you can write code in C++.

3. Creative Coding Frameworks

When ultimate flexibility is required, there is no substitute for writing code. Many systems have emerged that make it easier for creators to build code-based projects. There are programming frameworks for multimedia, embedded devices and machine learning, among others.

A very well-known example is the Processing environment, which provides an easy-to-use development environment for writing code in Java. It is free and open-source, and includes a vast number of extensions for different creative effects and interfaces.

However, Java is subject to significant performance limitations, so there is a lot of work to make higher performance languages accessible to creators.

The Cinder framework is a library of modules that support graphics and interactivity using the C++ language. While harder to use than purely graphical systems, C++ is able to provide very high performance in the finished apps, and frameworks like Cinder save a lot of development time.

 We used Cinder to build the control software for this elaborate LED illuminated tree:

 Another framework similar to Cinder is OpenFrameworks, which also allows creators to quickly build media rich applications.

Finally, we often have to program tiny computers that will connect to specialist sensors and devices. The Arduino environment, originally developed for education, has grown over the years to support a vast number of embedded systems. We frequently use Arduino to build software to integrate physical sensors.

An important subject that has emerged in recent years is Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Since this is a new field, it is particularly important for more people to learn about this domain, and the learning tools are very good. These learning tools, due to their power and ease of use, can also be used in real-world applications.

One notable example is Jupyter Notebooks, a system that allows you to run Python code in a web page, and output graphical or textual results directly on the page. Python is extremely popular for working with Machine Learning applications. The Zumi robot from Robolink lets learners experiment with machine learning and AI in the context of a self-driving car. It uses real AI tools like Tensorflow, accessed via Jupyter Notebooks.

The learning path

Systems like Scratch and MakeCode are excellent for learning the basics of programming, including concepts like iteration, conditions and variables. In fact, MakeCode goes one step further by letting you switch between seeing your program as blocks, and as TypeScript (a modern evolution of Javascript).

A student who starts from Scratch, moves on to MakeCode, then Javascript or Python is well positioned to use something like Max/MSP or Touch Designer in ‘real’ projects.

The game design engines are also quite accessible, and clearly interesting to most students! Unity in particular has a wonderful set of tutorials oriented towards beginners.

So for a parent, teacher or student that is asking “what’s next?”, the creative coding tools are a wonderful path to explore.

. . .

Read more from GP here, and find out what’s on at Saturday Kids here.

The post Beyond Scratch – Creative Software in the Real World | Postcards from a Creative Coder appeared first on Saturday Kids | Coding, Digital Literacy for Kids & Parents.

What does A.I. have to do with our kids?

I was reading an issue of the MIT Technology Review which included an interesting list of 35 innovators under 35 years old. I was curious to see what they are working on, so I did a quick tally of their areas:

Note: Some of the innovators worked in more than one area, and I have removed the overlaps.

Clearly, Artificial Intelligence is a key area of focus for young innovators. If this is the case, how can we prepare our very youngest innovators – our children – to understand and use this technology?

Image via www.vpnsrus.com

In this article, I’ll go into some background about A.I. and why it matters for our children to start to understand it.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) is the ability for computers to do things that are considered attributes of intelligence: processing language, understanding pictures, detecting patterns, etc. In the past few years, the combination of the Internet and ever increasing computing power have enabled an approach to A.I. based on statistical analysis of enormous data sets, allowing the development of accurate predictive models. 

These capabilities are now being applied in many different applications – from recommending purchases, to self-driving cars. 

Why A.I. matters for our kids

The environment in which our children are growing up includes instances of A.I. driven devices and services. As of late 2018, nearly a quarter of US households owned a “smart speaker” like Amazon Alexa or Google Home. What children think about these devices is quite remarkable. 

There is a pragmatic reason for teaching kids about A.I. which is its direct bearing on employability and future career success. This is a powerful way of robot-proofing your kids, as Dr. Vivienne Ming so eloquently puts it in her TED talk.

However, a more profound reason is equipping them with the ability to understand what A.I. is (or isn’t) capable of, and some of the basic principles behind how they operate. Some of the issues raised are profound, since exposure to A.I. will affect children’s mental models of what intelligence is, and how it manifests. Young children in particular tend to overestimate the capabilities of A.I. when they encounter it.

Teaching children how A.I. works is a way to “pull back the curtain” and enable them to make more accurate critical judgements.

Tools for kids to learn about A.I.

There are some great online resources available, suitable for every age group – from young children to teenagers. Many of these are free of charge, or very affordable. Here are some you can start with:

Cognimates

Cognimates is a project from the MIT Media Lab, and it extends the Scratch block-based programming system to include A.I. tools and capabilities.

Cognimates is extremely comprehensive. In addition to all the capabilities of Scratch, it includes blocks for typical A.I. applications like recognizing speech, translation, computer vision. It can interface with the real world using devices like the micro:bit, which opens the door to a variety of homebrew robots, among other things.

Moreover, it includes features for actually training models for computer vision and textual analysis.

The Cognimates team has done extensive research on A.I. and children, and their papers are worth reading for educators and parents.

Machine Learning For Kids

Machine Learning For Kids is another extremely impressive resource. Like Cognimates, some exercises are built using the Scratch block-based programming system. However, it uses the IBM Watson A.I. system behind the scenes to power applications, and some exercises use the Python programming language.

Like Cognimates, it goes “behind the scenes” to explain the process of training models, and using them in an application. The worksheets are very thorough, and support students and teachers who are not experts in the subject.

The A.I. Family Challenge is a free program that uses the Machine Learning For Kids system in a structured way, to get families and communities working together to apply A.I.

A.I. Experiments With Google

This collection of browser-based A.I. Experiments developed by Google runs entirely in your web browser, and is a good introduction to the applications of A.I. The experiments cover things like learning, music, drawing and a variety of other creative areas. Of course, they use Google’s powerful A.I. systems.

Unlike the previous two resources, these are mostly finished examples of A.I. in use. However, they are very fun to use, and could be a great starting point and inspiration for children using other systems.

This video is a good overview of the experiments: https://youtu.be/oOwfiYnRi5c

Google AIY projects

A combination of “AI” + “DIY”, these are hardware kits that allow for easy (and affordable) experimentation with computer vision and language processing. They are based on the Raspberry Pi computer, and require some familiarity with Python programming, so they are probably a good project for older kids.

One thing I like about them is that they use a cardboard enclosure, so it is very easy to customize them and add them to other projects, like a robot or a home device.

Tensorflow Playground and Machine Learning Crash Course

Google is clearly very interested in having as many people as possible learn about machine learning and A.I., so they’ve made available a lot of interesting tools. One of these is the Tensorflow Playground, which allows you “tinker” with a Neural Network.

Related to this, and for more advanced students, the Machine Learning Crash Course is a good way to become genuinely knowledgeable.

Zümi

Zümi is a very interesting project, basically a tiny self-driving car that uses real machine learning tools and APIs for programming. While it is still not released (shipping sometime in early August 2019!) it looks very promising, and claims to use Google’s Tensorflow system.

Getting started

With all these resources, what is a good way to start? There is certainly a lot to digest, so you don’t want to jump straight in. Here’s a progression that could be effective:

1. Start with relevant questions and projects: A great way to learn about new tools is to focus on a goal, something you want to achieve. Inquiry-based teaching programs start by identifying a problem to solve first, even before learning to use tools.
2. Build some basic skills: Many of these systems use some of the same basic tools and skills. Developing familiarity with Scratch (block-based) or Python programming is a good way to build a foundation.
3. Experiment with A.I. applications: Using some of the online experiments or even the services and devices that are commercially available is a good way to start understanding what is possible.
4. Get started with A.I. coding: Depending on the student’s age and abilities, pick one of the programming systems, like Cognimates, and set out to solve some real-world problems!

…

Did you find this article useful? If you have any comments or questions to share with us or GP, we’d love to hear from you! Let’s connect over email, here. 

Read more from GP:

A day in the life of a creative technologist | Postcards from a Creative Coder

A parent’s experience of inquiry based learning | Postcards from a Creative Technologist

Saturday Kids collaborates with San Francisco-based creative technologist

The post Teaching Kids about Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Saturday Kids | Coding, Digital Literacy for Kids & Parents.

Through GP, we got to know of the New School San Francisco which practises inquiry-based learning. Here, he shares his perspective as a parent on what inquiry-based learning entails, why it’s important, and some ways to incorporate it into how our kids learn.

A parent’s experience of inquiry-based learning

I’m a parent of two boys, both attending the New School of San Francisco, a newly established public charter school. What first attracted my wife and I to the school was their embrace of inquiry based learning as a core of their instructional philosophy. We got to know the founding team as they prepared to open the school, and formed part of their first class.

Over the past 4 years, we’ve watched as the school has grown, and experienced first hand what it means to our children’s growth and education. This article discusses some of the things we’ve observed about the program, and hope it is useful to other parents who are considering this as an educational approach.

What is inquiry based learning?

In a nutshell, inquiry based learning is a way of teaching, that is focused on creating learning skills, rather than simply transferring information.

Though the core principles have been discussed for almost 100 years, it has been codified in its current form since the 1970s. Originally developed to support science education, it is now being used to support multiple subject areas.

A great deal of the interest in inquiry based learning is driven by the fact that the world our children are growing up in is changing, and existing educational philosophies don’t seem to be preparing them for this new world.

It is expected that careers and employment may change over the course of a lifetime, and hence the ability to adapt and learn in new circumstances will be very valuable.

Moreover, there is some evidence to suggest that inquiry based approaches may be better at developing a fundamental understanding of some subject areas, such as science.

Start with the outcome, not the tool.

Inquiry based learning is focused on getting to understand a problem or subject area, by applying multiple tools. Understanding is verified by getting the students to present the results of their inquiry, using a variety of techniques and media.

This doesn’t preclude specialized education in specific subjects or techniques, such as structured writing, analytical techniques etc – however, by showing their application, it reinforces their value to the student.

Inquiry based learning integrates multiple traditional subject areas. Students are encouraged to apply what they have learned in subject areas including literacy, numeracy and others to research their inquiry topics.

As a parent, I notice that when working with my children, it is important to pay attention to the appropriateness of a tool or technique, in addition to practice using the tools themselves.

For example, inquiry principles are followed well before students start using computers or tablets, so that when these tools are introduced, there is a clear sense of how they can be applied. Without this, it is easy for computers to become a center of attention.

3 different approaches

There are multiple flavors of inquiry based learning, which share some basic approaches – most arcs involve aspects of all three approaches:

Inquiry based learning in practice

Inquiry based learning at the New School is used within various contexts, the most important of which is the “Arc”, a process which takes place over a trimester; students generally complete 3 arcs over the course of year. Inquiry is given dedicated time, but other subjects will also reference the inquiry arc.

Source: New School San Francisco

The Arc

1. Questions

The arc starts by exploring questions that students have about the world around them. In theory, this is used to select an inquiry topic. In practice, teachers propose subjects from a smalle rset. This is because a “pure” inquiry approach could take a long time, and requires considerable work by teachers to prepare, since they can’t prepare detailed curriculum without knowing the subject.

2. Research topic

Good topics for inquiry are relevant to student’s lives, and able to encompass multiple subject areas.
For example, some recent inquiry subjects we’ve covered at the New School include:

1. Animal locomotion
2. How are organizations governed (rules & laws)
3. Weather cycles in nature
4. How food is made
5. How animals evolve to adapt to their environment
6. How engineers work

Student work on animal adaptations

3. Presentation

A key part of the inquiry is getting students to present their work. This is treated as a celebration, an Expo Night where students show off their work to the community. It is important that students get used to the idea of being able to apply and explain their work, since this is in itself a valuable skill.

Expo Nights are an important event in the New School calendar, with all classes presenting their work over the course of two days. As parents, we are involved in preparations for Expo, but at the same time, the students are also excited to surprise us.

4. Reflection

After completing arc, it is typical to reflect on what worked well and what didn’t. This process of reflection involves the students, and is taken into account in the teacher’s own review and planning process for subsequent arcs.

Reflections from an arc on engineering (that I presented in)

Things to consider

1. Choice of topic

The choice of topics for an inquiry arc is key: it is important for students to be excited about it, and achieve the right balance teacher direction and student involvement. At the New School, for the younger grades, arc topics are chosen by the teachers, but as more senior grades are added, there will be more student involvement.

All the arcs for a given class year share an overall theme: for example, all 3 of the kinder arcs are about community, and the first grade arcs are all about “changes over time”.

However, even though the overall theme of the arc will be set by the teacher, they can evolve in different ways. For example, two kindergarten sections ended up taking the same topic in very different directions. They were both working on the arc topic “how does weather affect the community”.

One section became very interested in the water (rain) cycle, and at the same time very concerned about the welfare of the homeless people they saw on their to the park every day. In order to bring these themes together, the kids decide to record videos of themselves as meteorologists discussing the weather cycle, made DVDs, sold them (mostly to family) and contributed the money to organizations that work with the homeless.

Early stage brainstorming about topics & activities!

The other section was very interested in extreme weather events, and also the story of the “3 Little Pigs”. For their expo, they combined both of their interests by designing and presenting pig houses designed to resist extreme weather (instead of wolves).

2. Completion

A key aspect of inquiry based learning is the concept of completion: we are not just stockpiling knowledge or practicing techniques, but using them to reach an outcome.

Presentation

Student work on animal adaptations

One aspect of completion is that students are prepared to demonstrate and explain their work. During Expo Nights, parents (and other visitors) are given a “passport” or a checklist, to encourage them to approach students and ask about their work.

Presentation formats are extremely varied and can include:

• Posters
• Charts and illustrations
• Physical constructions
• Videos (in the age of YouTube, student produced videos are extremely popular!)
• Performances (dance, demonstrations)

Presenting a prototype flying suit at Expo Night

Documentation

Another important part of the inquiry process is documenting results, both individually and as teams. Student materials throughout the arc are gathered together, and each student brings home an organized notebook after the Expo Night. Interestingly, as students start to work with technology in the classroom, they use a similar approach to organize their online and digital documentation.

3. Cultural support (values) and relation to the teacher

It is impossible to roll out an inquiry based learning program without making other changes.

Traditional educational approaches make implicit assumptions about the role of the teacher and the source of their authority. These change quite a lot: the teacher shifts from being the sole source of truth, to being more of a learning coach.

The teacher may not have all the answers at the outset, and works collaboratively with the students in planning the arc.

This change in teacher roles has a couple of implications:

First, the relationship between teacher and students is less hierarchical. I have noticed at the New School that students are very comfortable engaging in substantive conversations with teachers on many subjects, and the relationship feels collegial.

Second, given this change in role, it is necessary to rely on different approaches to maintain order and discipline. At the New School, this is not done through threats of punishment and promises of rewards, but rather by a constant reinforcement of the school values. Acting in accordance with the school values is acknowledged with “glow” cards that kids appreciate, whereas actions in contradiction to values are met with a “grow” card, an opportunity to reflect on consequences and modify behavior.

These principles can be applied in other situations, but are essential for inquiry-based learning to work.

A cool-down corner for agitated or upset students to relax – the stuffies are called Kimochis and are part of a program for social and emotional learning

As a parent, it is important to understand these approaches, and support them at home. In my experience, observing the styles of interaction at the school have certainly influenced how we reinforce key behaviors at home. For example, encouraging children to contemplate how their actions affect others (both positively and negatively) is a recurring theme in our life.

4. Balancing vs traditional instruction (and practice)

A challenge with inquiry based learning is how to incorporate subjects where a certain amount of practice and memorization is important. For example, basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills require a degree of repetitive practice to become automatic.

I’ve noticed that programs that started out as 100% inquiry, such as Brightworks, have gradually incorporated more traditional approaches in some subject areas. The inquiry arc will still refer to and apply these subjects, but time is spent reinforcing these skills.

The New School has taken a hybrid approach since the beginning, and literacy/numeracy are given dedicated time and a different approach.

The New School does not issue traditional homework, however students are given assignments to complete over the course of the week. This helps keep parents informed and engaged with the current subjects their children and working on. In addition, assignments related to the inquiry arc allow students to set up some self-directed activities, that can involve their families.

. . .

Why did my wife and I choose an inquiry-based program for our children? We were very impressed with our initial contact with the school team, even before the school opened. They had a very clear vision for what a school could be, addressing the challenges of education in a changing environment.

Not only did they have a strong focus on critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration, they also had a clear plan in place for measuring the impact and outcomes of the program.

After 4 years, we have noticed some very noticeable outcomes:

• Students (including our two boys!) are excited to be at school. They look forward to it, and are enthusiastic for the day ahead.
• The relationship with the teachers is strong and supportive. Students feel like they are able to discuss many subjects with them, and this translates into a fearless, yet respectful, attitude towards other adults in the community.
• Our approach to discipline at home has inherited many of the values-based approaches from the school.
• Teachers are excited and positive: as the head of school told me, they are teaching the way that they want to teach.

There are challenges too, in particular how we deal with building skills that require repetitive drill and practice. Sometimes you just have to put in the time and effort to practice. However, the payoff when kids are able to apply a learned to skill to a broader challenge is very noticeable.

My older son reading his inquiry results to us at Expo Night

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Did you find this article useful? If this resonates with you, and if you have any comments or questions to share with us or GP, we’d love to hear from you! Let’s connect over email, here.

The post A parent’s experience of inquiry based learning | Postcards from a Creative Technologist appeared first on Saturday Kids | Coding, Digital Literacy for Kids & Parents.

From an early age, he had wanted to be an inventor, and now spends a lot of his time (both at a professional and a personal level) on experimenting with technology. Currently based in San Francisco, GP is married to a Singaporean and has two kids, ages 5 and 7.

Our team caught up with GP in person when we visited San Francisco back in June this year. Over the course of a few days, we discussed the possibilities of our collaborations, exchanged ideas, got connected to a few local partners, and took time to get to know him and his work a little better.

“There’s a lot of interest in building bridges across the Pacific, with the kind of maker and innovation culture that’s flourishing here in the Bay Area, that we would like to bring back to Saturday Kids in Singapore.”

Nicole: Starting with the obvious, how did this cross-continent collaboration come about?

GP: I’ve known John for many years now and our conversations (both in-person and virtually) have always been wide ranging and interesting. John is passionate about breaking moulds and promoting creative and self-directed education, and I think he saw in me an example of that in the real world.

He’s always very interested in the projects i’m doing, and so he proposed a collaboration, without a lot of structure at first, but with the idea that we could somehow work together to make the Saturday Kids experience very real and grounded by giving examples of how self-directed learning and creative learning actually play out in the real world. That it isn’t just about the time that the kids spend in the classroom, but that there’s real-world applications in the things that they are learning and it can become a much bigger thing.

In addition, there’s also a lot of interest in building bridges across the Pacific, with the kind of maker and innovation culture that’s flourishing here in the Bay Area that we would like to bring back to Saturday Kids in Singapore.

With this collaboration, I hope to contribute towards curriculum/product design, sharing experiences, help evaluate projects and continue to build bridges towards potential partnerships.

Nicole: You went from being a management consultant to a creative technologist, what’s that journey like?

GP: I studied Business, and Computer Science back in school and had a mid-career change where I decided to learn more about technology and get a little more hands-on with making things. That led me to getting a masters degree in Interactive Telecommunications at NYU. It was from there that I got to work on a lot of exciting large-scale projects that leveraged technology to create memorable experiences in the real world.

Right now I work full-time as a creative technologist with my role bridging the creative and technology teams – making sure that our ideas are technically leading edge and creatively powerful. The kind of work I do now has a focus on interactive and immersive video, such as 360 degree videos, virtual reality, and interactive installations. On the side, I also do an enormous amount of 3D printing – I have several 3D printers of my own and I enjoy designing things for practical use and for entertainment. Of late, I’m also gaining more interest in robotics and starting to do a lot more experimentation on that front.

From a very early age, when people asked me what I want to be when I grow up, I said inventor. So to some extent, the whole management consulting was a detour, so now I’m back to where I want to be all along – tinkering, experimenting, playing with different things.

Nicole: So what were some of the more memorable projects you’ve worked on?

GP: A key highlight was the opportunity to work on the Bay Lights project which involved 26,000 programmable LEDs on the Bay Bridge. Working together with an artistic team to bring this artistic project (enabled by technology) to life for such a San Francisco landmark was super exciting.

I also had the opportunity to work on a series of projects with an artist called Lynn Hershman, who has been doing art informed by tech for the past 50 years. More recently I’ve been doing a lot of work using drones to capture 3D imagery of cities and places.

Nicole: At the ISTE conference we attended earlier in Chicago, we heard a lot about the inquiry-based learning approach. You mentioned that your two kids (5 & 7) attend a school here where the pedagogy is based on that. Can you tell us more? 

GP: The school they attend here (in San Francisco) is called the New School, and like you said, the pedagogy revolves around Inquiry-Based Learning. The inquiry-based style of self-directed learning is one that’s attracting increasing interest in schools here in the U.S.

Charter schools (such as New School), are publicly funded with a high degree of independence, and you can see it as a vehicle for for trying new things in schools.

Inquiry is a key part of how the curriculum is organised. Each “inquiry arc’ lasts 6-8 weeks and consists of 3 phases: exploration, expression and exposition. Rather than dividing classwork into a series of formally divided subjects, they pick a topic of study that lets them all subjects together in a coherent way. For example, salt as a topic. What is salt chemically? How is it harvested through history? How has salt been used?  So instead of breaking it down by chemistry, history and so on, kids learn through topics of inquiry which helps them relate it better to the real-world.

“In the real world, a lot of the problems are never focused on a specific domain. A lot of the interesting problems worth solving will involve multiple things, not purely a math or history problem.”

Nicole:  How do you think the inquiry-based learning approach benefits kids and the way they learn?

GP: Well in the real world, a lot of the problems are never focused on a specific domain. A lot of the interesting problems worth solving will involve multiple things, not purely a math or history problem. So the overall skill of being able to look at a problem and then looking at the tools they have, is very important, rather than looking at it as a subject-problem.

The other key part is that generally they organise around team projects that students present to their peers and to the community, (the “exposition” phase). This helps them learn how to work together, how to share responsibility, accountability, and presentation skills – all valuable skills in the real world. It is great to see kids working on something, building it, presenting it, looking back and saying “I did it”.

“It is a not a bad thing to have something in your life that is disconnected from how you make a living. It is good to be able to unplug.”

Nicole: I personally believe in the importance of side projects outside of work. What are your thoughts on side-projects and making time for hobbies?

GP: All my hobbies actually ended up having professional relevance. I started flying drones as a hobby, then now it turned out to be an enormous part of a project I’m working on. 3D printing started as a hobby, and I ended up getting a job at Autodesk. Immersive video, something I started out experimenting, now is a part of my professional life. Right now I’m starting machine learning and robotics, all things that could eventually be useful.

It helps to stay in touch with other people who are doing similar things and to maintain diversity of information sources. Read widely, read differently. Be open to serendipity.

That said, it is a not a bad thing to have something in your life that is disconnected from how you make a living. It is good to be able to unplug.

Nicole: What do you have to share with fellow parents when it comes to kids and education?

GP: I guess a key thing to consider, is to what extent is education preparing children to execute someone else’s plan, vs to direct their own life. A great deal of what goes on with formal education, is teaching children to be perfect executors of someone else’s plans. However, It’s even more important to give kids a sense of how they can direct themselves, and to help them understand their own strengths and interests, in order to better navigate the world they’ll be growing up in.

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Massive thanks to GP for hosting the Saturday Kids team in San Francisco. Read more about why we spent a couple of weeks in the US earlier this summer, what we learnt from Mitch Resnick and Andy Weir, as well as a quick look at a new computational medium called Dynamicland.

The post Saturday Kids collaborates with San Francisco-based creative technologist appeared first on Saturday Kids | Coding, Digital Literacy for Kids & Parents.