Halloween Candy Machine | Part 1 of 8
Women, STEM, and The Kid-Powered Candy Machine
It’s April! Halloween is right around the corner! Makers and builders are running out of time to design and build 2022’s latest, greatest, most awe-inspiring kid entertainment!
All right, fine, I’m probably the only one who’s already planning for Halloween 2022, but I’m going to take some time right now to share my 2021 invention, inspired in part by my 6-year old daughter Nora’s Kiwi crates.
Back in 2020, when candy chutes were all the rage, I searched the Internet to see if there were any plans out there for a kid-powered, contactless candy dispenser. I never found any, so I took a more traditional route to amuse my daughter.
In 2021, I still hadn’t found plans for the candy machine I wanted to build, so I decided it was time to roll out my own.
I built it with the intention of writing about the process. It’s tempting to jump immediately to the how, because I think my design is pretty cool, very reliable, and I haven’t seen anything like it before. But before I jump into the how, let’s have a look at the why.
Why build a kid-powered candy machine? Here are some of the more obvious reasons:
- Because it’s fun!
- To compete with the neighbors.
- Because my daughter asked for a candy chute and I didn’t feel like making a DIY candy chute.
- Because I wanted to solve the useless-but-interesting engineering puzzle of how to build a completely contactless, completely kid-operated Halloween candy dispenser.
And here are my less-obvious reasons:
- Because I wanted to show my 6-year old daughter that women can build things and have STEM careers as well as being moms.
- Because a good friend has been urging me to write about design on Medium for a while, and this seemed like a good project to kick off a “designer diaries” series.
And, my final, most private reason: Because almost every time I see a kick-ass female inventor or mechanic or builder in a movie or a picture book, I have a fairly strong emotional reaction: She’s awesome, but that’s not me.
I’m talking about characters I love, like Kaylee from Firefly, Shuri from Black Panther, and even Rosie from the kids’ picture book Rosie Revere, Engineer. I love them so much for being strong and creative and independent, and I want them to be role models for my 6-year old daughter. But I need to be honest with myself: if I of all people see these girl geniuses as unattainably not me, then how am I supposed to convince my daughter that she can live up to that?
Fixing-and-building-and-inventing only looks effortless and exuberant from the outside. I don’t often get to see a portrayal of what it looks like from the inside. That internal state is difficult to depict because, well, it’s not where the action is. Also, the first woman on the team or the only woman on the team inevitably becomes highly visible and it becomes part of her job to wear the mask and play the effortlessly cool persona. I’ve played the persona as well as any while building and fixing things, but now that I have a daughter, I don’t want her to go through what I did. I can’t grant her society’s permission to get visibly stuck, frustrated, and sweaty, but I can grant her mine.
My background is in software engineering and user interface design. The friend who urged me to write on Medium was expecting me to write about UI/UX, not how to build a giant candy machine. But the candy machine allows me to touch on many aspects of design, so this is where we begin: designing and building a contraption, and exploring what the process looks like from the inside rather than the outside.
The articles below can either be read in order or as standalone pieces.
