The Inadvertent Inventor
How does innovation happen? At the moment, I can identify, oh, about a thousand books or articles that talk about the nature of innovation. Among them is Steven Johnson’s excellent Where Good Ideas Come From. In that book, Johnson talks about the concept of the “adjacent possible,” a kind of “shadow future” where one can’t envision point D from point A, but after conceptualizing from A to B, and then B to C, D becomes imaginable. Other essayists describe innovation as tinkering, or the remixing of materials or ideas.
For me, innovation happened when I thought about applying an existing technology in a new way to solve a problem.
It started out when my school’s first 3D printer arrived. Like others, I excitedly printed the demo comb, nut and bolt, and length of chain, marveling at the technology and hypnotized by watching the melted plastic filament ooze out of the printer’s extruder head. Soon after, I took the next step by designing and printing for myself a decorative box.
While that was a satisfying experience, I began to think about making something better — something to solve a problem. As the technology manager in a school for children who learn differently, I wondered: What could I make to help kids with dyslexia? Up until then, I had read about the usefulness of 3D technology for making prosthetic hands, webbed feet for ducks, and even the potential for printing with stem cells. But all of those are physical things. I wanted to make language tangible.
By starting with the question, “What can I make?” I opened the door to a line of inquiry that led to my invention, Wordameechee™ — a 3D printed game that helps children with dyslexia make sense of words.* Dyslexia is a language-based learning disability that affects the way the brain processes information. Because dyslexia manifests itself in a child’s ability to read, even bright students with dyslexia often feel academically inferior compared to their classmates. They experience a great deal of anxiety. For students with dyslexia, learning to read can be one of the most stressful challenges they face in school.
I designed Wordameechee™ as a game which takes the typically 2-dimensional activity of learning to read into the 3rd dimension thru the use of 3D-printed syllables, called “morphemes,” and prefix and suffice dice.
To play the game, students roll a prefix die, put it next to a base morpheme, and determine the meaning of the newly-formed word. Sometimes the roll of the die will result in a nonsense word, but it’s still decode-able. While the die lend an element of gamification to the process, the physicality of the morphemes allows students to interact with them, which results in a kind of intimacy between the student and the words that can’t be achieved by handling printed cards, which is typically how our students learn to read.
As students handle Wordameechee™, they can see, touch, and feel each letter shape in a morpheme — in particular, ascenders and descenders, which are the parts of letters that extend above and below a horizon or baseline. (For example, the lowercase letters b, d, f, h, k, l, and t have ascenders; lowercase g, j, p, q, and y have descenders.) Around here, we talk about making learning “stick.” Multisensory learning tools help cement knowledge for our students, imprinting it into what I think of as mental muscle memory.
At first, I thought my invention was so simple a chimpanzee could’ve thought of it. But in fact, Wordameechee™ would not have been thinkable until the 3D printer was invented. My “aha” moment came courtesy of the “adjacent possible.”
As Wordameechee™ has been making its way into schools that have volunteered to test drive it, I find teachers and administrators applauding it as inventive. Of course, that makes me feel validated, but it also goes to show that sometimes inventions don’t have to be groundbreaking to have value. Joy Mangano, the inventor of the Miracle Mop, achieved her success because she asked a simple question: How could she make her mop better? When I think of inventiveness, household objects don’t readily spring to mind, yet many household objects are the products of such inquisitiveness, where someone asked the question: How can this thing be made easier, cleaner, lighter, stronger…smarter?
Questions are the can openers of inventiveness. Nobody sits down, pencil and sketchbook in hand, and draws the plans for the Canogulator 5000X without having asked a lot of questions first, not only of themselves, but of others. Yet I think there is something a little scary about asking kids to “invent” something. We’ve been conditioned to think of invention as coming from geniuses; we say, “Gee, what will they think up next?” But we are the geniuses, really — or we can be.
Part of my job as an educator is to demonstrate creative confidence; to show that messing around with ideas isn’t just a waste of time, but in fact a process that can pave the way for the adjacent possible. By modeling this behavior, I hope to give my students the confidence to not only ask, “What can I make?” but “What will I think up next?”
Wordameechee literally means “Friends with Words,” which was my original product name. Unfortunately, the folks who make the popular “Words with Friends” weren’t happy about it. “Ameechee” is the phonetic spelling of the Italian “amici.”
Wordameechee™ is a trademark of Edu-Tech Academic Solutions. It is also Patent Pending.
