Makerspace
I had the good fortune to visit SXSW Edu conference in March 2017. My mother and my son also travelled along with me. I saw that maker education was a hot topic there. Teachers from USA were very savvy towards maker education. My son and my mother also liked the demonstrations. In the same trip I had taken both of them to Children’s Creativity Museum in San Francisco and both of them had like maker activities their.
My mother who has been a pillar of my life was so influenced from the trip that she said we should open a makerspace for kids in our office in New Delhi. Our office is Karol Bagh area which is a middle class area of Delhi with huge population. I was a little apprehensive since I said something like Children’s Creativity Museum can work only in rich or intellectual neighbourhoods. Karol Bagh was not top in both these criteria.
In parallel a major tenant of my office building had vacated the office just a few days ago. So we had the space free for the makerspace. I talked to a few friends and relatives and they seemed to like the idea.
We finally started the makerspace in the end of May 2017. I started small. Created a few projects and then tried my best to get some kids join the makerspace. Google Ads were not that effective due to lack of target within a 2 km radius. Finally when I had lot hope of getting many kids to joining we got 10 kids at our makerspace. Most were the kids from our friends and neighbours. Since it was summer vacation time the kids had time and their parents wanted them to learn something creative.
We were following Lean Startup methodology to execute our startup venture. I cannot explain Lean Startup process here but basically it talks about getting started with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to learn about the customer behaviour. I was very focused to understand the psychology of every parent and child who came join our makerspace.
Parents and kids were excited. I was very worried about the first class. Also it was the first time me or my team was teaching to kids. Fortunately the first class went well. Some parents paid only in the 2nd or 3rd class once they were satisfied that the kids were enjoying and learning.
That 1 month taught us a lot about kids and their behaviour. Me and my small team was experienced in creating educational content through mobile apps and multimedia but this was our first big encounter with live kids.
We learnt a great deal from kids about their YouTube habits, homework habits and learning capabilities. An interesting observation was that the more the parent used to feel that the child was naughty the better focused the child was while doing maker activities. Again I was seeing flow in action.
A few kids already knew some things since they had experimented with electronic parts at their home by watching YouTube. They were making toy gadgets like my son. So finally my son was not the genius kid which my relatives were making him out to be. He was a normal child who was just curious like the other members of our makerspace. The thing that differentiated my son and these 2–3 kids from others was that they had actively been building stuff at home by seeing YouTube videos. They were having problems getting parts but Amazon and old Delhi wholesale markets were providing them the needed stuff. I fondly call these kids ‘Maker Kids’.
These Maker Kids loved the makerspace so much that they did not want to go home. One kid had to leave the makerspace after few months since he had to start his IIT entrance coaching in class 8th. I felt very unhappy when he left the makerspace to pursue IIT coaching. He did not want to leave but his parents like millions of parents in India wanted him to go to IIT and have a good career as an engineer.
A problem which I faced was that the number of kids fluctuate based on the school schedule. During holidays we got 10 kids without much promotion and during exams most kids took off. Kids did not want to take off but parents obviously wanted them to concentrate on studies.
The kids were able to create toy lamps, toy water fountains, toy cars and lots of other stuff at our makerspace. They also learned programming using Scratch and Python. I tried to teach a few kids HTML and CSS and they really liked it.
I have founded an open education project called Fun2Do Labs. To know more about it visit : http://fun2dolabs.org . Subscribe to me on Medium to read my posts on education and technology.
