Street College 2019: Finding the Perfect Beat
By Drs. Will Patterson and Sharon Irish
All photos by Sharon Irish
This story is both a grant report and summary of Street College, a part of Ghetto Genius Universe, a culture and engineering start-up that engages young people in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in various venues. Dr. William Patterson (Dr. P), its founding director, calls the mentoring STEMulation.
For Street College 2019 in Champaign we were privileged to partner with Boyz 2 Men, a mentoring program for African-American males in Champaign-Urbana. We received funding through the Don Moyer Boys & Girls Club to implement a week-long set of activities, Finding the Perfect Beat, to learn about sound engineering and design and build boom boxes. We consistently had fifteen youth (mostly ages 12–14) and, on a few days, we had 20, in addition to adult volunteers from the University of Illinois, Boyz 2 Men, Dante Scott of the Douglass Branch of the Champaign Public Library, and other groups. We paid a small stipend to one young man who had worked with us last summer; he helped lead the design and construction process for the week. Two undergraduate interns from the Siebel Center for Design also worked with us. Further support came from the staff of the Champaign Park District, Douglass Center, and from Mike Royse, who donated the wood we used for the boom boxes.
We met at the pavilion in Douglass Park in Champaign, from 11am-1pm for six days, from July 15–19 and July 22, 2019. For those of you who don’t know the area, the pavilion is near the Douglass Center, which hosts summer camps and has bathrooms and storage space. The lead instructors were engineer Mr. Joe Bolton and Ghetto Genius founder Dr. Will Patterson; Sharon Irish served as project coordinator.
This year was distinct from last year in that we partnered with a single organization and had substantial help from both the Champaign Park District and the Siebel Center for Design (SCD). Further, we focused on one project — building boom boxes — and how that process was informed by human-centered design and the engineering design cycle.
Beyond STEM-related concepts, a key goal of Street College is to foster positive interactions and entrepreneurship. The boom box builds provided excellent opportunities for team building. Scaffolding the process allowed youth who were unsure of their skills to gain confidence, try out their ideas, and successfully complete the project. One young man initially said there was no way he could build a boom box; at the end of the week, we photographed him smiling with his completed box. We also had DJ equipment to sustain interest and energy while the teams assembled their boxes. The music helped integrate the history of hip hop and other genres into the boombox builds.
From the start, the youth were introduced to the idea of a clean work space, so we began each session with picking up garbage and sweeping the park pavilion. We used posters to introduce the street inquiry engineering design cycle, and discussed what the terms meant: authenticate, investigate, ideate, illuminate, prototype, and evaluate. The youth formed eight teams of 2–3 people and presented their ideas to the whole group after spending some time studying the boom boxes that Mr. Bolton had built over the years. In their journals they wrote down their questions and observations about the boom boxes. (“What will make my boom box work?” for example).
Mr. Bolton had sketched a figure, “L’il Man,” which became a central focus for discussion. As seen in the illustration, “L’il Man” is listening to music on headphones, music inflected by African influences and technological developments. Dr. P led a discussion with the youth about the imagery and their associations to it, inviting everyone to write their thoughts on post-it notes to generate further discussion. A dominant theme among the youth was how important certain music was in regulating their moods and clearing their heads. A key concept that Dr. P repeated was “what you put into the space” — learning, innovation, positive actions — affects the space and everyone around you. “L’il Man” was an extremely useful character to embody this idea.
By the second session, we had passed out the supplies to start assembling the electronics for the boom boxes. Mr. Bolton, assisted by the SCD interns and the youth engineer, helped instruct the teams as needed. They wrote their names on the speaker boxes to keep their assemblies together from day to day. Each session, Dr. P led a session of about 20 minutes, reviewing the design cycle, or music history, or introducing a new activity, prior to continuing to build the boom boxes. This 20/20 instructional method works well: 20 minutes of focused discussion, followed by 20 minutes or more of hands-on activities, with further discussion and reflection later in the session.
After six sessions, and a lot of extra time by Mr. Bolton to build the boxes, cut the speaker holes, and complete the wiring, each team had a completed boom box. One youth chose not to install a handle on his box because he wanted to add a guitar strap to it. One last-minute fix that we had to manage was that the power adapters that we had ordered were not adequate, so we had to return them and order new versions, to be disseminated to the youth later.
We observed a wonderful variety of ideas about design and adaptation of off-the-shelf materials. For example, Dr. P and one of the SCD interns led a discussion about how a wheeled tool kit could be repurposed — aiming to spark “out of the box” thinking and imagining how items could be other than usual. Youth suggested an exciting range of uses: mobile kitchen, lighting it with LEDs, DJ booth, food or shoe storage, in addition to installing speakers in it.
Mr. Eric Dixon visited us at the end of the week, sharing stories from his career in radio and television. And the project was covered by WCIA News.
While we appreciate the financial and in-kind support we received, this year’s Street College would not have been possible without the substantial donated labor, equipment and transportation provided by Dr. P, Mr. Bolton and other volunteers. If we had sufficient resources, a four-week session would have allowed the youth to do more of the actual construction together with learning further concepts about carpentry, sound and electronics. It was remarkable that the park setting worked as well as it did: we only had one day of rain and a “heat dome” descended on Champaign-Urbana the week we met, with high humidity and temperatures in the mid-90s. But we managed with ice water and fans and shade.
We observed firsthand the support the youth gave each other, persisting through frustration or confusion to smiling when the boom box worked. It was wonderful to join with Boyz 2 Men, which fostered a culture of respect among the participants. The youth already knew each other and most of the adults who volunteered at Street College, affirming the need for ongoing relationships that build and maintain trust.
Boyz 2 Men describes its organization as follows: “Founded by Devon ‘Wayne’ Turner, Sr., the Boyz 2 Men Mentoring Program’s mission is to improve the academic achievement, self-esteem, social awareness, and social competence of young African American males. By providing young men with professional male mentors, Boyz 2 Men will help their mentees to reach their full potential thereby cultivating productive citizens.” Street College was pleased to be able to support this excellent group.
This summer we began to assemble a guide to building boomboxes using illustrated steps; while not yet completed, this guide will help others to replicate and/or adapt the activity. Finally, we are working on converting a trailer into a mobile boombox-creation station in which we can readily store and move all the necessary equipment to various locations.
We are grateful for the financial support of the Don Moyers Boys & Girls Club, as well as the many other groups and people listed above. As of fall 2019, we continue our collaboration with the Boyz2Men group, which is helping with the development of the Hip Hop Xpress.
