What happens when you invite kids to try?
Emma Shoe is a 14-year old from Australia. She is one of 400,000 kids at DIY who try their hand at challenges each day and then share their work with our worldwide community. Here’s a glimpse of what Emma did over the course of her first year with DIY.
Step 1 Select a challenge: A few months ago Emma decided she wanted to complete a challenge for our innovator skill.
Step 2 Share the results: Emma came up with a new way to help people open jars and she shared her sketches and prototype with us. In this case she imagined a car that would help unlock vacuum-sealed lids!
Step 3 Give and receive feedback: Emma’s project sparked an exchange within our community of 400,000 kids. Her willingness to reveal both her success and failures inspired other kids to try their own prototypes and also helped evolve her own ideas. Here’s an example of how kids responded to her jar-opener concept.
Step 4 Repeat: In the past year Emma has responded to over 70 DIY challenges on a wide range of topics. She’s tried her hand at everything from puppets to animations to doing osmosis with food.
I’m continuously inspired by Emma and all of the other kids within our community. Their participation at DIY is entirely voluntary and most typically is done during free time after school and on weekends. Despite this, they consistently bring an electrifying amount of imagination to their projects. We are still honing our pedagogy and our platform, but our 1 million projects and the 2.5 million comments to date are a testimony to the untapped creativity and curiosity in kids all around the world.
What happens when you invite adults to try?
At the i3 conference, a gathering devoted to innovation in education, a subtext of many of the discussions kept circling back to ideas for keeping creativity alive in adults as well as kids. Gabe Kleinman and Ev Williams mentioned that part of the goal at Medium is to create an environment where people can share their stories without having their guard up so they can take some risks and be authentic. Sandy Speicher from IDEO pondered how we could give everyone access to feeling more creative. Arne Duncan talked about how public/private partnerships were initial experiments in trying to build a culture within the U.S. Department of Education that makes failure ok. Their examples resonate with everything we’ve observed is important for kids within the DIY community like Emma Shoe.
I’d be interested in learning from others who are exploring ways to spark curiosity and creativity within your own communities. What’s working? What challenges have you faced? Are there differences between what adults and kids need? Most importantly, what would the world be missing if we didn’t invite people to try new things and to share their work with an audience?
I look forward to seeing if there are commonalities to what we are all discovering.
Postscript: Many thanks to Molly McMahon for serving as the muse for this post. She sat next to me at the i3 conference at a moment when I had writer’s block and, through the simple act of listening, she helped to inspire this story.
