Beyond Hour of Code: How MetaMedia Fuses Digital Literacy + Creative Expression
By Sam Phillips | Lead Instructor, MetaMedia
By connecting an Arduino circuit board to a CNC machine, a 12-year-old from California programmed a robot to paint with watercolors. Using his school’s 3D printer, a teen from Massachusetts hacked his wheelchair so he could navigate the world in a new way. On the MaKey MaKey website, hundreds of inventors of all ages have created working instruments, interactive dioramas, and video game controllers out of alligator clips and tin foil. Technology has empowered students to realize projects beyond their wildest imagination. When I was in middle school, if I were asked to design my dream home, my toolbox would have been limited to graph paper and pencil; now — with FUSE Studio—youth can teach themselves 3D design software and render architectural blueprints in the same time it would have taken me to hot glue pieces of card stock together.
What a time to be alive.
Of course, not every student has access to the tools necessary to make their dreams happen, which is why MetaMedia offers these high-tech resources—Arduinos, 3D printers, MaKey MaKeys, and FUSE Studio—to all middle school youth for free. We believe that the world becomes a better place when digital literacy is no longer exclusive to the privileged, but a central component of every student’s education. Part of this education requires youth be exposed to the principles of computer programming so that they can understand the apps and technical innovations that they use everyday and evolve their media habits from consumption to production.
Currently, only 25% of schools in America offer computer science courses, and in Evanston, there are no dedicated computer science teachers at the middle school level. In an effort to fill this gap, MetaMedia hosted its first Hour of Code event last December — along with 200,000 other schools and community organizations— to take part in the largest global learning event in history. Hour of Code’s mission is simple: if we expose kids to code for one hour, we might spark an interest in computer science that could change their lives and lead to a more promising, equitable, and innovative future.
During MetaMedia’s event, Makers from different middle schools worked together to complete a series of self-guided challenges, learning essential programming concepts like loops and if statements. For many kids, this was their first exposure to the “hard fun” of computer science. Other students had completed Hour of Code projects in school, and emerged as leaders, helping others with less experience solve rigorous puzzles. It was a pleasure to witness persistence and teamwork surface organically and see so many kids opt-in to an afternoon of geeking out. To reward their efforts, we partnered with Gigio’s Pizzeria to offer free slices of pizza to any teen who programmed for at least an hour. Sometimes real food makes “food for thought” that much more satisfying.
An hour is not enough.
Mitch Resnick, one of the co-founders of the Scratch programming platform, is thrilled that more students have been exposed to computer science but has expressed concern that some instructional methods, including those used by Hour of Code, don’t leave room for student self-expression:
In many introductory coding activities, students are asked to program the movements of a virtual character navigating through a set of obstacles toward a goal. This approach can help students learn some basic coding concepts, but it doesn’t allow them to express themselves creatively — or develop a long-term engagement with coding. It’s like offering a writing class that teaches only grammar and punctuation without providing students a chance to write their own stories
At MetaMedia, we are reaching beyond Hour of Code to find tools that also foster creative voice. Middle school is a formative developmental time for students. Part of our mission is to provide a space where youth can take risks and explore their identities without judgment, and we need to consider this when we develop our coding workshops. Computer science is traditionally taught in a STEM context, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, we’ve seen students who struggle in science and math invest in coding activities when they are framed as art projects or platforms for storytelling.
For example, over the past two months, we’ve worked with a group of students from Y.O.U. to develop interactive video games. Video game design can be incredibly complex and require mastery of advanced mathematical concepts. We needed to create an on-ramp for these students, who would otherwise be intimidated. Instead of jumping into code first, we asked students to stretch their imaginative muscles, creating vision boards that listed their games’ objectives, mapped out story arcs, and displayed sketches of characters, environments, and enemies. These preliminary measures ensured that Makers programmed with purpose and eventually led to a delightful variety of final projects: everything from a racing game about Uber and Lyft drivers to a zombie apocalypse adventure. In the end, not every student finished their game, but they all left our workshop with something: a sprite, an animation, an interactive prototype, and a Scratch log-in so that they could continue tinkering at home in their spare time. As an after-school space liberated from the pressures of standardized testing and academic achievement, it’s important that we emphasize to our students the value of process over product and the incremental nature of skill-building.
The Legacy and Future of STEAM Learning.
By now, you’ve probably heard of STEM-centered learning. It’s an acronym that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics — and it has become a ubiquitous buzzword in the last decade, used widely by President Obama, who envisions 100,000 new STEM teachers deployed over the next ten years. More recently, a group of educators began integrating The Arts into the STEM equation. Some find this shift to STEAM controversial, but it is aligned with MetaMedia’s emphasis on self-expression and we believe that it offers more access points to under-represented populations than the STEM framework. Students who don’t have computers at home may not be motivated to engineer websites or apps that will be inaccessible to their friends and family, but they likely will want to tell stories, arrange images, compose music, and express themselves — like everyone else.
As George Lucas, father of Star Wars and recipient of both the National Medal of Arts and the National Medal of Science, points out: the idea of the artist as scientist is nothing new.
“For thousands of years, artists were also the scientists and engineers. In order to accomplish certain works, especially in architecture, you had to figure out how to accomplish it. They sat with the D’uomo in Florence for hundreds of years because they couldn’t figure out how to put the dome on top. Brunelleschi, who did it…had to actually invent the ratcheting pulley in order to get oxen to pull bricks up that high.”
We don’t know who the future Filippo Brunelleschis or George Lucases will be (not to mention the future Ada Lovelaces and Neil deGrasse Tysons), but we do know that they all have to start somewhere: bit by bit, an hour at a time. Who knows: some of them might be hanging out at MetaMedia right now, playing a video game in a bean bag chair, dreaming up something revolutionary that could change the world.
