An intro to LBD
Sitting down in front of my computer in my first day of Learning by Doing at the CRI, I didn’t have many thoughts on the topic, or know what to expect. Okay, learning by doing. Wtf is Arduino? Why is someone talking about Raspberry pi literally an hour before lunchtime?
Confusion in the beginning and being hungry from your brain working a lot is commonplace at CRI (the Center for Interdisciplinary Research), based in Paris’s 15th district in the tall ‘Tour de Montparnasse’ building. Since the start of the EdTech Masters program three weeks ago, everything has been new! exciting! “organized chaos!” they like to call it — and Learning by Doing has been no exception. And then there I was, nearly five days into the third week and this week’s bootcamp showing us the value of literally learning BY doing, having by that time built an exact 3D dinosaur head replica from cardboard, getting an intro to coding, learning to program a simple game and building a computerized project using the handheld Arduino computer, all by Thursday afternoon.
The concept of Learning by Doing is basically what it sounds like. Our teachers were two young guys who have backgounds in tech, science, engineering and art arenas. They gave us a basic (VERY basic, like an hour), (the boot camp is only a week long, you understand) intro to the concepts, showed us a bit and literally just let us go at it. Afterward, we learned more by playing around and helping each other where some understood and others didn’t (me), and then they assigned us projects due by the end of the week and gave us free reign of themselves and all the resources of their science and tech laboratory.
By day two they got right to it and tasked us with making an art installation, activity or teaching tool based on synesthesia and/or technology due by Friday morning. I’d been working with a group from the week before during our Game Design boot camp making a game for kids about how trees grow and we thought this could be the perfect opportunity to create an activity on the topic of symbiosis, which we were thinking might be kind of a difficult concept for kids (and let’s face it, adults) to grasp, what with all the big words, (mutualism, parasitism, COMMENSALISM, come on).
So, on Thursday morning, our group ideas took a few hours to morph into the idea of a push-button interface where, depending on the two buttons a player pushes, one of three lights either will or won’t light up. Blue for neutral symbiosis, red for parasitism and green for a positive symbiotic relationship. The finished project looked amazingly like this!
So steps, in a nutshell, looked like this:
- Think up the idea
- Find enough buttons & wires to connect (we needed roughly five buttons and about 28 wires)
- Hooking up our buttons & computer to an Arduino
- Writing code commands to tell the Arduino who the buttons were, what the wires were for and what they did together (amazingly, we told the computer more info than we have received since day one of the program)
- Finding graphics for the buttons (pictures of different trees and their symbiotic partners.. things like bees, lichen and tree-killing beetles)
- Cutting out and assembling all the pieces and fitting them together in a harmonizing way, which we realized as a kind of box to hide the wires and create a game-like button interface for people to visualize & interact with in order to understand basic concepts of symbiosis
- Making a cool poster to TELL everyone about what we just did
We were pretty proud of our button box and all the work that went into wiring and programming the buttons to the lights and eventually some fluttery sounds too, which would accompany a player’s correct choice of matching two pictures that have a symbiotic relationship. For our little group, made up of people from four different countries and completely different career backgrounds, the making of the project and working together was totally cool! I can’t speak for everyone else but I loved working in this group and on this project — it felt rad to be thinkers and makers and producers. I have to commend the concept of Learning by Doing and CRI’s overall approach in this area. While credit can be given to having intelligent mentors and being given the tools, the process of learning completely new concepts and teaching ourselves, together, is extraordinary and something I don’t think I’ll come back from. Nor do I want to!
Scroll down to see more from the journey of making our ‘symbiosis station’.
