Who is Robot Owl for?
There are no education technology experts out there. It’s just people like us.
With anything new, it can be tricky to know who it’s for. And so it is with Robot Owl, our guide to sparking children’s passion for innovation, creativity and technology.
Several people have asked me, who is Robot Owl for? Is it meant for parents? For teachers? Which ones?
Here’s my answer: Robot Owl is for anyone who wants to encourage children’s curiosity and their exploration.
Several people have asked me, who is Robot Owl for?
“Curiosity” and “exploration” can sound vague. When I say I want children to be curious, I mean I want them to see how interesting and vast the world of ideas is. I want them to catch a fever for asking questions, and to feel a hunger to know how things work.
When I talk about exploration, I mean that I want each child to know that treasures don’t get uncovered by themselves; stories they love didn’t start out as final drafts; the sidewalk didn’t pour itself, its cement didn’t invent itself, and the laws that govern it didn’t write themselves. People do all these things, people like you, and they create them little bit by little bit, trying and failing and tweaking and improving and starting over. “Exploring” doesn’t necessarily mean succeeding in discovering a new continent—but it most certainly does mean setting sail!
“Exploring” doesn’t necessarily mean succeeding in discovering a new continent — but it absolutely does mean setting sail
What about technology? To me, technology is just one area of fertile ground for curiosity and exploration. But it’s the newest area — always the newest area, in every age, because technology is constantly reinventing and outdoing itself.
This makes it different from, say, literature; I can read the same books to my children that my parents read to me, but my children will never use an Atari, an Apple II, or a Speak ’n’ Spell. (At least you can still get a Simon!)
There’s more out there, and more coming every day, than I can keep up with, so this project is necessarily collaborative
With electronic technology, we’re only beginning to have language to describe how we explore it, and we only have the beginnings of a canon of its greatest masterpieces and tools. So Robot Owl will focus in particular on those questions. What forms of programming actually work in a 5th grade classroom? Does teaching children to program actually make any sense? How young is too young to have a smartphone? Is Minecraft good or evil — and more importantly, how can adults engage with it so its massive potential as a learning tool is opened up to curious young minds?
Though I don’t have answers to every question, I’ve learned plenty about how kids are using technology and what gives them creative power versus turning them into mere consumers. But there’s more out there, and more coming every day, than I can keep up with. So this project is necessarily collaborative.
Robot Owl is for anyone who wants in on that collaboration
Robot Owl is for anyone who wants in on that collaboration. Parent, teacher, child, teenager, godparent, friend of the family, aunt or uncle, grandparent, school principal, schools chancellor who happens to be in the Mariachi Hall of Fame (welcome to the list, Chancellor Carranza!) — if you want to spark a passion for curiosity and exploration in every child, this is for you.
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Ben Wheeler is a software developer and teacher in Brooklyn. He’s taught hundreds of people to program, helped foment a revolution (ask him sometime!), and makes a mean gumbo. His work has been published in The Best of Make Magazine. You can see the recipe for all these things at his site, techno-social.com.
