Making Sense of History in the Makerspace
A typical school Makerspace is filled with tools and technology that make it a natural fit for robotics, engineering, and other STEM classes. Part of my job is finding ways to make 3D printing, electronics, coding, and other tech work for history, foreign language, literature, and other content areas. One of the classes that has created the most sophisticated projects is the African American History class. Over the last two years, students in this class have come to the Makerspace to design and build a project about the lives of African Americans during the post-civil war, reconstruction, era. Looking at the results of these two projects offers an interesting glimpse into the value of the Makerspace in non-STEM subjects.
When I do a content area project with a teacher, there is a wide range of possible formats. Sometimes the teacher wants the students to make a particular object that can demonstrate a concept or reinforce the content. Sometimes they are asking students to demonstrate in an object what they understand about a topic or unit, much like a test. Every now and then students actually learn and process the information in a unit through the creation of the product. These projects represent a different form of research, true learning by doing. By considering the form, design, mechanics, and presentation of the parts of the object they are evaluating, synthesizing and presenting information. This is similar to a research paper or an essay. Selecting information, deciding how it should be presented and building an argument or a thesis out of disparate facts and opinions is most of what we grade, not just memorization of facts. Students defend their thesis through this presentation and arrangement of words and concepts. If critical elements are left out, the teacher knows the student wasn’t paying attention or didn’t put thought into their argument, but if the concepts are there the student is given leeway to come to their own conclusions and make their own arguments. This is tangible evidence of a student’s thought process, and it can be done in words or in objects.
Version One: The Monuments
After studying some of the facts of the reconstruction, students arrived at the Makerspace with one directive, how would you represent or memorialize this time in American history? We began with a wide-ranging discussion of possible symbols and systems of symbols. Things like chain links were suggested, but so was a pond with interrelated parts. When one student described the stories of success from that time as “hidden gems” a group decision was made to design jewelry boxes. The cover of the box would represent an attitude or situation that kept these stories from being told. The viewer could remove that to “uncover the hidden history”. The design was at once simple, elegant and extremely customizable.
At this point, I facilitated a digital fabrication process. Students found or designed objects to place in their box. These might be laser cut shapes, printed photographs or 3D printed objects. Students needed to create a mock-up of their design, determine the dimensions of the objects, and share them appropriately. Once the boxes and parts were created, students assembled them.
For me, the beauty of this project is its self-contained nature. Each box, quite literally, tells it’s own story. They can be held in your hand, hung on a wall, shown individually or as part of a set. The boxes were shown at the school’s black history month assembly, displayed outside of the Makerspace, and even traveled to conferences where we talked about the project with other educators. They are thoughtful because the students who designed them were thoughtful about what they were making.
Version Two: The Game
A year later a new group of students arrived in the Makerspace to address the same time period of American history. They had studied the same information, looked at the same sources, and were told only one thing about their project, they wouldn’t be making boxes. Their job would be creation, not re-creation.
They came with the concept in mind that this was “the worst of times and the best of times.” They had ideas jotted down like a physical scale that would balance when positive and negative pieces were added, or a puzzle with images on the front and back of each piece.
Creativity is not a linear or predictable exercise. They decided to make a board game.
They decided on three design principles for their game. It needed to be fun to play, realistic in how it portrayed the lives of African Americans after the Civil War, and educational. We embarked on a process of game design that took the students through four separate versions of the game, each ending with playtesting and refinement of the design, the rules and the information presented in the game. The first version, with handwritten index cards and a board of marker on cardboard, was nearly unplayable. The second version led to players having a remarkably easy time triumphing over challenges. The third version was fun but needed some alterations. The fourth version was a legit board game with a game board, pieces, cards and rules designed by the students.
The game is called Bad Hand, and each player starts with a deck of cards that is stacked against them, some worse than others. If you were born in Mississippi you are significantly farther behind someone born in Maryland. You can pull the illiterate card or the apprenticeship card. Your goal is to navigate the board, drawing new cards, some negative and some positive, to try to mitigate your bad hand. These cards reflect actual challenges and successes African Americans might have faced: walking into a white’s only restaurant, being accused of whistling at a white woman, joining the NAACP. The player who increases their points the most is the winner, so it’s possible to win with negative points, an accurate depiction of what “winning” might mean at the time.
The beauty of this project is that it continues to change. The students ask to play it when they have a few minutes at the end of class, and it is as much a spectator event as it is a board game. They know the different events that can improve or hurt their “hand”. They know the parts of the board that are hard to navigate, the areas where they are likely to be thrown in jail or lose valuable points, but at each playing the story plays out a little differently and it is largely outside of their control, an accurate portrayal of the situation. They are preparing to pass the game on to the eighth-grade history students, who are studying the same time period, fulfilling their design goal of being able to use the game as an educational tool.
Taking Control of the Process
One of the things I love about these projects is how they tell completely different stories from the same set of information. The boxes focus on the successes that arose out of horrible conditions. The game tells the story of all those who struggled so that a few successes could emerge. These decisions were made by students, not teachers. In each case, the history teacher and I were there to facilitate a process, provide technical and historical information, and offer advice, we were not there to direct the outcome. There was a moment during the box project when I had created a mockup of what the cover of the box might look like: a mashup of text and images cut out from the wood in an intricate design. When I showed it to the students I was given a flat out “no.” Instead, a single word, in quotation marks, in a simple font was what they wanted, and they were completely unified in that decision. They had a reason behind it. The attitudes and systems that these words represented, like segregation and inferiority, were not layered and complex things, they were blunt and direct and should be represented that way.
I don’t remember often being encouraged to come to my own conclusions and override the teacher during my public high school education. The few times that I was allowed to think for myself are the few moments I remember from those four years. But even then the best I could do was write about my ideas, and present them to the teacher or my classmates. With a Makerspace, students can create tangible, functional and/or beautifully expressive objects that reach beyond their own class. They can be displayed, or played, publically. Students who learn what it takes to make their ideas into real things, regardless of where the original content came from, have learned that the world is something that they can create, not just re-create.
