Inspiring the next generation of makers
It’s important kids see screens as more than magic: turn your phone into a maker toy.
When my son was in kindergarten, he started calling my iPhone “the everything machine.” It was his favorite toy. It could be a tool—like a camera or a sound recorder—passive entertainment, a toy, a game, a book, or even a friend (I recommend listening to the conversations 6-year-olds have with Siri).
That kindergartner is now about to enter the 6th grade. The iPhone is still his favorite toy but he has one of his own. He saved all his money for more than a year — from chores, elaborate Pokemon trades, a birthday, a Christmas, and a tooth fairy visit or two — to buy a top-of-the-line model. For him it’s not a second screen, it’s a first screen, the only screen.
A year or two ago my son starting asking questions about software and how iPhones are made. And I realized just how hard it is to deconstruct the technology hidden inside a handheld supercomputer for an elementary school kid. I used physical circuits, introduced him to coding with Scratch and Hopscotch, and started showing him how sensors work.
Little by little he started to get it, but it was still difficult to move his understanding of digital devices out of the realm of magic. This felt like parental failure on my part.
I believe one of the most important ideas we can spark in kids is that everything non-natural is made by people, is the product of people’s work, and is an expression of an accumulation of ideas. Someone invented that milk carton. That mirror is the product of hundreds of years of history. The letters in that text on the screen were drawn by someone.
I like telling my kids about my abuelito; he was a shoemaker. I would drive around Monterrey with him in his big black Buick and we would source animal hides for leather, nails, wood for heels, rubber, and so on. Men would carve the forms of feet out of blocks of wood. Piece by piece the shoe would take part around it. When a new line of shoes was designed he would have people try them on to see how they felt. “A good shoe should feel invisible,” he said. My job was to take the finished shoes and put them in boxes with tissue paper printed with his bright red rooster logo and a certificate of quality. The paper had to be wrapped around the shoes just so. “Everyone is happy to get new shoes,” he used to say, “make opening the box something special.”
This story is useful for explaining to kids how software is made. Instead of nails and leather we use logic to connect pictures and sounds to sensors. The sensors detect our touch, and when we are successful, the machinery feels invisible.
Kids, I believe, have an innate desire to make things. Every modern generation has had its version of building toys: wooden blocks, Tinker Toys, Erector Sets, the original square Lego, and Minecraft. Each toy gives kids a set of construction materials with few restrictions on what they can do with them. The code that builds software, in some ways, is the ultimate building block.
When I was nine my parents brought an Apple][ into our house and it changed my life. Back then there wasn’t much to do on those machines unless you learned to code. But the source — of most of the programs available — was visible. From that, I figured out how to change the colors of Steve Wozniak’s Brick Out. Suddenly, I had power over this hard-to-understand machine.
The generation that built the internet had the same experience with view source back when most websites were relatively simple HTML. I remember the first time I looked at a site with CSS and started to understand what was possible. My mind was blown.
One of the unintended consequences of building better software, and a better web, is that it’s very hard for kids to pop the hood. Mobile devices are black boxes and the software to program apps is sophisticated beyond the comprehension of most 10-year-olds. Similarly the web is no longer a series of simple interlinked HTML pages. Those pages are now essentially programs that talk to each other via APIs. There is no view source in the games and sites kids use every day.
As a counter to this, programming languages directed at kids are built on the idea of viewing source and forking. Scratch and Hopscotch both have vibrant communities dedicated to imagining, creating, publishing, sharing, and forking. These languages offer kids a way into essential concepts in programming.
At Tinybop, we wanted to add to this vocabulary. We wanted kids to understand the touch points between people and machines. The result is The Everything Machine app. The app turns the phones and tablets in kids’ hands inside-out and gives them access to the hardware. We combined elements of physical programming and logic, married them to all the sensors on iOS hardware, and wrapped everything up in an easy-to-use set of virtual blocks. The combination is incredibly powerful. Watching kids play with the app, I’ve seen them go from building simple flashlights triggered by darkness to elaborate prank machines that involve several devices.
We hope to fundamentally change the way kids see their devices and the software on it: from something they can use to something they can build. I knew we were on to something when one of our young beta testers asked if we could install The Everything Machine on his family’s iPad. “Why?” I asked. “There are just so many things I want to try to make.”
