Exploring Bits & Threads with our Partners

Introduction

At the start of November 2023 we had the opportunity to invite our partners at the Denver Public Library (DPL) IdeaLabs and Denver-based Clubhouse Network to visit us at CU Boulder as a part of our Bits & Threads project with the Unstable Design Lab. Twelve educators drove in from Denver and participated in a day of brainstorming, weaving workshops, and more textile fun. 

Our main goals for the field trip was to introduce our partners to different aspects of weaving, inspire ideas for future weaving projects, and hear their thoughts on how they saw weaving and computing being incorporated into their spaces. Prior to the meeting, our team had already been visiting our partners at their sites and bringing looms and other weaving materials for their participants to try.

How it went

We started the day with breakfast, introductions, and talking about our goals for the Bits & Threads project. We invited our DPL partners, many of whom have had looms in their spaces for the past several months, to share their own experiences and thoughts on weaving. For example, the Hampden ideaLAB has supported weaving on small tapestry looms. The Hadley ideaLAB has a loom in their space for a month and community members collectively created a cloth that they plan to display.

We then moved over to the BTU space for a tapestry weaving workshop led by Steven Frost where we learned how to weave on small laser cut looms designed by Steven.

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After a lunch of empanadas, we got the chance to explore the Unstable Design Lab with Laura Devendorf and try out the various table and floor looms in the space. Each loom was already warped and had a suggested pattern for each educator to try out.

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After our weaving explorations, we had a brief reflection on the activities and next steps on how we might continue to work together. We ended the day with a tour of the Schacht Spindle Company (maker of hand weaving and spinning equipment) factory. 

Reflection

Not only was this a great chance for us to show our partners some of the work that goes on in our labs, it was also wonderful to hear their reflections and ideas throughout the day. Our partners shared a desire from community members to personalize items or recycle materials, and saw weaving as a way to address both through using a variety of materials and incorporating weaving into existing projects. Some saw it as a collaborative art form that could even change the dynamics of their space from creating consumables to creating a community display. They walked away with new ideas to try with their visitors, and we received lots of inspiration, suggestions, and ways to support them in this endeavor. 

We hope our partners had as much fun as we did, and we are looking forward to all of the future bits & threads workshops.

What Does Equity Mean to Me? Zine + Facilitation Guide

Our team is excited to share a new resource for educators in the form of a zine called “What Does Equity Mean to Me"?” This zine is based on research our team conducted with informal learning educators, or facilitators, from 2020-2022. In addition to the zine, we made a facilitator guide for educators to use the zine with their peers to reflect on what equity means in their spaces and organizations together. The facilitator guide includes a sample workshop outline, facilitation tips, and other strategies that we’ve gathered from our experiences facilitating these sessions with educators. Check out the zine and the facilitator guide here.

Inside the zine, there are reflective activities that invite educators to engage in questions adapted from those originally posed by Shirin Vossoughi (2017) in her article titled “Access and Equity in Out-of-School Learning” to challenge equity-oriented educators and researchers to think beyond access and reflect on their own values, goals and positionality in their spaces. The guide and zine are free to access and shared under Creative Commons. We created this zine as part of our work on the Facilitating Computational Tinkering project with our project collaborators.

Why did we make this zine?

Facilitators play important roles in cultivating and sustaining equitable and creative learning environments. In addition to building knowledge and skills, facilitators also need professional development that supports them in challenging and deepening their ongoing equity-oriented work as the material, social, cultural, and political contexts of their spaces and communities change. We designed this facilitated discussion and reflection using a zine to support facilitators in reflecting on what equity means to them individually and with their peers and what it means for their practice and organization.

This zine was inspired by virtual interviews that our team conducted with educators in making and tinkering spaces within libraries, museums, and community centers in the fall 2020 and spring 2021. While the initial goals of our interviews were to ask educators about the challenges of incorporating computing into their spaces, we noticed educators making implicit and explicit statements about their equity work in their spaces. We recognize that these interviews were also conducted in the midst of a very fraught, uncertain, and violent time: the pandemic, anti-Asian hate, and the George Floyd protests. For many involved in these interviews, equity and justice were on their minds and what it meant in their roles and their organizations. 

In reviewing these interviews, we noticed different conceptions of equity that varied across organizations and these varying conceptions highlighted different tensions and challenges. As we shared our interview findings with our educator partners, we noticed educators sharing additional reflections and responding to their peers’ reflections and tensions. We wanted to continue supporting these conversations with educators beyond the original interview study. We were preparing a workshop to present these findings to Clubhouse coordinators as part of their Annual Conference in Oct 2022. Instead of making presentation slides, we felt a zine could scaffold more participatory and multi-modal interactions. After trying out a version of the zine with Clubhouse coordinators, we were encouraged by the grounded and productive conversations that emerged between coordinators.

We continued to iterate on the zine based on feedback from our educator partners. We have shared our zines with the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at MIT, with ideaLAB makerspace educators from Denver Public Library, and the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium. We used these sessions to facilitate conversations about equity in their roles and work and also to get feedback on the format of the session and zine. 

We hope this zine along with the facilitator guide can be a useful tool for you and your colleagues to ground your goals and conversations around equity in your practice. We would love to hear from your experiences!

Members of the Tinkering Studio, the Lifelong Kindergarten group, and the Creative Communities research group share their individual reflections on equity in practice with their small groups.

These materials are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (2005764).

Spring 2023 Family Creative Learning Workshop Implementation

This past April, Creative Communities facilitated a new iteration of Family Creative Learning (FCL) program in collaboration with the Hadley Branch Denver Public Library. We continued our long term partnership with Jose, a facilitator at the Hadley ideaLAB makerspace who previously helped us design our virtual FCL workshops and last year’s FCL workshop series. We also continued to include pre-service teachers as facilitators and co-designers of the FCL workshops. We recruited and worked with four pre-service teachers from the School of Education at CU Boulder who are undergraduate students in the process of becoming elementary school teachers. 

In this blog post we’ll share what was new about this iteration, some of our “whys” behind these design changes, as well as what we’re excited to explore next.

Design Changes of New Iteration

Increasing Pre-service Teachers Involvement

Following last year’s FCL workshops [include link], Jose expressed to our team a wish that to more deeply engage pre-service teachers in the process of designing the activity, as well as had more time to become familiar with the ideaLAB and its community. We were excited by this suggestion and decided to expand the pre-service teachers’ involvement this year. Starting in February, our team including pre-service teachers (PST’s) spent Saturdays as a design team at the ideaLab at the Hadley Public Library engaging in activities that are popular with visitors, iterating on the design of the FCL activity for families, and learning to document making and tinkering experiences. The PST’s were compensated for their time and treated their engagement with the ideaLAB and co-design as a part-time job, meeting consistently each Saturday from February through the implementation of the program in April. The fact that they were compensated, and able to see spending time at the ideaLAB and working on design activities as a legitimate form of teacher preparation, made their participation possible. 

We saw wide-reaching benefits of this shift including the depth of relationships that the pre-service teachers were able to foster with families, their comfort with the tools and working alongside participants, and their confidence in suggesting design tweaks to implement before the next workshop during our post-workshop reflections.   

Introducing Computing Tools Sooner

Another tweak that we implemented was how the computing tools, the Circuit Playground Express (CPX) and Neopixel LED light strips were introduced. Last year we introduced the idea of telling a family story first, and provided scaffolding such as storyboards to help families think about a story they may tell with their light box. Families started exploring with everyday materials, such as colorful cups, paper, and flashlights to think about the story they may tell. However, we found that it was challenging for families to decide on a story to bring to life in their lightbox when they didn’t know what was possible with the computing tools yet. This year, we introduced the CPX to parents during the first workshop so that they knew about its functionality ie: the ability to animate lights, trigger responses based on sensory input like shaking or loud noises, and that it could be used to add sound. During the second workshop they learned how to create an animation using the neopixel strip and more about inputs available on the CPX. Last year we received feedback that participants wish they had more time working with the computing tools so this change gave families more flexibility deciding if they wanted to work with the CPX and neopixels or on other parts of their project each week. 

Shifting How We Scaffold Storytelling

Finally, we iterated on the way that we talked about and scaffolded storytelling in the workshop. First we added a new activity during the first workshop where families were invited to create a mini version of a lightbox using small 4 x 6” boxes and a lego duck. We called this activity “duck party” and participants were invited to use the lights on the CPX to create a small scene for the duck. We demonstrated how you can verbally narrate a story while bringing it to life using simple light animations on the CPX, for example: “The duck went to a pool party and cannon balled into the pool” where shaking the box with a CPX taped inside triggers the LED lights to turn blue like water. 

As mentioned earlier, we also think that introducing the computing tools during the first workshop allowed participants to better understand what was possible, and allowed parents to more confidently facilitate their young people to think about what storytelling might look like with the tools available to them. 

On average our participants in our workshop series this year were younger than last year, which meant that storytelling looked different than it had previously. Whereas last year families spent time working on storyboards together and drawing out the scenes depicting an experience they’d previously had together, this year families mainly followed the interests of their young people in the moment, and were responsive to the materials around them. For example, one participant was excited by a 3D printed shark head he had found in the ideaLAB and led his family in creating a story about a battle between a shark and a duck in their light box. Another family loved creating a “duck dance party” during the first workshop, as they also enjoy having dance parties as a family together at home, and decided to keep working on that theme together in their larger light box. 

Next Steps

Our team remains excited by the possibility of using Circuit Playground Express as a tool for meaningful expressing in computing projects, however, we’re also aware of the higher barrier to entry associated with this type of tool. In the future we’re continuing to explore different ways to take up the idea of “light boxes” using a CPX and how we might think about the combination of storytelling and computing. Next week Ronni will be visiting the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium where she will be working with that team to explore what drop-in version of light play may look like as well as how to think about storytelling with these tools in other ways. Stay tuned! 

These materials are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (2005764, 1908351).

Creative Communities at ISLS, IDC, FAccT, C&C, and PML

This summer, our Creative Communities research group will be presenting our work at ISLS, FAccT, IDC, C&C, and PML. We look forward to sharing our work more broadly, especially as many conference and gatherings are in-person again. We’ll feature our work studying family learning, infrastructures of informal learning settings, embodied algorithmic tinkering, physical play and computing, and facilitating computational tinkering.

To start, our team will be at the annual conference of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). We'll be presenting our infrastructure analysis from interviews with educators in our Facilitating Computational Tinkering (FCT) research and we’ll be sharing what the kinds of consequential transitions that pre-service teachers experienced when we invited them to support families’ participation in the Family Creative Learning (FCL) project

• Expanding and Focusing Infrastructuring Analysis for Informal STEM Education by Ronni Hayden, Stephanie Hladik, and Ricarose Roque (PDF)

• “They Are Whole People”: Consequential Transitions for Pre-Service Teachers Participating in a Family Creative Computing Program by Melissa Braaten, Ricarose Roque, Ronni Hayden, Elizabeth Tetu as part a symposium titled “Expansive Lenses to Examine Interventions (of) Moving Across Contexts”

At the ACM Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT) conference, Janet Ruppert will be conducting a Drag vs. AI workshop along with the Joy Buolamwini and José Ramón Lizárraga from the Algorithmic Justice League. Janet wrote a blog post sharing her reflections on implementing and studying Drag vs. AI workshop.

• #DragVsAI: Exploring Facial Recognition Technologies through Embodied Algorithmic Tinkering with Janet Ruppert, Joy Buolamwini, José Ramón Lizárraga

• FAcct helped document and shared a twitter thread from Janet’s workshop.

At Interaction Design and Children (IDC), Junnan Yu will share some work from his dissertation exploring computing and physical play, and Ricarose will share a pictorial featuring photo visuals from FCL as provocations to imagine alternative visions of computing.

• Imagining Alternative Visions of Computing: Photo-Visuals of Material, Social, and Emotional Contexts from Family Creative Learning by Ricarose Roque

• Exploring Computational Thinking with Physical Play through Design by Junnan Yu, Ronni Hayden, and Ricarose Roque

Later in June, Celeste Moreno will be presenting at the virtual conference for ACM Creativity and Cognition (C&C). She'll be sharing a pictorial that showcases the unseen and instrumental work of educators and designers of creative learning experiences in making and tinkering experiences.

• Revealing the Tuning Practices of Creative Learning Experience Designers by Celeste Moreno and Ricarose Roque

Finally, in July, Celeste and Ricarose along with partners from the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium will be at the Play Make Learn (PML) conference in Madison, WI. We'll be conducting a workshop to engage participants in computational tinkering experiences.

At PML, Celeste and I will also be doing a presentation about our Facilitating Facilitators comics, visual stories that document the moves, dilemmas, and practices of informal learning educators supporting families in creative learning experiences with computing.

These materials are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (2005764, 1908351).

Tinkering with Lights and Code at the Tinkering Studio

Last month I visited the Tinkering Studio–one of our collaborators for the Facilitating Computational Tinkering project–at the Exploratorium for a short artist’s residency. One fun thing we did was participate in an open-ended exploration of the Circuit Playground Express, a microcontroller that the Creative Communities group often uses when we co-design computational tinkering activities and workshops with the ideaLabs at Denver Public Library. The Circuit Playground Express was new-ish to most of the Tinkering Studio team, and there is so much you can do with this microcontroller. Sometimes that makes finding a good starting point difficult. We decided to start with programming the neopixel LED lights built into the Circuit Playground since many of us are interested in tinkering with lights, shadows, and lanterns. 

Tinkering with the Circuit Playground Express inside the Learning Studio at the Exploratorium

Here are a few of the directions our tinkering went: 

Ryoko began to explore how simple materials like a coffee filter can make a great light diffuser. She also experimented with the capacitive touch feature; animated red lights appeared each time she tapped an alligator clip connected to the Circuit Playground.

Luigi started with an idea–creating a sound-responsive light animation– and went in-depth with the code to make it work like he wanted it to. Luigi found that using the “mapping” code blocks helped him create the desired effect. I loved how Luigi used a coffee cup to house the circuit playground. The plastic lid made for a great light diffuser, and the Circuit Playground fit perfectly into the bottom of the cup.

Luigi uses a coffee cup lid to diffuse the LED lights

Luigi places the Circuit Playground inside of a coffee cup

Sebastian also made great use of upcycled materials; a recycled yogurt container created a base that held the Circuit Playground. Sebastian focused on how he could combine materials like paper and wire with the Circuit Playground to create interesting effects. He created a light-diffusing “screen” using vellum paper and used some wire to position the screen a few inches away from the Circuit Playground. Then, he used wire and a few other materials, like a leafy shape and a figurine, and positioned them between the screen and the lights. As the lights changed colors and turned on or off, it often created the illusion that those shapes were moving behind the screen.

Sebastian experiments with placing objects behind the vellum screen and observes how the light affects the object’s shadow

Sebastian attaches the circuit playground and the the vellum screen to a yogurt container

While this session was short, it generated some exciting sparks that we can continue to tinker with in the future. For example, while the light animations are beautiful and intriguing on their own, using a different input to control the lights, like the tap of a finger or the sound of music, feels even more exciting (sometimes it almost feels magical). Additionally, it was interesting to see the diverse ways that we engaged in computational tinkering. Some went in depth with the code and explored different loops, logic, and functions. Others stuck with one simple program  but spent a lot of time experimenting with how to integrate physical materials with the microcontroller. Both of these approaches are essential parts of computational tinkering!

Check out this blog post from the Tinkering Studio, “Shadow Hunting with Photochromic Powder” to see what else we explored during this residency.

Workshop Reflection: Mar Lee Commemorative Quilt

This past weekend we held a workshop in collaboration with our partners at the Hadley Public Library in Denver. Originally this workshop was planned to fit into other activities happening at the library in honor of Día de los Muertos, centered around remembering and celebrating our loved ones who have passed. The theme of celebrating and remembering is one that we explored a few ways this fall, which you can read more about here. We had to reschedule the workshop due to unforeseen circumstances but we were excited to still be able to host the workshop this month!

Activity Overview

This activity was inspired by projects that were shared at the Computer Clubhouse Conference this fall made by youth from Panama City as well as the artist Han Cao. 

Participants were invited to bring an image of a loved one that had passed to print using sublimation paper, heat press transfer onto a quilt square, and embellish them using embroidery thread and/or soft circuit elements like LED’s. 

Setting up

Prior to the workshop the two teen facilitators at Hadley worked together to imagine the best lay out for the workshop. They decided to arrange into a U-shape to allow for a central location to introduce the activity in the front of the room, encourage conversation between participants as they were working, as well as to allow for easy materials sharing between tables. We set up the heat presses in the corner and made sure they were pre-heated and ready to go!

Lay out of Hadley ideaLAB tables for our workshop.

Sublimation Printing and Heat Pressing

We were excited to explore sublimation printing through this workshop activity. Prior to the workshop, Jose, Daria and I (Ronni), visited the ideaLAB at the Montbello branch of the Denver Public Library to learn more about sublimation printing at a site where the activity was extremely popular. We learned about how to convert an Epson color jet printer into a sublimation printer, tips on the best fabric to use to press onto, and heat press options and settings. It was really fun to learn from other ideaLAB facilitators and brainstorm together how our workshop might be run. 

During the workshop we invited participants to email or scan pictures of their loved ones and we used a photoshop template to size them properly and flip them horizontally to prepare for printing. Participants then used one of our two heat presses to transfer the image onto our pre-sized quilt squares. 

Embellishing our quilt squares

The remainder of our workshop, around 90 minutes, was spent embellishing our quilt squares. Many workshop participants opted to use embroidery thread to highlight certain aspects of the image, fill in the white space around the picture, or add elements that reminded them of their loved one (flowers, music notes, sun rays). We also provided beads and sequins that could be sewn onto the quilt squares. 

In addition to embroidery embellishments, we also had one of our tables dedicated to soft circuits with Jose ready to assist people in adding LED’s using Lilypad components to their square. We prepared a one pager that outlined simple circuits and included step by step instructions to using the lilypad batteries, sequin LED’s and conductive thread. None of our participants opted to add circuits to their quilt squares during the workshop but they all expressed interest in returning to the ideaLAB later that week to work with Jose on the circuitry. The projects below were made by our facilitation team as examples.

Following the workshop, all of our squares from the workshop were pinned together into one quilt to display in the ideaLAB. Drop in visitors at Hadley will also be encouraged to create a quilt square to add to the commemorative quilt while its on display for the next few weeks.

Reflections and Next Steps

During the workshop all of the participants agreed that the process of embroidering together felt very meditative and calming. This activity was definitely a change of pace from other workshops I’ve been a part of, fostering a more quiet and reflective atmosphere. Although this atmosphere felt fitting given the theme of remembrance, in the future I’d like to continue to explore what it might look like to scaffold celebrating our loved ones and our projects a bit more through sharing together or engaging in other forms of collaboration. I’m also looking forward to continuing to think about how we might motivate participants to dig into sewable circuits in a workshop setting and what engaging low-floor projects to get started might look like. Finally, our participants and partners at the library agree that sublimation printing is a really engaging and exciting technique and I’m looking forward to future R&D with this tool as a team. 

Celebrating and Remembering: Reflections on an Activity Prompt

This is an excerpt from the latest Tinkering Together newsletter:

Last month, Ricarose and I (Celeste) visited our project partners at the Lifelong Kindergarten (LLK) Group at MIT. While there, we facilitated a virtual tinkering session with educational partners from global community-based organizations located in Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, India, and throughout the US to explore the possibilities of a new coding app that the LLK group is developing. We offered this prompt as a starting point for our tinkering session: 

“Celebrating and Remembering – Around the world, many cultures have traditions that celebrate loved ones. We’ll create projects to celebrate and remember people, places, or objects that have special meaning to us.”

The theme “celebrating and remembering” is inspired by cultural traditions in our families and traditions we see in the communities we work with, such as Día de los Muertos.  We are constantly striving towards mindfully connecting with the communities we work with around relevant and meaningful topics. Additionally, the feeling of wanting to celebrate loved ones and special places has the potential to be relevant beyond our local partner communities. 

Ricarose’s example projects celebrates her brother’s favorite taco spot that she loves to go to whenever she visits family in Los Angeles

Celeste’s example project remembers afternoons spent with her Abuela

We were touched by the emotion and personal and cultural connections participants brought into their projects. We saw family photos brought to life, remembrances of loved ones, animated altars, celebrations of favorite taco shops, and more. 

We’re curious about what it would look like to explore the theme “celebrating and remembering” further. What would it look like if you brought this prompt to your context? What activities or materials might you pair with this prompt? Ronni from the Creative Communities group is working with partners at the ideaLAB makerspace in Denver Public Library to host a workshop related to this theme. Inspired by the artist Mar Lee, participants will print pictures of loved ones onto a quilt square and embellish them with embroidery and soft circuit elements like LED lights. Stay tuned for our blog post about the workshop!

Engaging in Peer Review as an Emerging Scholar

For a graduate student or postdoc, being a reviewer for conference papers and journal articles is an excellent way to gain insight into the academic publishing process, build skills in giving and receiving feedback, and create connections with the academic community. However, this can also be a bit of a daunting process for emerging scholars who may feel as if they aren’t qualified enough to review the work of their peers - especially when they may be reviewing work written by more experienced scholars. With that in mind, I would like to offer some tips that have helped me as a reviewer:

1. Firstly, remember that you are not the only reviewer for the article. While your review will help senior reviewers, editors, or conference chairs to make their final decisions, your own review will likely not be a “make it or break it” moment for the paper. Just do the best you can. Many reviewing systems also have space for a reviewer to rate their expertise with the topic area, so there’s no need to say you’re an expert if you don’t feel like you are one. 

2. My overarching principle is that I want to be constructive, but kind. I aim to be the reviewer I would want to have on my own work, and word my feedback in ways that I would be comfortable saying, in person, to a colleague or friend. No one likes an overly critical or harsh review - remember that the paper you are reviewing was written by real people, who may be emerging scholars as well.

3. I aim to give a mix of positive and formative feedback. Point out the things that you like, sentences that are well-written, strong arguments, and good organization. When giving more critical feedback, I tend to use sentence starters such as “I am confused about…”, “I am curious about..”, “I would recommend adding more detail about…” etc. I also may focus on figures and tables (do I understand the main idea they are trying to get across?), add recommendations for relevant literature, or suggest new ways to organize sentences/paragraphs to improve the flow of the paper.

4. I sometimes feel pressure to judge the main idea/argument/framework to determine if it’s “good enough” for the field - and how can I do that as a relative newbie to the field? Don’t forget: even as a graduate student or postdoc, you are a part of the field too. You’ve taken courses, read papers, formulated your own ideas, and written your own papers. That said, I tend to think about my reviews more personally, rather than trying to speak as “the field” as a whole. Examples: does the argument make sense to me? Am I confused about anything? Is there enough detail for me to assess the methods/analysis? Can I easily see the connections between the theoretical framework, methods, analysis, and discussion? Can I see the application of this research to my own work? Chances are, if I can see some areas for improvement with my relatively fresh eyes, likely others with more experience than me will too.

I hope that these tips can help graduate students and postdocs feel more comfortable about participating in the peer review process!

Additional resources:

• How to get involved with peer review as an emerging scholar (Taylor & Francis)

• How to review conference proposals (and why you should bother) - Sarah Theule Lubienski