Design Make Play and NY Adventures

Last week, I settled into Chinatown, narrowly avoided food poisoning, invented AND solved a mystery settled at the New York Hall of Science while training nearly 20 new recruits for Click! Spy School.  Clearly, my trip to New York was a success.

But first, the backstory on the adventure: 1) Why I was there.  As a volunteer at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, I seemed to impress the staff with both my "knowing stuff" and also my human side (Someone actually said to me, "You just told a joke!  You have a Ph.D. and you are funny!").  They think it is cool to have their very own scientist around, so they've kept me as an off site volunteer, and normally I help in developing some of the online tools we are becoming well known for.
2) Why this meeting?  Are you familiar with the Maker movement?  I was, vaguely, before I went, but this is a movement of non-experts and experts who are interested in getting people, including children, to engage in and influence their own world productively by Making Stuff.  This encourages ownership, and independence, and creative problem solving and building new skills and collaborations, and you get stuff out of it too.  The movement is decentralized for the most part, but your town may host a Maker Faire, or a Hackerspace or one of the other places or events that bring these people out.  What they call the "informal education" folks (museums, afterschool programs and summer camps) are starting to take note, and this meetign was to help those of us in the informal arena think about how to effectively incorporate elements of "design, make and play" into education programs.  This was hosted by the New York Hall of Science in Queens.
Take 1+ 2 and you get 3) The Carnegie Science Center of Pittsburgh submitted an application to share our Click! Spy School program, which won the juried response, and they really wanted to impress this group of assembled peers.... so they convinced the New York Hall of Science (who was hosting the event), to fly me out for the presentation.

I figured this would be must like other professional conferences I've been to- unending supply of coffee, crowds of people assembled to make the mucky-mucks feel important and a brutal schedule of talks that make you exhausted enough to sleep in a bare dorm room at the end of the day.  This was not much like that.  Our hotel was very posh, and located in Flushing, New York, which is New York's major Chinatown.  There were about 100 participants, and from what I could tell, not a lot of mucky-mucks.  Don't get me wrong, there were some really important people there, but I talked with most of them.  One of the Keynote speakers came to our workshop even.  Oh, and the schedule was broken up with workshops by different groups- people came from all over to present their ideas about Design, Make and Play.  There were several robot building workshops, something on hydraulics, several cool techie computer type things... but obviously the coolest of all was our Spy School presentation.

It was the coolest because we showed up a day early to create a site specific workshop, a nefarious character whose grandmother was embarassed at the 1964 World's Fair (at that location) was plotting to release and acne germ via the Maker Space downstairs.  But to solve the mystery (which "the agency" revealed to us within minutes of our "recruits" sitting down to begin their training), our agents were given iPhones loaded with info and clues, and sent out into the museum to gather clues or complete training programs.  We got to be very secret agent-y, and the workshop was very well received.  We even got some folks asking to collaborate for off-site activities!  This was a big relief, because our leader, who applied to bring us here, has been involved in the program for years, became violently ill overnight with food poisoning, so two of us presented the workshop like we'd done it before. I did read dozens of pages of grant info and previous "training materials" before I came, but we were still REALLY nervous.

I got to chat up lots of people, many of whom are quite important in their own right, many more of whom are doing really really cool projects in other places.  It was the funnest meeting I could have imagined, and everyone was very encouraging and open.  Even during the keynote, dozens of people were taking pictures of slides or videos of the presenters- this is unheard of in science!  The conference ended with a large brainstorming session to talk about what are the potential benefits of this type of work, and how can those be assessed by small, grant funded entities like us.  There wasn't much extra time for site-seeing, I just hopped on my plane and headed back to snowy-Seattle.