We know that arts integration can open all kinds of opportunities for learning and fostering creativity. We’re learning why computer science is an essential skill for every student to thrive in the digital world. And we’re understanding how allowing kids to get their hands on do-it-yourself projects shows them the value of designing, creating, and the process of making.

Until such time that schools provide these essential skills to all students, certain individuals and organizations are stepping in to fill the void. We met a few of these changemakers who are bringing these essential tools to students recently at the Big Ideas Fest in Half Moon Bay. Here are their stories. Perhaps their work and influence will make progress towards bringing these skills from outside the school system to where it belongs.

SMARTHISTORY: Making High Art Accessible

Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, the creators of Smarthistory, a huge collection of videos that take you inside the most important museums in the world, talk about how their explanations of significant art work make otherwise abstract or hard-to-understand concepts more accessible to students.

BLACK GIRLS CODE: Teaching a New Generation of Innovators

Moving from being consumers of media to creators is the goal of Black Girls Code, an organization devoted to teaching girls of color in-demand skills when they’re thinking about what they want to be when they grow up, says Kimberly Bryant

CAINE’S ARCADE: Showing the Value of Making By Hand

Nirvan Mullik, the creator of the wildly popular video Caine’s Arcade, about a young boy who built an arcade out of recycled cardboard boxes, talks about the importance of knowing how to make things by hand, and how the video has helped propel the Maker Movement in schools.

STARTUP WEEKEND EDU: Entrepreneurs Helping Educators

While these organizations provide tools and opportunities for students, another group is attempting to bring innovation from the fringes directly to teachers. Introducing educators to the world of technology and innovation is the goal of the grassroots movement called Startup Weekend EDU, and the organizer, Khalid Smith, talks about what teachers can learn from tech entrepreneurs, and what educators want from entrepreneurs that can help them be better teachers.

[Videos co-produced with Matthew Williams]

Jon Kalish

By Jon Kalish

Countless kids have grown up with the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts or Campfire Girls, but for some families, the uniforms and outdoor focus of traditional Scouting groups don’t appeal.

In recent months, Scout like groups that concentrate on technology and do-it-yourself projects have been sprouting up around the country. They’re coed and, like traditional Scouting organizations, award patches to kids who master skills.

Ace Monster Toys is a hacker space in Oakland, Calif., where members share high-tech tools. Normally, grown-ups congregate there, working on electronics or woodworking projects. But two Sundays a month, the place is overrun by 50 kids and their parents for the gatherings of a group called Hacker Scouts.

The kids in Hacker Scouts are not breaking into computer networks. They make things with their hands, and at this particular meeting they are learning to solder and are building “judobots,” small robots made out of wooden Popsicle sticks.

“I’ve been sewing on little felt pieces with this,” Davis explains. “The battery will power the LEDs and light up. It’s pretty cool.”

Crafting, Computers And The Physical World

Chris Cook, one of the parents active in organizing the Hacker Scouts, serves as president of the hacker space where the Scouts meet. He says the group has expressly targeted kids between the ages of 8 to 14.

“It’s old enough where they’re ready to start developing skills, [but] they’re not so old that they’ve already been set in their ways,” Cook says, “and they’re more interested in what their peer groups are doing.”

“So, we felt it’s the right kind of time to expose them to how to craft with their hands — how to take things from a computer and put them into the physical world,” Cook says.

The Hacker Scouts don’t wear uniforms, but soon they’ll be able to earn something akin to merit badges, made by the kid-friendly DIY electronics company Adafruit Industries.

Badges range from “learn to solder,” “aerial quadcopter” and “high-altitude balloon” badges to the “Dumpster-diving” badge — “for when you get dirty but get some free stuff,” explains Adafruit founder Limor Fried.

The site awards more than 40 badges for skills ranging from bike mechanic to “special effects wizard,” and has started producing how-to videos for DIY projects, like a shoebox harp made from a box, a pencil and some rubber bands.

“Right now, I really like making paper airplanes and origami,” McFadden says. “I have a whole fleet of paper airplanes.” She learned to make them, she says, using an app on her iPod and by looking online.

A Scouting Handbook For Young Hackers

There are now 32,000 kids registered with DIY.org, which plans to organize local clubs around the country. The website even has an animated anthem exhorting kids to “build, make, hack and grow.”

The site’s chief creative officer, Isaiah Saxon, says the group plans to create the digital equivalent of a Scouting handbook for mobile devices.

“We hope that people’s smartphones are eventually the Swiss army knife of our movement,” Saxon says. “And that you go out into the woods … point your phone at a tree and peel it open [to] learn about the wood underneath.”

Saxon also plans to offer visual guides and “amazing experiences on the fly through these powerful handheld computers,” he says.

As these efforts take off online, the hacker Scout movement is also spreading around the country. Seattle now has a science-focused group called “Geek Scouts,” and a couple of tribes — not troops — of “Maker Scouts” are being formed in Milwaukee and Charleston, S.C.

DIY.org

By Katrina Schwartz

Refrigerators and fireplace mantles might still be covered with children’s projects, but more and more, those projects are finding a home online.

That’s just one of the purposes for the launch of DIY.org, a site that allows kids to upload photos of their projects and share it with their friends, family, and the public.

Here’s how it work: Parents help their children set up a profile that’s linked to the parent’s email, which gives parents access to a dashboard showing everything that’s been posted on the account. To protect kids’ privacy, kids choose an animal character and a nickname (the prompt clearly says “Please don’t use your real name!”) to identify themselves on the site. After that, it’s easy to click on the big upload button, choose a photo, give it a title and create a digital art portfolio. Parents, grandparents, friends or anyone else can then search for their portfolio by nickname and give the project stickers to show support.

That’s just the beginning. The next iterations of the site will include ways for kids to create DIY videos and upload them for public view, allowing them to share projects and learn from each other. Though there’s no public gallery yet, the site will eventually open up the community to public view — with parental permission of course, according to Zach Klein, the CEO and one of the four co-founders of the San Francisco-based company. Klein is perhaps best known for starting Vimeo, a project he thinks relates to DIY.

“The boldest thing we’ve done is give kids a public facing page,” he said. “It’s obscured, but still, the fact that kids have a URL is bold.” But he thinks it’s time for parents to get comfortable with that idea, and help their kids enter the online world in a safe way.

The creators also wanted the comment system to be 100% positive, which is why the only way to comment on a piece of art is to give it one of four stickers: Awesome, Beautiful, Favorite, and Genius.

Right now, DIY is a free service. Klein said they also have a premium feature in development, available to users who who pay a monthly subscriber fee, which they hope to release in the early summer. Klein says much of the service will remain free, however, because he sees children as an “under-served” virtual population.

“I want to help convince kids and their parents that creativity is as fundamental to their growth as a person as anything else that they are taught,” Klein said.

StudentRND

Budding entrepreneurs from StudentRND on Code Day

By Kyle Palmer

Entrepreneurs are getting younger and younger these days. Just a few weeks ago, more than 100 high school and college students converged on a warehouse in Bellevue, Washington, with one mission: to build a marketable mobile app in less than 24 hours.

By all accounts, this convening is an encouraging sign of youth exercising their creativity, technical skills, and compunction to build something on their own — without a blueprint or instructions. For these tinkerers, the experience is arguably more educational than anything they could do at school.

Brandon Ramirez, a sophomore at nearby Bellevue College, said the energy at the event—called Code Day and sponsored by Seattle-based nonprofit StudentRND—was palpable. “Whether you know how to do something or not, when you have 24 hours, you have to figure it out,” he said. “You learn a lot.”

“The students who are successful are the ones who just go out and figure a problem out,” says Edward Jiang, a University of Washington Computer Science major and the founder of StudentRND. “A lot of the students who come here say it’s way better than school because they’re actually making things.”

Ramirez paired up with fellow Bellevue College student Kieran Brusewitz to create a mobile game called “Slide” with which players move colored blocks around on the screen trying to form lines against a ticking clock. Other participants at Code Day judged “Slide” to be “the most likely to sell” of all the apps made at the event, which stretched to 35 hours.

“It was really hard at first,” Ramirez said. “When you have that little time, you really have to plan everything out step by step.”

The students’ hard work might pay off in literal ways. The goal is to get Slide, along with other creations made in StudentRND’s Bellevue warehouse, to actually sell in the real world, possibly launching their creators into the fast-paced tech startup industry.

That’s one of the goals of the organization, says Jiang. “We just want to give students space and resources to help them build cool stuff,” he said.

Founded in 2010, StudentRND has quickly become a popular destination for teenage tinkerers in the Seattle area. The organization—which receives funding form Google, AT&T, and Microsoft among others—offers up use of its 3,500-square foot warehouse for free to students who want to use it. The place sounds like a budding scientist’s dream-come-true: laser cutters, woodworking tools, soldering irons, oscilloscopes (used to observe electrical frequencies), audio/visual studios, and iPhone development labs are just some of the things young creators have at their disposal.

In the past year, tinkering teens at the StudentRND warehouse have produced an automatic door lock that can be opened via a user’s Twitter account, a robotic pipe organ made of PVC pipes and steel tubes, and a so-called plasma speaker, which plays music via an arc of super-charged electrical energy (check out the video of this on YouTube).

The high-school inventors of the plasma speaker have already sold $18,000 worth of kits, so other tinkerers can assemble their design.

Now, StudentRND plans to host an eight-week “Incubator” workshop this summer, with the intent of producing more “amazing stuff”.

StudentRND

Code Day

“A lot of students have the mentality, ‘I don’t know how to do something,’” Jiang said, “but the mentality needs to be, ‘I don’t know how to do something, but I can go out and learn how to do it.’”

StudentRND has begun taking applications for the workshop, which will be hosted at the Bellevue warehouse. Jiang said he hopes to receive applications from beyond Washington and is prioritizing team proposals.

“We really think that if you have a great team with students who are motivated and passionate, they will turn any idea they touch into gold,” he said. “Skills and ideas come after having a good mix of people.”

As with StudentRND’s past Code Day events, Jiang said he hopes the summer Incubator is another chance for young creators to show off their skills to tech-savvy entrepreneurs and established companies.

“In the past, we have had Facebook people and Microsoft reps at our events,” Jiang said. “Kids want to be the next Bill Gates, the next Steve Jobs. This is a chance for them to work on that idea that gives them a chance to start a business.”