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.

Courtesy: Exploratorium

In step with the popularity and growing momentum of Maker Faire, the “maker movement” is going global with the help of the Exploratorium museum’s Global Studios.

After 40 plus years of work in this field, the Exploratorium, which is based in San Francisco, is stepping up its involvement in hands-on, informal science and technology education by working with groups across the world to spread and grow the movement. In addition to participating in all the Maker Faire events, bringing mini Tinkering Studios™ where visitors can experiment with the activities freely, the museum has also been called on to teach these ideas in far-reaching spots like Saudi Arabia and Italy.

“Tinkering is not something we invented or anyone invented,” said Luigi Anzivino, scientific content developer for the Tinkering Studio in the museum. “I think it’s a fundamental way that human beings have of being in the world. There’s nothing that we’ve discovered about this. So, it belongs to everyone. All we are trying to do is reveal that and allow people to let that come to the surface.”

The group’s goal is to leave a lasting impression on the sites they visit — what they call a tinkering disposition. “A tinkering disposition is something that tells you that the world is knowable; you can find out something about the world by yourself and you don’t have to be an expert in any one discipline to start,” Anzivino said. “You can just begin by doing something and then it’s a practice.”

Giving a child the chance to illustrate what she knows in three dimensions connects the abstract concept to its real-life application. But, in the Tinkering Studio, Luigi and his staff don’t have to connect what a child makes to formal school learning. “The content is the thing that the kids are making, there’s no separation,” Anzivino said. “We know that they are becoming more sophisticated in their thinking because the things that they’re making become more sophisticated and complex.”

Educators from around the world have asked Anizvino and his staff to facilitate similar learning experiences and to set up parallel tinkering studios. Anzivino has noticed an interesting phenomenon: it’s challenging to get even the most ardent “tinkering” enthusiasts to stop “teaching” and let a student explore. And a whole other challenge to see the value in “content” disconnected from a specific academic goal.

Sparking an interest in science, engineering and design is increasingly a priority for educators, museums and even governments around the world. “We think it really unlocks potential in individuals, potential in society, potential in terms of advancing science, technology, art, all of those things,” said Silva Raker, director of Global Studios. For her, the project is finding pockets of interest in this work anywhere it exists and helping to nurture people who want to see it grow.

The Exploratorium has a long track record of cultivating a national network of inquiry-based educators through the Institute for Inquiry which trains teachers in the learning techniques used to make science fun at the museum. “Frank Oppenheimer [the museum’s founder] believed that one of the great ways to scale the impact of the Exploratorium was to work with teachers because over the course of their careers they’ll interact with many thousands of kids,” Raker said.

They’re also cultivating networks of educators around the nation interested in this work and supporting them to become facilitators of inquiry-based learning. This work mirrors what will come out of Global Studios – where educators approach the Exploratorium for help designing, setting up and putting into practice Tinkering Studios or other exhibits.

Anzivino went through years of training to become a neuroscientist before he found the Exploratorium. He says his traditional schooling helped him to fully appreciate what inquiry-based learning and tinkering can mean to kids. “It offers an opportunity to decide for yourself what it is you are interested in learning,” he said. “And to be validated in your own path toward finding the answer, even if it goes nowhere, even if it’s full of false starts and avenues that go nowhere.” And that, in and of itself, is a little radical.