When Eugene Korsunskiy and seven of his fellow students from Stanford University’s d.school
set out to tour the nation in a brightly painted truck full of laser cutters and rapid prototyping machines, they thought they were bringing a chance to play with high-tech maker tools to school kids who hadn’t had one yet.
And they were:
SparkTruck, the educational make-mobile, made 73 stops this summer, treating 2,679 elementary and middle school students to hands-on workshops covering the basics of electrical engineering and digital fabrication, and giving a chance to make cool stuff in the process, like small robotic creatures and laser-cut rubber stamps.
But as the summer progressed, the SparkTruck team learned an unlikely lesson. The most rewarding part of the trip wasn’t introducing the kids to new technologies. Instead it was something far more basic: watching them struggle with design problems.
Only one of the SparkTruck team had training in education. But when the group planned its workshops, Korsunskiy explained, they knew they wanted to emphasize the same skills and processes they’d learned in design school. “Somewhere in each activity, we wanted the kids to get stuck, physically or mentally,” he said.
The point wasn’t to torture children, but to force them to work through an open-ended problem on their own.
Some teachers were skeptical. “One teacher told us, ‘My students are so conditioned to thinking that I’ll give them the right answers,’” Korsunskiy said. She didn’t think the group’s approach, which Korsunskiy summarized as “giving [kids] the space but not giving them the answers,” would work.
Jason Chua inside the SparkTruck; 3-D printers in the foreground. Photo: Larry Rippel.
Sure enough, the SparkTruck team noticed kids’ resistance. Presented with a design problem, studentswould get stuck — and as the teacher predicted, they would come to the facilitators and ask, ‘How do I do this?’ They would beg, plead, and get frustrated. The SparkTruck team would withhold answers, instead asking a kid with, for example, no idea how to keep her robot from falling over, ‘How do youthink it cold be done?’
Eventually, the hard-nosed approach paid off. “After an interaction like that, you see a gear shift in [a kid's] head,” said Korsunskiy. “Once you make it clear that you’re not there to provide the answer, they completely rise to the challenge.”
Unwittingly, the team had stumbled into a big problem — and a gathering cultural debate. According to social scientists (and the journalists who popularize their work), American children are said to be weenies, much
more helpless and less resourceful than their age-matched peers in other countries. In educational settings, American kids are worryingly lacking in the faculty known as “grit,” the one that allows people to power through difficult problems, absorbing and learning from setbacks rather than giving up.
The point isn’t that young Americans are destined to be this way, but that somehow, amid all our prosperity, we’ve stopped giving kids the conditions they need to become self-sufficient.
Jason and Eugene lead a Vibrobots workshop in WQED, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photo: SparkTruck.
Could hands-on, design-inspired education help? Korsunskiy and his team think so. Design lessons, Korsunisky noted, are based around creative problem-solving. They’re not about memorizing right answers but about developing critical thinking skills, learning to work through problems in a repeated process of brainstorming, testing solutions, and going back to the drawing board. In short, this kind of education builds the very skills of perseverance and intellectual independence that parents, teachers, and social critics say that American children have in short supply.
For Korsunskiy, watching students hit a wall — and then figure out a way over (or around) it — was the most rewarding part of the SparkTruck experience.
Students of today aren’t necessarily going to need to know how to operate, say, a CNC router, he noted. But if this generation is to succeed, it will absolutely need to know “how to approach hairy, multi-variate problems without freaking out” — he name-checked climate change and the obesity epidemic — i.e., to be able to leverage the skills and mindset that a shop-class environment can instill.
As the summer went on, the SparkTruck team shifted focus, beginning to feel more like emissaries for that problem-solving mindset and design process, rather than for the bright, shiny machines in the back.
Which isn’t to say that the machines aren’t helpful for grabbing the attention of students — and educators too.
“When we say we have laser cutters and 3-D printers on board, that makes it way more exciting to principals and teachers,” Korsunskiy said. “We sneak the thing about creativity in the back door.”
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