The Same Amount of Blood

One of the commonly held myths about school is that our primary function is to teach children. In fact, our goal is to send home the same number of children in the afternoon that we received in the morning, with the same number of fingers and the same amount of blood that they had when they arrived. Safety is our mantra.

To support that, we hold yearly, mandatory, 30-minute safety briefings for each class. Until every single class (and teacher) has attended a session, we do not open the space for use.

Presenting kids with a long list of rules would be ineffective, not to mention boring. Instead, we have a single safety "Prime Directive." Make the safer choice. That's it. I do have a safety poster with some rules on it, but I don't mention it in detail during the briefings other than to note its presence on the wall. My main goal during the briefing is to communicate respect and trust.

CREATE safety poster.

I also do some role playing with hot glue guns and box cutters, but that's more to demonstrate to the students that they already know how to behave safely. My favorite "gotcha" question is "How fast are we allowed to run with scissors?" That kills both the running and scissors "birds" with one joke.

We also establish the safety culture in CREATE by differentiating it from other experiences they might have. Their parent (or teacher) might warn them about the consequences of unacceptable behavior with sentences that begin with, "The next time that you...," followed by some threatened consequence. In CREATE, unsafe behavior is zero tolerance. The first time a student chooses to do something unsafe, they are banned from the room for the day. If it happens during lunchtime Tinker Time, they have an immediate conversation about safety with the principal. In the six+ years we've operated CREATE, we've only had to do it three or four times.

Emotions count

When the inevitable small injuries happen, it's important to remember that students mirror our reactions. I always approach minor cuts and burns with an air of empathy mixed with a bit of reassuring nonchalance. A scared child will only ramp up their fear if their adult signals that something serious has happened. Give them 100% of your attention, but under-reacting is the best starting point.

Safety culture needs to reflect and serve the community. If success can be measured by the few minor cuts and hot glue gun burns we've had over the years, our approach has worked well so far.

Kobayashi Maru

Starfleet cadet, James T. Kirk was doing standardized testing. Faced with a deliberately impossible test, designed to evaluate his behavior in a no-win situation, he cheated (or did he?) He reprogrammed the simulation computer to permit a solution to the Kobayashi Maru Test.

School makerspaces are not about products, they are about training minds and imaginations to solve problems. They are also about learning that not every problem has a solution and how to engage with that reality.  In real life, if a student reprogrammed a standardized testing computer, they would be expelled and possibly prosecuted. Makerspaces are safe places where they can color outside the lines.

Progression: Four year olds are "free players" with unfettered imagination. Six year olds are all about rules and fairness, even to the point of creating rules on-the-fly to benefit themselves. As students grow, they grow to be more like most typical adults – cautious, habitual and ordinary. We want to intervene before they lose their exploratory courage.

But a "Kobayashi" approach isn't just about thinking outside the box. It can be about adopting an adversary mindset – a recognition that the world is not the friendly, supportive place we foster in our classrooms. As military writers Gregory Conti and James Caroland recognized in their 2011 article about cheating:

"We learned much from the students during the course of this exercise. They embraced the test, proved far more devious than their day-to-day personas let on, and impressed us with their ability to analyze and defeat the inherently flawed classroom system."

Conti, Caroland

Embracing The Kobayashi Maru

IEEE Security and Privacy

July/August 2011

This is why makerspaces that primarily utilize "recipe" projects where students all use the same components and end up with the same object are not as educationally effective as those that present a problem or a need, (or a Project Based Learning driving question) and let students design their own solutions. It's not about what students end up with, it is how they get there. The learning does not happen by executing somebody else's idea, it happens in the struggle to solve a problem.