[Sketching12] scanning food and future teenagers

[ctp at ctpdesign.com]

I know what you are saying Jan, and I don't want to look that gift horse
in the mouth...I love that it is now happening. And I am in the thick of
it, teaching, making, writing, guiding!

Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but when I took MATEC100 (intro to machine
technology) the first thing we were given was a blank piece of cutter
stock. We were expected to make our own Acme thread cutting bit, according
to spec. And then we had to take our cutting bit and cut 6 inches of Acme
thread on a piece of 1" steel round bar on a lathe. And it had to pass
muster under a microscope - with the correct lead, pitch,
depth...everything. I learned so much from that exercise, things that
continued to help me as I created more and more complex machines and
mechanisms. I never made another Acme threaded rod again (I just buy it
from McMaster, of course!) but ending up with a length of triple-lead Acme
was never actually the point of the exercise. Perhaps our current
exercises are too finished product/end result based? Maybe we need more
chances to learn the hard way how to break something. I usually learn way
more from breaking stuff than getting it right the first time anyway.

Like I said, maybe I'm old fashioned...maybe I am Don Quixote here. I
think a shop with 3D printers, and shopbots is a great thing. But if no
one knows how to use the welder, lathe, or mill (if you are even lucky
enough to have them) (nor why 4000 series Aluminum would be better than
6000 for that part, not to mention why to use 308 Stainless instead of
408!) By the way, this is the case at my school. We have machine tools and
welding equipment that no one knows how to use, and even though I am
teaching physical computing, I regularly hold breakout sessions during
class to teach silver soldering, metal forming, machining, woodworking,
MIG welding, sheet metal, how to combine a stepper motor with a 3D printed
part AND a machined part, etc etc. The students _*DEVOUR*_ it since no one
has ever shown them this stuff - they can not seem to get enough of it.
The desire is there, the need is there, but the high school shops are
gone, and so too are many of the teachers. The Crucible in Oakland (where
I was a faculty member for over 10 years), as well as Tech Shop have
helped fill the gap, but they are just two small sites, relatively
speaking.

So, yes, I do see some glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, with
this amazing maker renaissance, and I hold out hope or our future. I guess
I'm just mad that I couldn't stem the tide that lead up to the stuff I am
complaining about. Maybe that's all it is in the end.

ctp

> To offer some light at the end of the tunnel: I think those classes have a
> good chance of coming back, in modernized form. For example, I simply
> decided to buy fabbing tools for my university research lab in '08, even
> though it's in computer science. And it has changed the way our students,
> both at the undergraduate and graduate level, approach the user interface
> design project challenges we present to them.
>
> Take my Weatherella example (http://hci.rwth-aachen.de/weatherella): Five
> years ago, if students had approached me with the idea of an umbrella that
> tells you whether you should take it with you ("pick me, pick me!")
> because it's gonna rain, I would have just asked them to draw a paper
> prototype, then make a Flash prototype (remember Flash?), and maybe a dumb
> (nonfunctional) hardware prototype.
>
> In 2010, when this project idea actually came up, the students built an
> actual working prototype - 3D printing the handle, milling the PCB,
> lasercutting the front display cover, Arduino-ing the XBee link to the
> computer. And they actually found problems with their design (squeezing so
> much information onto the display only because it was in the online feed
> that it became illegible from across the room) that they likely would have
> missed if it hadn't been for the physical prototype. And they solved it by
> adding a big blue LED ring to the handle that just told the user to take
> the umbrella with them.
>
> And our PhD students have been using this infrastructure to create
> research prototypes they wouldn't have been able to explore otherwise.
>
> So on a more abstract level, I guess what I'm trying to say here is that
> universities, with their relative freedom (still) in designing new course
> contents and acquiring infrastructure (and providing space!) seem like a
> very good place to approach and ask to set up such spaces and include
> these "crafting" activities into their curricula. Make a professor the
> figurehead and he can brush up his profile at the university with all the
> press this will attract. And it's funny - it's not the ME department who
> usually comes up with this, but the design / HCI / architecture
> departments.
>
> Also, it's just adorable to have a super-bright PhD student, who leaves me
> in the dust when it comes to most coding problems, look at me sheepishly
> and ask what that whole thing with this LED only working one way round was
> about again. :)
>
> - Jan
>
> On Jul 25, 2012, at 2:21 PM, Christopher T Palmer wrote:
>
>> I can see your perspective on this, as that is sometimes my experience
>> in my classroom, in that limited set of conditions. I do see it in a
>> wider perspective though in my work making big art to take to Burning
>> Man, and I am sure that this experience has fed into my system of doom.
>> I also see it in my "arts engineering" practice, of course.
>>
>> I'd like to clarify though, that one of the points of *this* rant of
>> doom is the disappearance of, for lack of a better term, "shop" classes
>> at every grade level. Now that they have closed I bet that they'll never
>> open again, considering how expensive it would be to essentially create
>> them from scratch. The current shortages of skilled labor isn't
>> currently trending toward being fixed. And I can tell you that showing
>> someone how to hold a hammer, who has never used one, is not going to
>> get a structure built in a timely fashion, nor is it safe for the
>> hammer-wielder, or their colleagues, or a business' tenuous grip on
>> their worker's comp costs. Of course, insert any other tool in place of
>> hammers...I don't want to just pick on one tool.
>>
>> Or maybe I'm just the Don Quixote of the maker set...that's always a
>> possibility.
>>
>> ctp
>>
>> ps - I'm in my 40s and can't ask other people for money, so I can't say
>> that there's any hope for you there, Wendy :)
>>
>> At 01:34 PM 7/25/2012, Wendy Ju wrote:
>>> It's hard not to read this article as a "Kids these days!" piece. I
>>> have encountered technically clueless people of all ages.  This is not
>>> new. My father used to tell all the jokes that other people refer to as
>>> "Polish jokes" but in our household, they were "Software Engineer
>>> jokes."
>>>
>>> I will say, though, for people who want to be reassured, that it
>>> doesn't take a long time to remedy a whole lifetime of not tinkering
>>> with things. As a specific example, when they do engineering education
>>> studies with women who enter college without a lot of "making"
>>> experience, they find that they indeed lack the mechanical intuition of
>>> their male counterparts; however, within half an hour of a tinkering
>>> activity, there is no notably measurable difference in performance or
>>> intuition. Which is to say, if you just take the time to point out to
>>> someone where they need to hold the hammer, or which way they need to
>>> turn the screwdriver, and WHY, then they'll know, and they're unlikely
>>> to forget. Of course part of you wonders how people got this far in
>>> life without knowing these things, but I do think it's blowing things
>>> out of proportion to think this is holding humanity back.
>>>
>>> We all have our own blindspots... I, for example, am in my 30's and am
>>> still really unable to ask other people for money, which seems like a
>>> far more important skill than hammering...
>>>
>>> Wendy
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Christopher T Palmer
>>> <ctp at ctpdesign.com> wrote:
>>> On the article about "why your teenager can't use a hammer" it's a
>>> subject that is very much on my mind and has been for a long time now.
>>> I'd like to get on my soapbox for a bit, and then ask for
>>> help/comments/feedback
>>>
>>> I have no idea if I was a normal kid of my times. I was born in 1967.
>>> My father was a machinist for the school of science at a California
>>> State University. I grew up in a making household, and was a maker from
>>> early on. I built kits of all sorts, then I started building airplane
>>> kits - the kind that are a box of sticks and a paper plan. Soon after
>>> that I ditched the kits and designed my own planes based on what I had
>>> already learned. Same with model rockets. Et cetera, et cetera. I got
>>> to high school in 1980 and we still had an auto shop, and metal shop,
>>> and wood shop. I took metal shop, and decided to build a steam engine.
>>> The teacher asked if I planned to use a kit, I said no. He asked if I
>>> planned to use commercial plans, I said no. I drew what I planned to
>>> make, and pretty quickly he knew to just turn me loose and let me run
>>> with it. After high school I started college, and along side my general
>>> ed, and major classes I took machine technology, and welding. I just
>>> figured that to be as well rounded as I could be I should continue
>>> academics AND maker skills training.
>>>
>>> Fast forward a few years, and I had started a career in high tech, but
>>> I was continuing to take welding classes at the local community
>>> college. I was taking them at the two colleges that still had programs,
>>> since several others had been shut down permanently. While waiting for
>>> class one night, about 50 people showed up at our school hoping to get
>>> in. The only other welding program nearby had been shut down,
>>> permanently. BTW - these departments were being shut down to make room
>>> for information technology classes. Not computer science, or
>>> programming mind you. Microsoft, and Cisco, and the like were funneling
>>> in millions of dollars to set up programs to train MCSEs and CCNAs and
>>> such. All perfectly fine skills, but to sacrifice these other
>>> departments was completely short-sighted...horribly short sighted. All
>>> the while high school shop programs were being shuttered, along with
>>> art, music, and most everything else deemed not academically or
>>> fiscally important.
>>>
>>> I won't go on and on about this here, at least not like I am usually
>>> known to when the subject comes up. I know that we on this email list
>>> are in this little (but ever growing) bubble of the new makerdom.
>>> Clearly the success of Make magazine, and all the stuff associated -
>>> kits, books, blogs, companies, websites, conferences, etc - points to
>>> the re-prioritizing of what came to be pejoratively called "the trades"
>>> or "manual skills", so maybe my next question is moot.
>>>
>>> I'm going to ask it anyway.
>>>
>>> What can I do? Or more to the point what ELSE can I do? What else can
>>> we all do? Perhaps we are doing all we can. Maybe my head is out of
>>> whack with the expectation that until machine and wood shops are back
>>> in our high schools and colleges that we are going to stay screwed.
>>> Maybe we are now creating millions of people who will be able to use a
>>> hammer, and screwdriver, and solve mechanical problems, and all that
>>> has happened is we lost one generation...that it isn't a permanently
>>> downward slope. Maybe my teaching, writing, blogging, making, and
>>> mentoring is all I can do, and maybe it's having an impact. I need to
>>> say that I don't have words for the level of passion this mess raises
>>> in me, so I feel like there's no way I can do enough to right these
>>> wrongs. Or what I consider to be wrongs...egregious ones.
>>>
>>> Thanks for listening, and feel free to pass this along and post it
>>> places. I need to know.
>>> CTP
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> At 12:04 PM 7/25/2012, alicia wrote:
>>>> In the spirit of making Sketching longer than the weekend, here are
>>>> some interesting videos and researches I found.
>>>>
>>>> Why your teenager can't use a hammer - great article from Canada but I
>>>> think it's true in America too:
>>>> http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/08/25/why-your-teenager-cant-use-a-hammer/
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>> Alicia
>>>
>>>
>>>
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