Nifty little exercise where a group of designers turn a train station staircase into a piano keyboard (a la the classic scene from Big) in order to get people to engage in the healthier behavior of taking the stairs rather than the escalator. THey conclude:
“Fun can obviously change behavior for the better” and the slightly more difficult translation “Add fun changes common behavior”
Just finishing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind as the author, William Kamkwamba caps off his US speaking tour with a Daily Show interview (tomorrow). With the money he has raised, William has added solar panels to his village, another windmill and has achieved his goal of irrigating the land for a second season of planting. Now, he’s raising money for a variety of projects on his website.
There is a great range of things to donate to:
Wimbe Primary School Windmill
Cost: $300
Priority: medium
Books for Village Library
Cost: The need for books is high. $3,000-$5,000 will help further this extensive project.
Priority: high
Practice Jerseys and Children’s-Size Soccer Balls for Wimbe Primary School
Cost: $700, including shipping
Priority: high
Women’s Netball Uniforms
Cost: approximately $5,000
Priority: medium
Secondary School Scholarships
Cost: $2,000 for 20 students (10 in public school, 10 in boarding school)
Priority: high
Football Goal Nets (Soccer)
Cost: $3,000
Priority: medium
New Primary School
Cost: estimated at a minimum of $50,000
Priority: medium
I like the priorities here: the new school is less of a priority than the scholarships, which are the same priority as soccer balls. It’s realistic about giving kids a complete education and life. (For my part, I donated to the book initiative.)
About 3/4 of the way through The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (that’s the Amazon link, the author’s site is here). Terrific book on so many levels. In short, it’s the story of a 13 - 14 year Malawian boy (William Kamkwmaba) who, unable to pay tuition for school after a devastating famine (which his family managed to survive) spends his time reading books about electricity and manages to build, over the course of several months, a windmill (seen above). The story is broader, covering life in his village, the tragic story of the famine, but the arc points towards the windmill.
Oddly, despite my bleeding heart-left tendencies, this is the first time I’ve read a first person account of life during a famine or day-to-day living anywhere in Africa, so nearly everything in the book was a revelation. Right from the beginning, there’s the mix of magic and science in William’s life:
BEFORE I DISCOVERED THE miracles of science, magic ruled the world. Magic and its many mysteries were a presence that hovered about constantly, giving me my earliest memory as a boy—the time my father saved me from
His discovery of science is classic circuit-bender/hacking:
the integrated circuit are little things that look like beans. These are transistors, and they control the power that moves through the radio into the speakers. Geoffrey and I learned this by disconnecting one transistor and hearing the volume greatly reduce. We didn’t own a proper soldering iron, so to perform repairs on the circuit boards, we heated a thick wire over the kitchen fire until it became red hot, then used it to fuse the metal joints together.
Working with whatever left-over pieces he can find, he experiments with anything he can get his hands on and open. In this case, the radio-hacking led to a small repair business. William’s self-education in electronics is interrupted by the famine which nearly kills his immediate family and takes a toll on everyone around him. He describes a funeral tradition from his uncle’s burial, which reminded me of how little I actually know about Africa:
every grave has a hidden compartment at the bottom—usually a smaller cubbyhole carved into the side of the pit—where the coffin slides in. It’s like having your own little bedroom in death. The purpose is to protect the deceased from the falling dirt, or really, to keep the family from seeing the falling dirt land on the coffin.
In the midst of the famine — which is several months of excruciating hunger and day-to-day management of its pains and attempts to secure and ration food — William writes, “DURING THIS TIME OF trouble, I discovered the bicycle dynamo.” The whole book is written with an innocent sense-of-wonder voice and you gotta love a chapter that starts like this. The bicycle dynamo is the little device that attaches to a bike wheel and turns the pedaling into electricity. William’s dissection of the device leads him to a bigger vision:
Without realizing it, I’d just discovered the difference between alternating and direct current. Of course, I wouldn’t know what this meant until much later. After a few minutes of pedaling this upside-down bike by hand, my arm grew tired and the radio slowly died. So I began thinking, What can do the pedaling for us so Geoffrey and I can dance? The dynamo had given me a small taste of electricity, and that made me want to figure out how to create my own. Only 2 percent of Malawians have electricity, and this is a huge problem. Having no electricity meant no lights, which meant I could never do anything at night, such as study or finish my radio repairs, much less see the roaches, mice, and spiders that crawled the walls and floors in the dark. Once the sun goes down, and if there’s no moon, everyone stops what they’re doing, brushes their teeth, and just goes to sleep. Not at 10:00 P.M., or even nine o’clock—but seven in the evening! Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa.
This sets up what is at stake as William spends his schoolless months trolling through scrap heaps, digging up unused PVC, pillaging parts from junk, and experimenting with ways to turn a bicycle dynamo into a wind-based power source. There’s so much to write about from this book (what his education was like when he could afford it, the local economy’s more nuanced functioning, how world culture finds it way into his village via radio and the near-random cinema showings), so I’ll reco the book and grab a few more quotes about his inventor side.
Inventiveness:
I didn’t have a drill, so I had to make my own. First I heated a long nail in the fire, then drove it through a half a maize cob, creating a handle. I placed the nail back on the coals until it became red hot, then used it to bore holes into both sets of plastic blades. I then wired them together. I didn’t have any pliers, so I used two bicycle spokes to bend and tighten the wires on the blades.
The power of self-education:
One day I was looking in some weeds and found the differential of a four-wheel drive. Using my screwdriver, I pried it open and discovered loads of fresh black engine grease. I scraped it into a plastic bag for future use. I also found cotter pins and tangled bits of wire, in addition to things I’d probably never use—brake pedals, gear levers, and the crankshaft of a small car engine.
William’s dreams:
One day I pretended to be a great mechanic, crawling on my back under the old rusted cars and tractors with the tall grass clutching me in its arms. I shouted up to the customer. “Start it up! Let’s see how she sounds…push the gas, don’t be shy! Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s too much!” The engine didn’t sound right, so I gave it to them straight: “Looks like you’ll need an overhaul. I know, I know, it’s expensive, but it’s life.” I shouted to my other mechanics, who were slacking as usual. “Phiri, today you’re doing oil changes!” “Yes, boss!”
His vision:
Once I had more wire and a car battery, I explained, I could store electricity for the times when the wind stops blowing. It could also provide light for the entire house. It would have to be done little by little, but once complete, it would save my parents the money they normally spent on kerosene, and that was just the beginning. The next machine would pump water for our fields. One day, windmills would be our shield against hunger. That night, I was too excited to sleep. After everyone went to bed, I stayed awake and flipped through Explaining Physics, preparing for the next step.
Love this book. Check out his blog also. William is touring the US telling his story and he visited the famous Seattle Public Library.
Bryan and I presented at one of the coolest places so far on our tour: the Seattle Central Public Library. Just think, I started this entire journey in a small library in Wimbe Primary School that only had three shelves of books. So when I saw this place in Seattle, I nearly fell over. If a city puts this much energy and money into their public library, it’s a city for me.
Love this book. That is all.
Stumbled across the OLPCorps on Flickr this morning. The program is pretty awesome: propose a teaching plan for a 9 - 10 week program in any African country if you get accepted, they help you go, hook you up with equipment, and then you participate in a conference about computing, constructivism and your experience. Best part of the find, though, was an interesting nugget buried in the FAQ for the program:
[Question] Can we give XOs to several schools to start computer labs?
One does not think of community pencils—kids have their own. They are tools to think with, sufficiently inexpensive to be used for work and play, drawing, writing, and mathematics. A computer can be the same, but far more powerful. Furthermore, there are many reasons it is important for a child to own something—like a football, doll, or book—not the least of which being that these belongings will be well-maintained through love and care. Read Core Principles for more.
The picture at the top of this post has nothing to do with OLPCorps. I couldn’t find many OLPCorps pictures, but in the process of searching came across this one. The Lego attachment is a viewfinder you attach to the laptop, in order to use the XO as a point and shoot camera.
Interesting read in May 2009 issue Servo Magazine, which I got free at Maker Faire about new ways to teach groups.
The writer/editor, Bryan Bergeron, teaches a course on technology and the future of healthcare at Harvard Medical School. Each year, a session of the class simulates the creation of a business to give students a brief sense of the hours, adrenaline rush, complexity, and many dimensions of a tech start-up. This year, he did something new. He had his class break into two teams and gave each of them a Lego Mindstorm NXT kit and an hour (another link here). The assignment was to “design, build, and program a robot that could traverse 32″ and then stop just before the obstacle.” (This is a classic, and continually revisitable, robotics program - a combination of “hello world” and a sorting algorithm. There are a million ways to have a robot measure/detect/sense/calculate the distance it has traveled with various tradeoffs around accuracy, amount of code, use of resources, speed, etc.) The winner would be whichever person’s robot got closest to the goal. (In the case of a tie they would look at business plans. This course didn’t teach the immutable law of marketing that quality and performance just don’t matter, apparently.)
The two groups further subdivided themselves into teams: the business crew which figured out a model for selling the robot; the programming crew which learned how to program the thing; the “alogrithm” group addressed the problem of how to measure 32 inches; and a fourth group that attempted to spy and prevent spying(!). Both groups built their robots successfully and the difference in performance was one millimeter.
It’s important to point out, and this is the point of the column, that these people were not technical. They weren’t programmers. They learned the NXT language and interface on-the-fly and then applied that knowledge to the solution of their problem. They focused their time mostly on solving the problem (creating an algorithm for moving the distance, essentially designing the product), implementing it (figuring out the production and engineering), and debugging and trying additional ideas (optimizing). Valuable modes of learning both for individuals and teams, enough technology to open people’s eyes to some of the complexities of tech development (but not so much as to kill the exercise).
Most important, though, it was a real-life problem to solve. Lots of team building exercises tend to focus on hypothetical situations into which you can throw hypothetical answers. The intangibility of the assignment forces us to say the process is what matters, not the outcome. But, really the process can suck too — one person can do it all so it looks good when you present back to the group, the conversations can be blue sky with no grounding, etc. This exercise forces people to think analytically, solve a problem, communicate, and really, really work together.
Kind of an adult version of another President Nerd charge featured at Maker Faire:
Demonstrating the continued importance of visual communication in all fields, we have UC Berkeley helping educators explain “the most misunderstood concept in science”, evolution. The tool is the evogram, a series of tightly focused evolutionary paths demonstrating the emergence of species and/or features:
While the visual execution might be lacking, the structure and mode of the visual narrative is worthy of Tufte. The evogram’s tightness and potency is worth of a sparkline.
Found in the NY Times.
Excellent talk from the last Maker Faire, by Robert Bruce Thompson, author of an Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, just posted on blip.tv. The subject is the decline of the home chemistry set in the last 60 years. The clip starts with Thompson going through page after page of chemistry, biology, hydroponics and other science sets that were available for young boys (mostly, though I imagine some girls went all young Marie Curie). Thompson seems to be describing his experience as a child picking the chemistry set he wanted his parents to buy and the wide number of choices available to him.
For several months, I’ve been hearing older podcasters and bloggers (John Dvorak and Tim OReilly) talking about the decline of the “kit” — chemistry sets, electronics experiment boards, Heathkit, microscopes. Most of the laments have been that the decline of these things is a lack of scientific curiosity (maybe because of the computer, maybe because of the end of the Cold War). Thompson adds the theme of excessive fear and compulsive safety to that argument, arguing that people are so scared of injury and lawsuits that no one wants to sell or buy them. This is similar to Gever Tully of the Tinkering School talking at TED about the end of the pocketknife ritual: young American males (again) used to get pocketknives as a rite of passage, receiving their first powerful tool: a blade, a spatula, a screwdriver.
While looking at a dizzying array of chemistry sets on a page, he concludes that “these are serious science, these aren’t toys for children. These are tools for young people to get involved in and learn real science and do science.” It’s a fun talk, looking through catalogs and seeing advertisements for old kits. Thompson also shows pictures of Edison’s lab as well as his own, arguing that science happens everywhere.
Extra bits:
Good chemistry sets still on the market, but limited in how far they go.
Kevin Kelly Cool Tool review of Thompson’s book.
Biking past PS 22 in Crown Heights, I saw some cool fence decorations. From a distance, they looked like old guild symbols, and I thought perhaps this was a magnet school around science and technology. On closer inspection, they were much more: twisty lines of metal text suggesting shapes aspiring to be objects that thought they might be something else.
This shape reads: “Look at the short pants acting like binoculars dreaming of a hand drum.” This was my favorite, but there were more and they were interconnected, check them out on my flickrstream.
So, after a decidedly mixed launch, the XO will finally be tested by the audience and in the kind of environment it was designed for. (As opposed to bloggers and podcasters who have iPods, iPhones, XBoxes, two laptops and power towers.)
MIT’s Technology Review magazine has a piece about the Peru launch. It might be a little gentler about the criticisms, since it’s an MIT publication, but they summed it up nicely:
The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against Negroponte’s early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now. When I was in Lima, OLPC’s former chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen (she has formed Pixel Qi, a startup dedicated to making even lower-cost displays for OLPC’s computers and others), visited the education ministry to offer help and show staffers how to repair the machines. But she acknowledged that OLPC’s future doesn’t revolve around the hardware she helped bring about. “Laptops are easy; education is hard to transform,” she said. “I don’t even speak Spanish. How can I even start to transform primary education in Peru?”
Negroponte gets a lot of heat for saying this isn’t a technology project, it’s an education one. It’s a comment I haven’t really understood myself (despite being a huge fan of the project and the actual product). But this article helps bring that dynamic to life. Henry Dietz, a Peru expert and professor at UT, points out that the XO is being introduced into very unpromising situations: “You get out of those provincial capitals, a half-hour in any direction, and you are in rural Peru, and things are pretty primitive. Electricity is a sometimes thing, and the quality of education–the school is four walls and a roof and some benches, and that is about it. There is very little there to work with.”
The first, and oddly, most important, thing the XO brings to this environment is books and light. Peru has brought nearly a half million XOs and warehouse staff are using flash drives to load them (individually) with classics, Aesop, Peruvian poetry, Mario Vargos Llosa. This is powerful education: learning to read one’s language through its greatest artists.
Along with the books, they’re adding chess, literacy training, sudoko (plus the usual stuff). And the 15 hour battery is, of course, a source of light in the home even if the XO isn’t in use.
Another overlooked, or at least underdiscussed, part of the XO is that its mere presence connects kids to the world around them. Children in even the remotest towns are aware that there is a world out there that has computers and books and cameras and that they are at a far remove from that world. The XO puts them much closer to that world. As one father of an XO owner said:
“Our hope for him is that he will have hope,” he said. “So we are giving them the chance to look for a different future–or the same, but by choice, not by force. These children who didn’t have any expectation about life, other than to become farmers, now can think about being engineers, designing computers, being teachers–as any other child should, worldwide.”
Some other interesting notes on the design and deployment:
Gever Tully of the the Tinkering School has a great TED University talk (I think these are the people who don’t get the big stage . . . they should publish more of these) about 5 dangerous things parents should let their kids do. Most of them, in their straight form or adapted, are pretty useful for adult designers, especially those of us who manage more than do these days, as ways to keep us fresh.
One of the downsides of blogging about video or audio is that it’s hard to transcribe the key points, so I’m going on memory, here:
Play with fire — for kids, this covers everything from actually learning how to build a fire (stones and sparks, fireplace arrangements) to working with kilns and fire ovens. Kids not only learn about the physics of fire and respect for powerful forces, but they also learn about the creative power of subjecting things to heat. For adults, I think there’s an analog to playing with electricity, electronics, and code . . . things that are powerful and promethean, but where even a bit of familiarity can be massively empowering.
Throw a spear – it’s physical physics, problem solving, optimization of body mechanics and trajectories, and deeply Savannah evolution primal (I’m going with the secondary -h spelling to see how many people think IxDA08 rather than Africa.) For adults, I think it’s guns. There’s a woman in my office who goes shooting once a month at a Manhattan-based gun club with a Ladies night. My first game design title was a hunting game (Trophy Buck, it’s still on some clearance shelves) and I was fascinated all the things about bullet trajectories, winds, shot, timing and the calculation goes into guns. Bows are good too, but they lack the chemistry, and oiled metal of guns. Shooting in general has a good hunter-gatherer feel, worthy of throwing spears.
Own a pocketknife — this one was a little nostalgic for me. Tully leads with the point that getting a pocketknife used to be a rite of passage for a young boy. It was a tool, but it was dangerous and there were safety lessons and responsibilities somberly passed on to me when I got a knife. This one may be a literal translation for adults: get a pocket-knife, and not just one with a USB drive, but one that has some tools. Remember not to take it to the airport, but see how useful it is to carry around, see if you find yourself tinkering more. Then there are some adult tools to potentially play with: routers, soldering irons, a decent tool box. Or upgrade to a DeWalt tool and read the last chapter of Neal Stephenson’s In the Beginning there was the Command Line
Take apart appliances — I’m doing this one tonight or tomorrow. I just replaced a clock radio (with an iHome!) and I’m going to dissect it tonight. I may try to connect parts to a power supply and play with contact points to see what I can do. But it’s a sad reminder of how many things I throw out without looking at them. Gamers: take apart a rumble-pack or haptic empowered controller to see how they do it before you chuck it! Very cool!
That’s four, but I think my enthusiasm wanes here anyway, cuz I think the remaining ones are drive a car (let your kid drive a car) and break some DRM. I didn’t find those so compelling and the adult analog of driving a car — sailing or gliding or flying — seem expensive and outdoors.