New Exhibit Ideas for Lodestar School in 2020

This year we’re starting work on a second round of the Making the Future grant funded by Cognizant to develop and share prototypes for mini-exhibits with Lodestar Community Charter School in Oakland. In the fall we had a kick-off meeting with WICO artists, Lodestar teachers and critical friends to discuss possibilities for the new round of affordable, flexible and playful tinkering tools. And this month we’ve started building prototypes and testing the ideas with students at the school.

We’re collaborating with three local artists/designers as part of this project as a way to demonstrate the value of engaging with outside thinkers in formal education environments. These artists include Sarah H. Dot who is working on a digital kaleidoscope, Thalian When who is working on a magnetic collage/storytelling platform and Tiffany Tseng who will help us refine the stop motion animation station. As well I’m working on a experimental station based on the musical bench using the Playtronica touchme board and a Bela computer.

Over the first couple months of the year we hosted some prototyping sessions in the Maker Ed community studio where we could use tools and work on initial ideas. Sarah used the Glowforge laser cutter to create a kaleidoscope first version and Thai used a laminator to add sturdiness to a range of unique collage elements.

It’s always really fun to see the first round of testing and imagine different ways that these elements could be more open-ended or flexible. And I especially liked the ways that different materials (like legos) can simulate the user experience.

As well, I’ve been taking the lead on electronic music prototype this time and built two wooden stations using the hardware from the OliOli musical bench with a built in speaker, the Bela platform and the playtronica touchme board which converts the amount of electricy that passes from one end to the other into a MIDI signal.

For one of the stations used metal bowls for the connection points and for the other I used helping hands with alligator clips so that learners could put their own materials as touch points.

I brought both of these stations to Lodestar school last week and tested them out with small groups of students. They had fun messing around with the music making boards. As well they had a lot of good conversations about the way the set-ups worked and ideas for new elements.

There was something really fun about the collaborations that emerged with two or three students working together to ask questions and make discoveries about the components.

However for the next round, I want to figure out ways to deepen the engagement and create chances for learners to have a more prolonged experience. One option could be really playing up the options for students being able to modify different sliders or knobs to make more deliberate musical choices or adding a sequencer a la captain credible. Another possibility could be exploring ways to let students test out the relative conductivity of different materials. And one extra weird experiment that may be impractical (but would be fun) is revisiting the musical ice from the early days of the PIE project. We’ll start the next round of prototyping all three designs at Lodestar school at the end of March and will post those iterations and ideas.

Prototyping time and R&D with Lodestar Charter School students was made possible through the generous support of Cognizant “Making the Future” grant.