Friday, December 28, 2012

With Growth Of 'Hacker Scouting,' More Kids Learn To Tinker

Kids build robots with Popsicle sticks at an Oakland meeting of Hacker Scouts, a group that encourages young people to create do-it-yourself crafts and electronics. 
 
Kids build robots with Popsicle sticks at an Oakland meeting of Hacker Scouts, a group that encourages young people to create do-it-yourself crafts and electronics.
Countless kids have grown up with the Girl Scouts, the Boy Scouts or Campfire Girls, but for some families, the uniforms and outdoor focus of traditional Scouting groups don't appeal.

In recent months, Scoutlike groups that concentrate on technology and do-it-yourself projects have been sprouting up around the country. They're coed and, like traditional Scouting organizations, award patches to kids who master skills.

Ace Monster Toys is a hacker space in Oakland, Calif., where members share high-tech tools. Normally, grown-ups congregate there, working on electronics or woodworking projects. But two Sundays a month, the place is overrun by 50 kids and their parents for the gatherings of a group called Hacker Scouts.

The kids in Hacker Scouts are not breaking into computer networks. They make things with their hands, and at this particular meeting they are learning to solder and are building "judobots," small robots made out of wooden Popsicle sticks.

On this warm fall day, Alicia Davis, 10, is wearing a wool hat she knit herself. As her dad stands nearby, she sews an LED bracelet with conductive thread.

"I've been sewing on little felt pieces with this," Davis explains. "The battery will power the LEDs and light up. It's pretty cool."

DIY.org, a hands-on site for kids, offers merit badges for more than 40 different skills areas. 
DIY.org, a hands-on site for kids, offers merit badges for more than 40 different skills areas.

Crafting, Computers And The Physical World
Chris Cook, one of the parents active in organizing the Hacker Scouts, serves as president of the hacker space where the Scouts meet. He says the group has expressly targeted kids between the ages of 8 to 14.

"It's old enough where they're ready to start developing skills, [but] they're not so old that they've already been set in their ways," Cook says, "and they're more interested in what their peer groups are doing."

"So, we felt it's the right kind of time to expose them to how to craft with their hands — how to take things from a computer and put them into the physical world," Cook says.

The Hacker Scouts don't wear uniforms, but soon they'll be able to earn something akin to merit badges, made by the kid-friendly DIY electronics company Adafruit Industries.

Badges range from "learn to solder," "aerial quadcopter" and "high-altitude balloon" badges to the "Dumpster-diving" badge — "for when you get dirty but get some free stuff," explains Adafruit founder Limor Fried.

The thought of a bunch of Hacker Scouts Dumpster-diving may be unsettling, but recycling and repurposing are big with hacker groups. Grace McFadden, 11, of Madison, Conn., recently repurposed juice cartons into the soles of a pair of felt slippers, earning her a "salvager badge" from DIY.org, a new website for kids.

The site awards more than 40 badges for skills ranging from bike mechanic to "special effects wizard," and has started producing how-to videos for DIY projects, like a shoebox harp made from a box, a pencil and some rubber bands.
"Right now, I really like making paper airplanes and origami," McFadden says. "I have a whole fleet of paper airplanes." She learned to make them, she says, using an app on her iPod and by looking online.

A Scouting Handbook For Young Hackers
There are now 32,000 kids registered with DIY.org, which plans to organize local clubs around the country. The website even has an animated anthem exhorting kids to "build, make, hack and grow."
The site's chief creative officer, Isaiah Saxon, says the group plans to create the digital equivalent of a Scouting handbook for mobile devices.

"We hope that people's smartphones are eventually the Swiss army knife of our movement," Saxon says. "And that you go out into the woods ... point your phone at a tree and peel it open [to] learn about the wood underneath."

Saxon also plans to offer visual guides and "amazing experiences on the fly through these powerful handheld computers," he says.

As these efforts take off online, the hacker Scout movement is also spreading around the country. Seattle now has a science-focused group called "Geek Scouts," and a couple of tribes — not troops — of "Maker Scouts" are being formed in Milwaukee and Charleston, S.C.

Jon Kalish is a Manhattan-based radio reporter and podcast producer. For links to radio docs, podcasts & DIY stories, visit http://jonkalish.tumblr.com.

Adafruit to Teach Electronics Through Puppets in New Kids’ Show

By Mike Senese 12.27.12 2:02 PM

The Circuit Playground crew. Image: Adafruit

Adafruit, the kit-based electronics retailer and promoter of hobbyist engineering, is aiming to teach electronics to a younger demographic. So young that they’re enlisting the help of puppets.

Their new online show, titled Circuit Playground, will teach the essentials of electronics and circuitry to children through kid-friendly dolls with names like Cappy the Capacitor and Hans the 555 Timer Chip. Limor “Ladyada” Fried, Adafruit’s founder and chief engineer (and 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year), will host the episodes, with her team assisting with onscreen and puppeteering duties.
“We’ll have each component have a story, a song and something to do,” Fried says. “We’ll have live feeds in our factory on how things are made. It’s a little Elmo for engineering, a little Mr. Rogers for resistors and a little Sesame Street for Circuits.”

Adafruit is familiar with online broadcasts, hosting weekly “Show-and-Tell” and “Ask an Engineer” shows on Google+ and Ustream for over three years. Circuit Playground was a natural extension for them. “We saw the audience and the participants getting younger with more advanced projects, so we figured there was something there,” Fried says.

One of the first episodes will focus on robots. “ADABOT our robot muppet has a song about how robots can take pictures from mars, and be self-driving cars,” Fried explains. “We want to celebrate the fun and good parts of making things, and even tackle complex subjects like what’s ‘good’ to make — friendly robots for example.”

As a learning companion, Adafruit has also recently produced the coloring book E is for Electronics, and will carry plushie dolls of each character and an add-on for the eponymous Circuit Playground iPhone/iPad app.

Episodes will premiere this March on Google+ and Ustream. Fried holds hope for them to  inspire the upcoming crop of designers and builders.

“Will there be a generation of engineers 10 years or so from now saying, ‘Hey, I became an engineer because of that crazy electronics show Circuit Playground‘? I hope so.”

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Chemistry Construction Kits


Gifts That Keep Giving (if Not Exploding)


Gregory Tobias/Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections
A Chemcraft set from the mid-1950s. More Photos »




Ask scientists of a certain age about their childhood memories, and odds are they’ll start yarning about the stink bombs and gunpowder they concocted with their chemistry sets. Dangerous? Yes, but fun.

Podcast: Science Times

This week we take up a history of science toys. And if you’ve ever wondered what toys the reporters and editors at the Science Times adored as children, well, we got that too.
  A Science Toy Spectacular
Multimedia
Gregory Tobias/Chemical Heritage Foundation Collections

Readers’ Comments

What science toys did you adore as a child? Share your favorites in the comments box below.
“Admittedly, I have blown some things up in my time,” said William L. Whittaker, 64, a robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University who unearthed his first chemistry set, an A. C. Gilbert, in a junkyard around age 8. By 16, he was dabbling in advanced explosives. “There’s no question that I burned some skin off my face,” he recalled.
Under today’s Christmas tree, girls and boys will unwrap science toys of a very different ilk: slime-making kits and perfume labs, vials of a fluff-making polymer called Insta-Snow, “no-chem” chemistry sets (chemical free!), plus a dazzling array of modern telescopes, microscopes and D.I.Y. volcanoes. Nothing in these gifts will set the curtains on fire.
“Basically, you have to be able to eat everything in the science kit,” said Jim Becker, president of SmartLab Toys, who recalled learning the names of chemicals from his childhood chemistry set, which contained substances that have long since been banned from toys.
Some scientists lament the passing of the trial-and-error days that inspired so many careers. “Science kits are a lot less open-ended these days,” said Kimberly Gerson, a science blogger who lives outside Toronto. “Everything is packaged. It’s either ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ If you don’t get the right result, you’ve done it wrong and you’re out of chemicals.”
Others, though, say the new crop of science toys — even with their cartoonish packaging and heavy emphasis on neon goo — actually represent progress. More entertaining, educational and accessible than earlier products, which relied heavily on a child’s inner motivation, these toys may actually help democratize the learning of science and introduce children to scientific methods and concepts at an earlier age.
“I grew up in the 1960s, and a lot of the chemistry sets were kind of boring,” said William Gurstelle, a science and technology writer. “You’d go through the book, and at the end of the experiment you’d get some light precipitate at the bottom of the beaker. Maybe at most it changes color or something.”
Mr. Gurstelle’s books, which include “Whoosh Boom Splat” and “Backyard Ballistics,” teach people how to make dangerous projectiles, like a potato cannon that uses hair spray as launching fluid. But he had high praise for commercial science kits, which show children (among other things) how to make slime.
William L. Whittaker at the Planetary Robotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University surrounded by the robots he has created.
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times
William L. Whittaker at the Planetary Robotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University surrounded by the robots he has created.
“Well, that’s a pretty cool thing to have when you’re done,” Mr. Gurstelle said. “You’re not going to really learn to be a chemist from a chemistry set when you’re in seventh grade; you’re just going to be inspired. The point is that new chemistry sets and new toys are just better, because the manufacturers have figured out how to make them more fun.”
Some toy makers, like SmartLab, Mr. Becker’s company, have used this philosophy to give classic toys a makeover. One of SmartLab’s takes on a chemistry set, for instance, is the Extreme Secret Formula Lab, which comes with “squishy-lidded bubble test tubes” and “an abundance of glow-in-the-dark powder.” The game of Mousetrap has been re-envisioned as the Weird and Wacky Contraption Lab, meant to bring out children’s Rube Goldberg talents. And the slot car tracks that Mr. Becker recalls snapping together in his youth have been translated into a robot called ReCon 6.0, which children can program to roam around.
Jim Becker of SmartLab Toys.
Mike Kane for The New York Times
Jim Becker of SmartLab Toys.
“What we do is give kids the opportunity to learn through problem solving,” Mr. Becker said.
Of course, technology has also remade the experience of learning science. Children may be more likely to click on a science app than to go play outside.
Critics of the new toys say that’s all the more reason to promote playthings that are more suggestive than prescriptive, items that evoke creative thinking. Will the Beautiful Blob Slime Lab release your child’s inner chemist?
“I think back to when you had a bucket of Legos dumped in front of you, and you could do what you wanted with them,” said Ms. Gerson, the science blogger.
Certainly, science toys have evolved. In the 1920s, ‘30s and ‘40s, Erector Sets and chemistry sets with real glassware, chemicals and spirit lamps were “meant to breed a scientific culture in America,” said Art Molella, a science historian who directs the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. The atomic era of the 1950s and the launching of Sputnik ushered in science kits that pointed out the possibilities in energy and space, including some with samples of real radioactive ore. For better or worse, Mr. Molella said, “there was a lot of hands-on aspects to it, not like our video games today.”
Those toys did indeed breed a generation of scientists. Roald Hoffmann, who won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981, remembered playing with an A. C. Gilbert chemistry set from age 11, making gunpowder from sulfur, charcoal and nitrate. “I would paint the solution in parallel lines on a piece of paper, let it dry and then ignite it,” said Dr. Hoffmann, 75, a professor at Cornell. “It didn’t explode; it just burned along the path of the solution.”
Roald Hoffmann.
Heather Ainsworth for The New York Times
Roald Hoffmann.
The thrill of such early experimentation is described in memoirs like Primo Levi’s “The Periodic Table” and Oliver Sacks’s “Uncle Tungsten.” Dr. Hoffmann describes the latter book (which is dedicated to him) as “a wonderful account of how the sort of smell, stinks and color and explosions of chemistry attracted a young boy.”
Today, Dr. Hoffmann added, “we over-romanticize the experience, but I think something is lost, something in the excitement. I think parents worry.”
Yet the classic science toys have not completely disappeared. Many old favorites exist in modern forms. The Visible Man and Visible Woman anatomy kits have yielded shelf space to the Squishy Human Body Kit, which has rubbery internal organs and an instruction book that explains what happens when a bite of pizza is digested. “Having kids take those pieces, hold them and put them in there, they get such a deeper understanding of what’s going on than they ever could looking at a screen,” said Mr. Becker of SmartLab, the manufacturer.
A view of the Squishy Human Body Kit.
Mike Kane for The New York Times
A view of the Squishy Human Body Kit.
Another iconic toy, the Ant Farm, introduced in 1956, still exists — including in a high-end version that “projects the shadows of the ants up on your ceiling,” said Frank Adler, president of Uncle Milton, the company that makes it.
And classic chemistry sets, complete with mildly dangerous chemicals, are still available, largely as a boutique product. An 11-year-old company called Thames & Kosmos imports its kits from Germany, selling what are considered to be the only high-end chemistry sets in wide distribution in the United States.
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“There’s a lot of people who say the great innovators of the last century all had the opportunity to play with things like chemistry sets, and had the possibility to explore things in a more open-ended way, and that’s what led to their great innovations,” said Ted McGuire, president of Thames & Kosmos. “Now people are worried we don’t have those same opportunities for our young people.”
But even at the goo-making end of the retail spectrum, toy company executives make good arguments for the educational value of their products. At Be Amazing! Toys, top sellers include Insta-Snow, Cool Slime (“Just mix the two liquids together and you’ve got perfect slime every time”) and the Geyser Tube, which is a package of Mentos and a tube to funnel them into a soda bottle. Some kits cost under $5.
“We look at ourselves as, ‘Here’s a great way to introduce your child to the world of science and make it interesting, not boring,’ ” said ReneĆ© Whitney, a vice president at Be Amazing! Toys. “Once they’ve had the ‘wow effect,’ we try to explain why it happened.”
Snobs may scoff, but the experiments are quick and foolproof and can be done (whew!) without a grown-up. Science lessons are spoon-fed along with the fun: Kits like Growing Gators, which comes with miniature alligators and cards to track their growth, ask children to measure their experiments and hypothesize about what might happen, Ms. Whitney said. That sugary-looking “Water Gel” that turns water into a solid? The kit explains that it’s the same stuff found in baby diapers, and encourages children to cut open a dry diaper and see how much powder it has.
“We’re trying to teach them to think like scientists,” Ms. Whitney said.
Whether a future generation of scientists will look back fondly on their days of dropping candies through the Geyser Tube into Diet Coke remains to be seen. But it does seem that each generation grows up with a science toy that inspires in a particular way.
Rosie Cook with a kit from 1917.
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Rosie Cook with a kit from 1917.
“I’m 31 years old, and when I was growing up, everyone had this little Fisher-Price doctor set,” said Rosie Cook, a historian at the Chemical Heritage Foundation who is curating an exhibit on chemistry sets. “I honestly think that’s why a lot of people my age wanted to be doctors.”