The Evolution of Manufacturing

 Our museum focuses on the evolution of manufacturing from the first iterations of the American System to the present day.  Most of the students who come to visit come as part of their history unit on the Industrial Revolution.






To explore the evolution of manufacturing, we use visual thinking strategies to examine images of manufacturing work through time. Students then use chronological thinking skills to organize the images and then discuss how work and manufacturing has changed.

                                     








Students have a context for the machines which they then examine on the exhibit floor. All sorts of contemporary issues come in to the discussion and students have much to ponder back at school.

Lessons while Soldering

We recently purchased soldering irons for use in the Learning Lab. These Weller soldering irons have proven to work well. They have temperature controls and include a stand and sponge. This support proved to be important for our students who were at times struggling with fine motor skills on this project. In fact, after watching one student do well with a soldering stand, I purchased several more for our second session. We also had wire cutters available.


Again our teen volunteers proved to be very helpful.  Not only did one of them lead the students through the assembly of this WeevilEye kit, but they also were incredibly helpful with the students who needed help following directions and support with fine motor skills. Almost all of these grade 4 - 6 students were able to solder together the kit successfully.








We set up the stations with a piece of masonite over the table to protect it from burns. The cords went down between the two tables and connected to power strips underneath.  We had the power strips turned off until after we had gone over safety rules, had a demonstration, and were ready to start. Of course we all had safety glasses and I had made sure that we had ice on hand and that the first aid kit was stocked with neosporin. Happily there were no incidents.

At first I had mixed feelings about this program which was basically soldering a circuit board and assembling a kit.  The underlying purpose of the Learning Lab is to foster innovation and provide space for open-ended learning and problem-solving.  In fact, a colleague came up to me while the workshop was going on and said "wow, they are learning so much."  My immediate reaction was negative. I was frustrated that the students were just following directions and not really THINKING.

Here is a student using a "solder sucker" to repair her soldering.

But then I thought about it some more. Of course, they were learning soldering skills which could be applied to other more open-ended projects in the future.  But they were learning more. They were learning about being precise and about what happens when you don't do something perfectly. They had to fix their mistakes or the circuit wouldn't work. That's what this museum is all about--so we were learning about precision here at the American Precision Museum.

I also realized that they were learning about collaboration and helping each other. Of course, some students finished before others.  I encouraged them to lend a helping hand and was happy to see this helper step up to the plate. We are trying to foster leadership here as well--someday our teens will graduate and we will need new students to step in.

In the end, this soldering class gave me lots to think about. It made me reaffirm the pedagogical underpinnings to our work and helped me broaden my own thinking about what the kids are learning and how we achieve our goals.

Risk

Tinkering is about risk.  I have seen this over and over again in the learning lab.  There are always one or two kids who sit and wait to be told what to do. They are tentative and wait for instruction. If, by the end of the session, they are surrounded by a mess created from trial and error, I know I have done my job.

I first noticed this when we began to design our alarm systems. One little boy sat quietly looking at the table until I asked him what was up. He replied that he had been waiting to be told what to do. Slowly, he began to engage in the process until he relaxed and dove in.


This is the beauty of holding tinkering sessions at the Museum. Kids are free from being assessed. They can explore. They can try out their ideas without worrying that they might be wrong. It's what I like best about museum education.

The thinking behind the tinkering

How can we create a new generation of kids who are no longer passive users of technology, but instead are thinkers and makers? That's what happened here in Windsor. It's our heritage and it's our challenge.

Before fully diving in to a maker space project, it seemed appropriate to do some research. I began with the history.  The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors who Make Amermica Great helped me to connect the idea of tinkering to the past. While the word "tinkering" might sound like someone who is aimlessly messing around, it is a deeply innovative practice--building something out of existing, available parts for an entirely new purpose. It is exactly what happened here in Windsor as the development of interchangeable parts and increasing precision were iterative processes.


Invent to Learn, Tinkering: Kids Learn to Make Stuff, and the NGSS Science Standards all helped me to think about to shape a learning environment where kids would be innovative.  All agreed that we want kids to be unencumbered, filled with possibility. We want them to think, make, and improve. We want them to collaborate. We want them to have opportunities to reflect, talk about their work, and share with others.

That's the philosophy behind our project.