Transcript from 459: Ideas Have to Come From Somewhere with AnnMarie Thomas, Christopher White, and Elecia White.

EW (00:00:06):

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elecia White, here with Christopher White. I think I could use some silly. I could use some play. I could be a five-year-old with play dough. Mix all that with electricity. Let us have Professor AnnMarie Thomas talk to us about Squishy Circuits and learning and innovation and entrepreneurship.

CW (00:00:28):

Hello, Professor Thomas. Welcome to the show <laugh>.

AT (00:00:32):

Thank you so much for having me on. I am excited to be here.

EW (00:00:35):

Could you tell us about yourself, as if we met at Hackaday Supercon?

AT (00:00:41):

I love the context there, because I wear a couple of different hats. I am an engineering and business professor, who also teaches education, in Minnesota. And I run a lab on playful learning where we look at the intersection of art, technology and K-12 education, which is a fancy way of saying we love smashing unusual combinations of things together, and seeing how we can use them to learn.

EW (00:01:02):

All right! And I believe that does include play dough.

AT (00:01:07):

It definitely includes play dough.

EW (00:01:10):

We would like to get started with lightning round, where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we are behaving ourselves, we will not ask for much deeper questions until the end.

AT (00:01:19):

Perfect.

CW (00:01:20):

Favorite MBARI project?

AT (00:01:23):

Favorite- As in M B A R I, MBARI?

EW (00:01:26):

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

AT (00:01:29):

Oh, I love their underwater robots! Their AUV, their autonomous underwater vehicles.

EW (00:01:35):

You were not expecting that one, were you?

AT (00:01:37):

I was not. I like that one. No, actually the proper answer is whichever project any of my research students are working on as an intern this summer there.

EW (00:01:46):

Do you have any research project interns at MBARI this year?

AT (00:01:50):

I did. We are starting the semester here in Minnesota, but I had one student, Joel Rodich, who is a senior engineering student who was working there on camera systems this past summer. Two years ago, we had an education major there. So at the Playful Learning Lab we are big fans of MBARI. I was an intern there more than 20 years ago myself, so I feel old, but it is fun watching my students do things that were life-changing for me decades ago.

EW (00:02:14):

I work on some of the projects, so I am quite familiar with them, and think they are a great institute.

AT (00:02:19):

Yes, one of my favorites.

EW (00:02:21):

Salty or sweet?

AT (00:02:22):

Ooh, sweet.

CW (00:02:24):

STEAM, the acronym, which is your favorite letter?

AT (00:02:28):

None of them. I am a fan of the holistic education approach. Cannot have a favorite.

EW (00:02:34):

Rank these three schools in order of worst to best. Caltech, MIT and Harvey Mudd College.

AT (00:02:42):

<laugh>

CW (00:02:44):

It is a trap.

AT (00:02:45):

I would like my friends to still speak to me, so I will have to plead the fifth on that one.

EW (00:02:51):

What is nice is she did not just say Harvey Mudd to start with is the worst, because that is the only one she has not gone to.

AT (00:02:56):

Oh, that is a great school. That is the only school I know that has a professional magician teaching in their math department, so I could not rank them down.

EW (00:03:03):

Professor Benjamin.

AT (00:03:03):

But as an alumna of MIT and Caltech, I cannot rank them down either.

CW (00:03:07):

I have taken classes from him. Oh, right mine. You walk into a sixth grade classroom and have to teach them something for an hour. What do you go with?

AT (00:03:17):

Something for an hour? I think we would do storytelling, if I had just walked in. We would write a story together.

EW (00:03:23):

Complete one project or start a dozen?

AT (00:03:27):

Oh, aspirational? I would have to say, if you are asking, I typically start a dozen, but I think I would aspire to complete one.

CW (00:03:39):

Favorite fictional robot?

AT (00:03:42):

BB-8.

EW (00:03:43):

Do you have a tip everyone should know?

AT (00:03:45):

Oh, I sound like a kindergarten teacher, which is also aspirational for me. Be kind to everybody, because you never know what other people are secretly dealing with.

CW (00:03:54):

With that set up, I thought you were going to say, "Take more naps."

EW (00:03:56):

I did too.

AT (00:03:57):

Oh, definitely take more naps too, but that goes without saying.

EW (00:04:01):

So you said in your introduction, you are a professor of engineering and of business, and education and playful learning. How do all these things mix?

AT (00:04:16):

I am now in my mid forties and I have spent the last couple decades trying to figure out how to make a nice linear path out of my life story. I think I can only do that retroactively. So to be honest, it is I follow what is interesting at the time, and often they lead to learning new things and going into new fields. When you enter a new space, you often see how it relates to the places you have already been.

(00:04:39):

As an academic, I have been incredibly fortunate to be able to combine those. If you had asked little me what I was going to major in, I wanted to be an artist or an actress or a painter. Ended up going to college for engineering, but got into music composition while I was there. Then wanted to teach, so had to get a PhD, because I am old enough that we did not used to have high school and elementary school and middle school engineering.

(00:04:58):

All of these things have led to the other. Meeting someone and deciding to learn a new thing. And having the great privilege of being in a field as an academic where I can pull in seemingly unrelated disciplines. But I think the first two, engineering and business, make a ton of sense together, as many of your guests have talked about and who have started businesses and hardware and software companies. Understanding both of those, really benefits you as an inventor, as I would argue as anyone.

EW (00:05:30):

You did a TED Talk about Squishy Circuits, about using play dough to transport electricity to light lights. Where did that fit in with your art, business, engineering pyramid?

AT (00:05:48):

It fits very much into my being a parent. I have two daughters, and Squishy Circuits really came out of wanting to do something for them. I think my oldest daughter was a toddler at the time. It was as the maker movement was taking off. I had done a PhD in a robotics lab. And I was really admiring a lot of the things I was seeing in the maker movement, the sewable circuits, and the paintable circuits in the early days of Bare Conductive.

(00:06:09):

But none of them really lent themselves to use by little kids with toddler fingers, or to classroom uses, where if you have a limited budget you can only buy so many supplies. So if you painted a circuit, you would have to buy more conductive paint, or more electric tape. Really wanting a way that you could build something, and then literally squish it up and do it again.

(00:06:33):

Never assuming that it would go anywhere beyond my kids in the kitchen, and maybe my lab and some of the schools we work with. But we were able to develop a conductive play dough recipe and a non-conductive play dough recipe. My kids liked it, and then the schools liked it. We were surprised to find that it was fairly novel, and took off way beyond what I thought a project in my kitchen would turn into, much to the credit of my students who have gone on and started it as a company.

EW (00:07:02):

It is kind of funny because there have always been a few homemade play dough recipes. I should not say "Play-Doh," because that is probably trademarked, but that is how we all know it, so going with it. Flour and water, and is it cornstarch and salts was one of the recipes, and the other was sugar instead of salts?

AT (00:07:25):

Yeah, the main difference was sugar instead of salt, for the one that is technically not insulating, but much, much, much less conductive. The other big difference is actually the type of water you use.

EW (00:07:38):

Oh?

AT (00:07:38):

Our tap water has so much stuff in it, that it conducts electricity. So for our quasi-insulating or less conductive dough, we use distilled or deionized water. And when we were doing this, people- It seems so obvious now, that I had some engineers say, "Oh, well, you are not going to be able to make circuits that light up with play dough as the wires."

(00:08:00):

It actually was apparently novel in education, to look at it this way, but the field of circuit vendors, there were circuit vendors making music using play dough to short out kids' toys, before Squishy Circuits came along. That was fascinating. One of those things where the academic world does not always look at the same- Well typically will look at the same research, but not notice things happening in maybe the maker art world.

EW (00:08:27):

Was this innovative, in whatever that word is supposed to mean?

AT (00:08:33):

That is a hard question to ask me, because I tend to do projects when I feel like there is something that needs to get done, and it could help the people around me. I typically will then let others decide whether it is useful to them.

(00:08:46):

Squishy Circuits was personal. It was for my kids. And then it was for the schools that I helped out with, the public schools here in the Twin Cities. It really was only because people started asking us for the recipes, that we started sharing them. It was always on our website, all the recipes, which battery packs to buy.

(00:09:02):

It was not supposed to be a company. We did not even publish curriculum for the first year, because I said that I wanted people to use it however they wanted to. And so we shared other people's curriculum, showing what people around the world were doing with it.

(00:09:15):

The Squishy Circuit Store actually started because one of my students who was working on the project as a research student, one of their parents is a teacher. They said they would love to use it, but they did not want to solder the battery packs together, and put the right little bits on them. And as a mother of two, pre-tenure professor, it was not in my to-do list to start a company.

(00:09:35):

So this young gentleman, Matthew Schmidtbauer, started it. It is a decade later and that company still exists. So I was not asking if it was innovative or if it was going to change the world, I was saying, "Can I do this, and would this help the kids and the teachers that I know? A cheap way of making the circuitry that they can reuse." It has been delightful seeing how it has taken off, but that was not the mindset I set up to explore in.

EW (00:10:02):

It ended being a pretty high profile project.

AT (00:10:05):

Very much so.

EW (00:10:06):

Are there other projects that have had similar starts, that you wish had gotten more attention?

AT (00:10:13):

Oh, that is a really good question.

EW (00:10:15):

Should thank Lenore for that one, because she totally fed me that.

AT (00:10:18):

It is interesting because one of the things my work has always been, both as a professor and as a consultant, as an artist, I focus on the collaborations. Who do I want to work with, and where can I do something that is meaningful to other people? And so each of our projects at the Playful Learning Lab, which really constitutes about 25 undergraduate research students and a couple of other professors who play with us, we set out to do the work because we think it is important, not because it will get attention.

(00:10:45):

Some of them get attention, but we do not really care about the big press. We care about attention in the communities we work in. For example, years ago a student who had actually applied to work on the Squishy Circuits project, it was not the right fit for a project for her. But the question I asked her at the end of the interview was, "Well, if I did not hire you for this project, is there something else you would like to work on?"

(00:11:11):

She paused. Her name was Brynn Kasper, and she paused and thought about it and said, "Well, part of my family is deaf. And deaf and hard of hearing kids do not have the same opportunities that hearing kids do in STEM. So I guess I would want to work on that." We started a project then, that we did after school. Science and STEM and STEAM classes and workshops at Metro Deaf School, which is an incredible birth through 21 charter school for deaf and hard of hearing children in the Twin Cities.

(00:11:43):

That started as a small thing. It led to a Summer Camp during 2020, where kids got boxes and did materials even though the pandemic had them in their homes. It led to a episode of the TV show on PBS, SciGirls. So while many people will not know that project per se, I think it got attention from the right people.

(00:12:03):

We were able to get the resources to the schools that needed it. That is one of the joys of this work, is we can find an immediate need and go do something, even if we are not going to get tons of attention for it. To directly answer your question of, are there projects I wish had gotten attention? I do not think so, because I have never set out with a project hoping to get attention.

(00:12:21):

We always hope to do the work, and if the people we are doing the work for like it, then we have been successful. Often attention just means that you get to bring that work to more people, which is a privilege.

EW (00:12:35):

Did that work turn into playgroundcamp.org or is that something separate?

AT (00:12:42):

Oh, yes. Yeah. So the summer of 2020, we had- Going back a little further, as we all know, the world changed a lot in 2020, particularly in the spring and summer of it. In our lab we were very focused on a few projects, but then everything changed.

(00:13:01):

I was actually in Denmark in early March of 2020, and had won an award. Our lab had won the Lego prize, which comes with research funding. As I am rushing home, the conference it would have been conferred at, did not happen. I am rushing home. I was getting emails from a lot of my research students, who again are all undergrads. And so much uncertainty.

(00:13:23):

Over the coming weeks some students lost family members, but almost, actually, every student lost any summer internships they had lined up. Companies had dropped internships. So we decided we have this funding, and I sent out an email and offered to all of my research students that they could be funded for the whole summer. They all got raises.

(00:13:41):

I said, "We will probably run out of money in September, but we have three months. What is the most good that we can do to help during this difficult time?" We are also in the Twin Cities, so the spring of 2020 was not just the pandemic, it was also the killing of George Floyd. The gas station on the corner of my street here burnt down. This was a really tough time for our community.

(00:14:00):

So these amazing 18 to 22 year olds looked at it and said, "Well, a lot of our community, they could use playful things, so we have got to do something there. But the kids at Metro Deaf School have all been sent home. Some of them are deaf blind, and all of them- Some of them have family members who do not sign, and school was the place they communicated. How could we create something to help them?"

(00:14:21):

So using the Lego prize funding, we created hundreds of videos that were all different STEM activities. We recorded all the videos in American Sign Language, in English, in Spanish, and in Arabic, because many of the homes of the kids we were working with, the parents did not speak English or did not sign.

(00:14:39):

We were doing this in the early days of the pandemic, so with long telephoto lenses, and no one getting near each other, and filming outside. But for the summer of 2020, every week about 85 children would get a box on their door. It had science supplies in it. Maybe it had Lego, maybe it had motors, maybe it had Squishy Circuits. It always had some snacks. We would leave them outside, because remember, we did not know how long you had to let something sit before you touched it if someone else had.

(00:15:06):

So yeah, that project came out of the work of this student who applied for Squishy Circuits about eight years earlier, and did not get the job and yet found this need. At the time, I knew nothing about the deaf community. A decade later, I am a student in the extension program at Gallaudet University. I have taken about seven classes on American Sign Language and deaf culture. I am not an expert by any means, but I have incredible colleagues in the deaf community that I can work with.

(00:15:34):

Actually this past summer, so summer of 2023, we have been working on coding in the deaf community. We ran a course for teachers of deaf and hard of hearing kids, who were learning how to program in the Scratch programming language. They got some Squishy Circuits and Makey Makeys and other things.

(00:15:48):

But we also were able to have an incredible deaf woman create interpretations for some coding videos, that had come out of Harvard that were currently in English. So I never know where these projects are going to go. Squishy Circuits somehow leads to computer science in American Sign Language. I could never predict that.

EW (00:16:06):

Some of the videos on the playgroundcamp.org- There are, as you said, hundreds of videos and little lesson plans and written lectures and what you need. And not everything needs a box. A lot of it is stuff you can get at home or make, like the play dough. But how much of it was about the fun, the playfulness, the doing something, and how much was it about curriculum?

AT (00:16:40):

Oh, that summer, we did not really care at all about curriculum. You were in a city during a pandemic, kids are at home, we are having all the challenges the Twin Cities were having. Our main goal was connecting kids to each other. There would be Zoom calls where they were signing with each other.

(00:16:54):

This is also happening the same time we launched the PLAYground, we also had something called the PlayLine. In March of 2020, as I mentioned, I was flying back from Denmark, rushing home before I would not be allowed to fly back anymore. On the plane I was emailing the only other person who had come from the US to Denmark for that event, Carly Ciarrocchi, who was a kids' TV host. The two of us were commenting on how this was going to change education around the world.

(00:17:20):

No one really knew what was coming, in terms of the pandemic. How do you switch online, and that teachers were going to have to help each other, and how could we connect them. So from March of 2020, for over a year, we held daily, and actually it was twice daily for the first three months, open Zoom calls where teachers anywhere in the world could jump into the PlayLine and just chat for half an hour. It truly was- We did them twice a day, because we had people around the world. It was a chance for teachers to just laugh or share what was going on or cry or vent.

(00:17:52):

What was really fascinating for us was, because we started immediately mid-March 2020, things were worse in certain countries. The waves were traveling, so we could hear from the Italian teachers. Or some of the US teachers could comment on the problems they were going to have with all the kids who did not have Wi-Fi. And it turns out that was going to be an issue in Australia.

(00:18:11):

In that case, just like PLAYground, one of our main goals was connection. I think one of the most important things is that we connect to other people, we share ideas, the curriculum follows. That is very different than if we were creating an in-school program. Maybe in math class we are going to start with a curriculum.

(00:18:29):

I think it is very important for us always to look at what are the goals of what we are doing? To your earlier question of which projects do not get attention, well, if the goal is attention, then that is problematic. But in some cases it is just doing the work. So if the goal is to have kids be engaged and enjoy their time, well, maybe that is what we focus on and we look at the playfulness, less so than the exact standards that we are covering.

(00:18:53):

On the other hand, if we are teaching a class that is crucial to another course in a student's academic trajectory, well then we are definitely going to look at the standards. But even if we said that the curriculum is driving it, I would posit, and I suspect many of my research students would as well, that we can put a playful lens on learning almost anything.

(00:19:10):

We took a class at the university, gosh, over a decade ago, where we were teaching Lagrangian dynamics and force and motion. Well, you can do that in a basement. If you are teaching someone about springs and pendulums, you can swing a pendulum on a string. Or you can take a little spring.

(00:19:28):

Or you could partner with a local circus school and have your engineering students put on harnesses. Instead of swinging a little tiny pendulum, you swing your engineering students 40 feet up on a flying trapeze. Instead of a little tiny spring, you have them jump off of a bungee trapeze. You take measurements, and you look at their oscillations.

(00:19:48):

You can take something that is pretty serious lab process and mathematics, and look at it in a new light that hopefully is a little more joyful. So I would argue that play and curriculum do not have to be separated, but which one you consider first maybe depends on the setting.

EW (00:20:07):

What sort of projects are you working on now?

AT (00:20:10):

I am very lucky. I am a professor, which means that I am on sabbatical- Well, I can have sabbaticals once every seven or eight years. So I am on a sabbatical. This is actually going to be the first year, first time in 19 years, I have gone more than 12 months without teaching. Never done that. I do not think I have ever gone more than nine months without teaching, in the last 19 years.

(00:20:30):

So I am not teaching this coming year, but I am working on a couple projects. One, we are finishing up writing up a bunch of papers with my awesome undergrads, that just submitted one to a journal. It was accepted yesterday. Looking at the coding and electronics work that they did all of last year at Metro Deaf School. We taught a middle school electronics class that was 20 days long and taken by every middle schooler at Metro Deaf School in the Twin Cities. So writing up those papers.

(00:20:54):

We are also working with the Minnesota Children's Museum. We have worked with them for the last five years, on designing exhibits and hands-on activities and also engagement for adults at children's museums. But this specific one in summer of 2024, they are going to have an exhibit called "Monsters on Summer Vacation." So I am actually doing some exhibit design, which I have not done hands-on by myself in a long time. I get to spend some time in the shop and ordering equipment, and have an exhibit that hopefully will be unveiled in a few months there.

(00:21:26):

My secret project, I always feel sabbaticals, you should do some projects that will get the papers, but you should also take some risks. And so my personal sabbatical project, which I hope goes somewhere, has actually been looking at the history and practice of magic, actually like magicians, magic wand, sleight of hand. For the last couple of years, ever since the pandemic, I have had a magic tutor. One of my daughters is quite skilled at sleight of hand. So I am diving into that.

(00:21:58):

I should say that that actually started because for a while I had a young man who was an electrical engineering major, but also a professional magician, working in my research lab. So when the pandemic hit, I was like, "Oh, I should learn those cool things that Patrick does."

(00:22:12):

I am really fascinated by magic as a teacher, because it is all about what you believe and what you notice. I feel like there are some really interesting corollaries between sleight of hand and misdirection, that apply and can be used in a classroom. But also maybe a little further in these days of AI and fake news and deep fakes, how do we believe what we believe? That is a question that I think people have been wrestling with for a long time in magic, but maybe not from that direction.

(00:22:44):

So I have been deep diving in the history of magic and the psychology of magic. There are some phenomenal books that have come out recently by some psychologists on magic. And then frankly, it is just fun. I will look at the engineering behind a lot of the different illusions that are in that repertoire.

(00:22:59):

And then a project that makes six year old me inside somewhere deep down super happy, is I am spending some time working with one of my favorite companies. I am doing a consulting collaboration project with Lego in Denmark. So my kids are happy, because it means I come home with black licorice and Lego for them. They have an amazing Lego education team there, looking at the use of Lego in schools. I am delighted to get to spend some time with them. Just starting out with that project, though.

CW (00:23:34):

This is an overwhelming number of things.

EW (00:23:35):

You overloaded me.

AT (00:23:36):

Sorry.

CW (00:23:36):

I feel like asking, how many hours are in your day?

AT (00:23:44):

<laugh> I do not think the brain works the way other people's- This is funny, the question of how we do it all, it has just always been that way. I am lucky that I can follow interests. But hours in a day is a hard one, Christopher, because I am trying to work on Danish time schedule. So my days start quite early. Yes.

EW (00:24:02):

Okay, I have questions about Legos. But first I want to go back to the magic, because I noticed it on the playground camp site that you had magic tricks, and I wondered how that worked in with curriculum. And then I was like, "Well, teaching people to be skeptical, it is really important." So I am glad you mentioned that.

(00:24:23):

But on the site, there are things like how to do the French drop, which is one of the things that when you are making it appear like coins happen in different places, that French drop is really important. And the thing is it slows it down. It tells you how to get better. It says you do the drop and then you hold it in the other- You pretend to have transferred the coin to the other hand.

(00:24:50):

But now you do it again, but this time really transfer the coin. So you get an idea of how you feel, how you look, how you pay attention when the coin is in the hand that appears to be in, so that when it is not in the hand that it appears in, you are doing the same physical reactions. I really, really liked that, and it made me want to go through all of the magic lessons, because the truth is I do not know how to do any of this stuff. And it is cool. I could totally trick Christopher if I tried.

CW (00:25:21):

<laugh>

AT (00:25:23):

Yeah, all credit for all of that goes to Patrick Roche. Patrick was a- Gosh, time that was all happening, I think he was a freshman or sophomore, maybe sophomore, engineering student. Electrical engineering. Also a professional magician. Also spent part of his time in college flying out to New York to be an assistant on a magic show.

(00:25:41):

When we had our all hands Zoom meetings, figuring out how are we going to delight all of these kids who were stuck at home at this really scary time in history. Particularly again the Twin Cities, that is incredibly diverse community, that was really roiling then after George Floyd's killing. All the students brought out, "Well, I could teach this. I could teach that."

(00:26:01):

Patrick said, "Why do we not bring some magic to these boxes that we can send out to kids?" And he worked with an interpreter to make sure it was interpreted. Through Patrick, I also learned there is a long history of deaf magicians, really rich history. Yeah, I think that was delightful. We did not have a curricular goal to that. Honestly, the playground stuff we did that summer, our driving goal was that it would bring joy to kids at a difficult time. It is why every box that was left on their doors also always had snacks. We were just trying to make kids and their families smile.

(00:26:37):

Patrick was right that like magic! Not only did you teach a kid magic in their language, so all those lessons were in Arabic or ASL or Spanish- Not only to do that, then the kids had the materials so they could do that for their family members, who were also stuck at home at that time. So that was again, one of these incredible young adults, probably 19, having that idea of like, "We could put this in." And he was right, and kids really liked that.

EW (00:27:01):

Okay. But fast forward to today, or last week as the case may be, because you were in Denmark at the Lego headquarters.

AT (00:27:07):

Mm-hmm.

EW (00:27:10):

There are so many things you can learn with Legos. From mechanical engineering to you can do storytelling with Legos. And there are the kits that you can make art. And it seems like Lego has gotten to be an ingredient and not an end.

CW (00:27:32):

Huh.

AT (00:27:34):

That is a beautiful way of putting it. I am like a kid in a candy store. I did grow up with Legos. The kits were a lot less elaborate in the late seventies and early eighties. But yeah, it is this empowering tool that kids and adults gravitate towards, and it can be used in so many different ways. To me, that is really sticky, that is really intriguing.

(00:27:59):

I will say that my introduction to Lego as a company, as opposed to Lego as a toy, actually comes through the Lego Foundation. Not everyone knows this, but Lego- There is a separate foundation called the Lego Foundation. It does incredible work on the study of playful learning, and playful parenting in museums, not focused on bricks, truly focused on what is play.

(00:28:25):

They have done incredible work in Ukraine for decades, I think. Throughout the world that they have major projects, in Mexico and South Africa. Really looking throughout the world at what does it mean to learn through play? And how do you engage kids and families, and kids with special needs, and kids who maybe are not exceeding in a typical classroom?

(00:28:49):

I was delighted by finding them, gosh, five or six more than that even years ago, and have read all their papers. Really in awe of the international team that the Foundation has put together to champion for children and children's voice and children's empowerment. Again, it is the Lego Foundation, but it is not about the bricks. It is about play, broadly. And if you are an educator listening, stunning research.

(00:29:20):

So through that philosophy, I have gotten to meet some incredible researchers and designers and engineers at Lego. I am delighted that over the past couple of years have gotten to work with them on some projects. They had a Playful Schools Network of administrators from schools around the world. I got to work with Italian teachers, and actually the executive director of Metro Deaf School.

(00:29:43):

I think that many of us smile when we think of Lego, the toys and the bricks. I am looking at quite a few around me right now here in my office. But the impact and the commitment to meaningful playful learning and support of child voice is pretty spectacular. So getting to work with any of the teams there in Billund delights me, makes me so incredibly happy. I just hope I can help with the work that they are doing.

(00:30:13):

You may have seen there was a product that they came out with, that actually Metro Deaf school got to test early on, because Metro Deaf School that we work with, about 13% of the kids are also blind. So 13% are deaf blind, and Lego has a Lego braille block kit that the kids loved playing with. So yeah, there is so much you can do with it.

(00:30:31):

I am truly a kid in a candy store when I get to work with the brilliant and just incredibly kind humans, that are at that company, trying to really make us all smile and build. They also, I will say, are doing some great work in environmental sustainability, which is near and dear to my heart. In terms of companies, that is one that I have long admired. So the chance to spend part of my sabbatical working with them is a joy.

EW (00:30:56):

What about the entrepreneurship aspect? How does playful learning and entrepreneurship overlap? I mean, I get Squishy Circuits. That became a company, but you kind of gave that away.

AT (00:31:11):

Yeah, I was not a good business person in some ways, but I am a huge fan of the open-source hardware movement. So that fit in. How does entrepreneurship tie in? How did I end up as a business professor, if my PhD is in engineering? It may be a better way to say it.

(00:31:24):

One of the ways, is that there has been a long push on human-centered design and design thinking in business schools, over the last decade or way beyond, maybe 20 years. If we look at some of the things like Stanford's d.school and the work of David Kelley and IDEO. Many business schools try to teach design.

(00:31:45):

I am fortunate the school that I am at, we are multidisciplinary. They knew that I had done a lot of work in the design space, and had also taken a year off from the university. I am the rare professor who left her position right after getting tenure. I left to be the founding executive director of the Maker Education Initiative back in around 2012. Through those experiences I was working on nonprofit management, but also innovation, and how do we help others come up with new ideas? So that is my role more in the business school, is I am there to help with idea generation. I am there to help nurture how do we find a need and build off of it.

(00:32:32):

I love learning. So the other reason I am at a business school is that like 15 years ago, I went back to school and did a Certificate in Sustainable Design from Minneapolis College of Art and Design. So the courses that I teach in our business school, I teach one in the fall, which is technology prototyping, and it is how to build stuff for business students.

(00:32:54):

So we code, we do some Arduino, we build some circuits, we learn about 3D printing, because so many business students want to launch tech companies or products that involve tech, but do not have any experience working with it. So I get to teach that awesome class where my students are actually wiring things up even though they are not engineers. They are majoring in entrepreneurship, or they are majoring in finance.

(00:33:14):

In the spring, I teach a class on environmental sustainability, and that is just a joy. That class is looking at the world of things and how that relates to business. But yeah, I am lucky that we have a business school that wanted someone who thinks like a designer, and let me come in and work with these awesome students.

(00:33:34):

I think engineers need entrepreneurship, right? Engineering, we need to know how to implement our ideas. Entrepreneurship does not just mean making money, it means finding a need and finding purpose and how to bring ideas to reality. And I think there is a really rich space for opportunities working across those disciplines.

CW (00:33:58):

Does it also mean figuring out when something is not a good idea?

AT (00:34:03):

Oh, I love that. Yes. Figuring out when something is not a good idea. Like which ideas should you try, and then you give up on at some point? An example that I give my students often, I think many of your listeners are US based, so if you are trying to get to Mexico, you are trying to drive south. We are in Minnesota trying to drive south to Mexico, but your car is pointing towards Canada.

(00:34:25):

Even if you slow the car down, it is not going to help you out. You need to turn direction. There are some times when you just have to turn the car around. It does not matter if you slow down or speed up, you are going in the wrong direction. And learning how to do that is super important.

(00:34:37):

I am in the Twin Cities where we have lots of medical companies, and often we will have those employees come and help out in our classes. When I was a very young professor, I remember talking about the joys of the design process and iteration. One of these gentlemen from a medical company pulled me aside, and said, "The way you talk about iteration is not really accurate." He said, "You make it sound like iterating is this great thing. Iterating is good. However, iterating- You want to find problems as early as you can to save money. And building a full scale bridge to find out the design was wrong, it would have been nice if you could have figured that out in software."

(00:35:12):

So I think there is a nuance there, right, of how do you know when something is not going to work? And that is something that maybe was not my strongest suit when I was younger. I would bang at things a lot longer. I hope I have gotten better.

(00:35:28):

I hope this is one of the ways that I teach and I run my lab, is getting my students involved in as many projects as I can. Because I think it is through projects and experience, you learn what is going to work and what is not going to work, and some of those signs for when something is not going to work. It is a little bit more of an art than a science, figuring out that intuition.

EW (00:35:47):

I have a couple of more questions from Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, "What are your favorite things about working with undergraduates?"

AT (00:35:59):

My favorite thing about working with undergraduates is that for many of them, they do not have a lot of experience about how things are normally done in corporate, or design, et cetera, settings. So they dream bigger in many cases, I think, than we typically do after we have been working for a long time.

(00:36:22):

And they can really throw a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and all of the skills that they have by being new, typically young, into those projects. And that does not just mean energy. I think we forget sometimes that when we are growing up, everything is new. It is amazing the kids are not constantly overwhelmed by the world, because everything is new as you are growing up. And different. So you are constantly being thrust into new situations, by definition. Everything requires you to really do things that you have not done before. That mindset is incredible when you are working on projects.

(00:37:04):

I remember a project about five years ago. I ran into the lead singer from the rock band, OK Go. I was a fan, and we decided to start an education project together immediately, and we were suddenly filming projects with them. Within months we had launched a major website with education materials led by- In creation, led by these students who were 18 to 22 year olds, and coming out with lesson plans and testing them in classrooms.

(00:37:27):

I remember one of the funders of that project saying, "It should not be possible to do all of this in three months. This should not be possible." And I get that a lot. We have low expectations for young adults, I think, in what they can accomplish. And they are sometimes just the most amazing results, that they want to accomplish something, they want to do something. And they have not been told "No" as often as maybe those of us who are a bit older have been.

EW (00:37:55):

Yes, that optimism, that certainty you can do it, that ability to believe, and to get it done through belief. Yes, that is all very inspirational.

AT (00:38:10):

It is right, with the optimism. I wrote a book a few years ago and I interviewed- I was really intrigued by, particularly in the early days of the maker movement and Maker Faires, just some of the audacious projects that were happening. And people doing things that they had not been formally trained for. And the ability to just be persistent.

(00:38:27):

So I interviewed dozens of folks who create physical things, about their childhoods and about what they do. Honestly, one of the things that I think held true across almost all of them, besides of course persistence and some playfulness, was optimism. That you inherently, if you set out to build something, you think that you can figure it out.

(00:38:50):

If you are the kind of person that goes about assuming you can figure things out, that does not seem revolutionary to you. But there are a lot of people that see hard things and think, "Well, I could not do that." And so that optimism, that I can do something, I can learn this, I can make a change, is an incredibly powerful thing.

EW (00:39:08):

That makes sense. You are not going to make changes, if you do not believe you can.

AT (00:39:12):

Mm-hmm. And that is something if you look at history and you read a lot of history, we see that play out. Maybe we are even seeing that play out today in many realms.

EW (00:39:22):

One of the reasons reading science fiction is something I think is important, because it is the opposite. It is trying to think of all the different things that could happen, and just thinking that they could, means that they can.

AT (00:39:36):

I just proposed a class, an engineering class, where you had to read science fiction stories throughout it, because yeah, you have to learn. This is one of the things with engineering, I always ask students, well, I often ask students, why they became an engineering major. Quite a few of them will say, "Well, I am good at math and science, and my teachers told me I should do that." That is a valid answer, but I do not think it is all of it.

(00:39:58):

I really think that engineering and particularly engineering design, those are tools. If you wanted to be a novelist, and you memorize the dictionary and all the rules of grammar, that would not mean that you would write the next great novel. It would just mean that you knew the words to use, once you got an idea. But the ideas have to come from somewhere.

(00:40:16):

And I think engineering and design are very similar, in that you can learn all the physics, and you can learn all the calculus, and you can be really good at chemistry. But those textbooks do not have the ideas that lead to safer transportation, and clean water, and all of the things that have hopefully changed lives for the better. Math and physics alone, do not do that. You need something else that you apply the tools of math and physics and science and English, et cetera, to.

(00:40:48):

If we just focus on the core classes and experiences, we are not giving kids the tools to dream up the things that they then want to apply those tools to. And I think you are completely right, Elecia, that it is science fiction, it is stories, it is taking a walk, gets the history class.

(00:41:04):

I am incredibly fortunate that I teach at a liberal arts school. Every one of my engineering students has to take foreign languages, has to take philosophy, has to take history, has to take art. I could keep going. And I think that is incredible. I think it is not just nice, I think it is essential. Because you need to learn how to dream big, and how to come up with new ideas, and what better place the literature to inspire some of those. I am an avid reader, so I am there with you.

CW (00:41:32):

I have a comment and then a question. The comment is what you are describing about just not synthesizing all of this, the dictionary and such and facts and figures, and then expecting ideas to come out, is exactly why I am not impressed by large language models. So thank you. Thank you for-

EW (00:41:51):

<laugh> Got to get that dig in.

AT (00:41:52):

Oh, I would love to have that conversation with you, Christopher. I think there is a lot- Yes, I have an education comment on ChatGPT. If you want to ask me, I will give it. I can get into that.

CW (00:42:03):

The second question, have you already come up with the reading list for the science fiction class?

EW (00:42:08):

Oh, no. We could just have another show right now.

AT (00:42:11):

No, it was a thought exercise, the class. I do not think the class is coming anytime soon, so everyone should send me the stories that they think that engineering students should read. I would love to hear those.

(00:42:23):

I am a huge fan of the writings of Mary Robinette Kowal, who wrote "The Calculating Stars," but she has also written- I worked in a research lab, but I was doing my PhD. I did not work on the project, but other people in the lab worked on brain computer interfaces. Something that has come close to home, as I have lost two friends to ALS. She wrote a very thought provoking and kind of chilling story, about brain computer interfaces and locked-in syndrome.

(00:42:52):

I think authors such as Mary Robinette and so many others- I am looking at my desk right now, and the best book I have read this year is "The Mountain in the Sea" by Ray Nayler. Incredible. I cannot recommend it enough. It is about AI, it is about cephalopods. These stories make you-

CW (00:43:07):

What? How do you not know about this book?

EW (00:43:10):

How have I not read this book?

CW (00:43:11):

<laugh> Cephalopods, she has read every book about cephalopods.

AT (00:43:15):

Oh, everyone. I have given Ray's book to over 20 people at this point. Man, it is- I bought a bulk order and I have been shipping them, after I read it, because it is credible. And a side note I will say is, I have some friends who are blind and I wanted to gift the book to them. And if you read "The Mountain in the Sea," you will see that- Literally you will see, that symbols make- They are quite important in the story. And I actually asked Ray, I called Ray and asked Ray how that was handled in the audio book, because I wanted to give it to a blind astronomer. He had a great answer, that they had thought of it very thoughtfully and it was not an afterthought.

(00:43:51):

Stories like that just make me think through what technology and science and what humans can be. I know it is sometimes a badge of pride for people, particularly in engineering, to say that they read nonfiction, "I do not read fiction." I think it is very sad when people tell me that they will not read fiction, they do not have time for it. Because I think we need those bursts of inspiration. We need those bursts of ideas. And it is different than your textbooks. I would argue that reading stories is just as important to being a designer, as learning the tools.

EW (00:44:27):

I see. It is a new book. It is full price. That is why I have not read it yet. And our library is not open yet. Another few months and our library will reopen.

AT (00:44:36):

Ooh.

EW (00:44:38):

Okay. Sorry. I am so excited about the book, cephalopod, AI, it is so-

AT (00:44:46):

It is incredible! I got it because it had a cephalopod. It had an octopus on the cover and I researched- Part of my PhD was researching how octopi and other sea creatures, cetaceans, swim. Not cetaceans-

EW (00:44:59):

Cephalopods.

AT (00:45:00):

Yeah, cephalopods. I did cetacean swimming in college research, but grad school, it was cephalopods. I just thought the cover was beautiful, and I was not sure what I was getting into. Before I had even finished it, I had ordered 20 copies to send to friends. That is how good it is, particularly I think with a lot of our discussions right now about AI and humanity and environmental science. Just incredible book.

EW (00:45:24):

Have you read Sy Montgomery's "Soul of an Octopus"?

AT (00:45:28):

I have not, but I am now writing it down as I talk, and I am going to read that.

EW (00:45:32):

It is nonfiction, but it feels fiction in the depth she goes into, to talk about cephalopod intelligence, and how would we even recognize such an alien form of intelligence?

AT (00:45:44):

Okay, so you are perfectly set up to read "The Mountain in the Sea." That is kind of at the crux of it. I should be clear that I am a fan of reading all things fiction and nonfiction, so I have stacks, much to the chagrin of my partner. My poor husband would love my library to go fully Kindle, but I love having books around me.

EW (00:46:05):

I am pretty good with the electronic, because I like to have all of the books around me all of the time. But that is why I do not pay full price.

AT (00:46:13):

I think I am a very spatial learner, and I love the physicality of books. So I can remember where on a page, and how far in my hand was on something.

EW (00:46:21):

Yeah. Books, books, books. You mentioned writing a book. Was that "Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation"?

AT (00:46:35):

<pause> Oh, yes, that is the book, yes.

EW (00:46:36):

<laugh>

CW (00:46:36):

She was worried there for a second.

EW (00:46:39):

I was kind of worried.

AT (00:46:41):

Yeah, that is the book. I have been fortunate, as we have kind of hit on, I never know what is coming next. So there has been a lot of- I love, I so respect editors and authors. And yeah, so the longest book I have ever written, I guess, is "Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation." Many of your guests, past guests, I think are some of the people that I have interviewed in it. Such a joy to hear their stories.

EW (00:47:05):

You mentioned being a reader, and I always get the idea that the people who become makers and engineers, tend to be the ones who take apart their toys. And the telephones and everything around them. But I was never that kid. I was read all the time, anything I could get my hands on, but never took apart my toys, then they would be gone.

AT (00:47:29):

You were in good company. Many of the interviews I did were folks that read a lot, some people took things apart, some people built things. Lots of people read stories. I remember Danny Hillis talked a lot about the books that he read, and he has done some pretty interesting forward-thinking things since then.

(00:47:49):

Actually, we mentioned underwater robotics early on, and one of my mentors, Paul McGill, who is with Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, incredible builder of robots. But as a kid, he read lots of books, loved books about adventure. Actually convinced his teachers in, I think it was fourth grade, that instead of writing a book report on one of the books that was about an explorer in the Arctic, he was allowed to instead build a working model with a little flickering light and everything, which was pretty advanced making at that age.

EW (00:48:20):

I thought you were going to say he convinced his teacher to let him go to the Arctic, but that really did not make sense at fourth grade.

AT (00:48:26):

Oh, no, it did not. But actually that is one of my favorite stories, is Paul McGill who is an electrical engineer at MBARI. It was a diorama that he built based on the book "Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure." What I love about Paul, when I wrote the book, I did not even know the story, but I put him in a chapter on resourcefulness, and I asked him to send me a picture that I could have published in the book with the publisher.

(00:48:48):

He sent me a picture of him and some other engineers in Antarctica with a robot that they were sending down, a remotely operated vehicle. And it got some great data. And the more I looked at the picture, the more I realized that the robot did not look that impressive to me. The robot looked really scrappy and not the kind of thing that you would send to Antarctica, which it was very expensive to work on.

(00:49:12):

I asked him about it, and it is named "The Phoenix." And I thought this was an add a picture later to the book at the end, but it actually ended up being part of the book. Because what it turned out was that when Paul- This little boy who dreamt of going to the Arctic, and who was a tinkerer, and loved to figure out how to build things. Him and his incredible team went to the Antarctic, which is very expensive, and they also do not have Amazon deliveries there.

(00:49:34):

The ROV that they have brought on the research mission went under the ice and did not come back. You are paying a lot of money every day, and you have got scientists, and they are all really frustrated. What do you do in that case? Well, what you do is you have Paul and others go around the building and find what you can find. Spare underwater cameras and thrusters and maybe some backup electronics.

(00:49:54):

They actually built a new ROV that they titled "The Phoenix," that swam under the Antarctic ice, and got the data that MBARI needed. The stories like that, I love that ingenuity and that persistence. That was a little boy who, well, he did take things apart, but he was right with you reading everything he could get as hands on.

EW (00:50:16):

So this book was published almost a decade ago.

AT (00:50:20):

I feel old.

EW (00:50:21):

Sorry.

AT (00:50:22):

That is okay. I teach undergrads. I feel old every day.

EW (00:50:26):

Is there anything you would change now? The maker movement has changed in the last decade. Is it?

AT (00:50:30):

Oh, the maker movement has changed immensely. I consider myself really lucky that I got to be there for a lot of the early days. Squishy Circuits was early on. And I spent a year leading Maker Education Initiative, which was a nonprofit that was out doing a lot of work, and working with schools and libraries.

(00:50:47):

Would I change anything? Well, I mean, I think anyone who writes a book would always want to change a few things, but I think at its heart, I stand by everything I said. The preface talks a bit about the maker movement, as we might describe it historically, but the mindset I think is pretty evergreen. It was my attempt at figuring out what that would be. But I said, here are the things that make a maker. And I said, it is curiosity, it is playfulness, it is risk, it is responsibility, it is persistence, it is resourcefulness, it is generosity, it is optimism.

(00:51:19):

I think I would stand by all of those things, whether we call it "making," does not really matter to me. What matters to me is that we give kids, that we empower kids, that we empower children, to not wait until they are older, to try to figure out who they want to be in the world. And how they can make a mark literally or figuratively. And really trusting them and letting them do things.

(00:51:45):

A lot of makers, if they wanted to read, they were allowed to read. If they wanted to build stuff, they built stuff. But they did things that today we might consider, "Oh, you can do that when you are older. A child is too young to do that." I remember I came across a toy that was called, I will not name it, but a toy that was a construction toy for kids. It prided itself on how it was not dangerous, because the tools were all plastic and foam. But if you look historically, kids have been building stuff with real tools from kindergarten on. If we look at John Dewey and the Chicago Laboratory School, they were building their own clubhouses at like ten.

(00:52:21):

I think while maybe where the maker movement was going changed a little bit, I think the heart of it has not changed. And I think that is partially because it is part of a long tradition. The maker movement gave a name to something, gave a name and a community, to something that I think has been, as long as there have been humans.

EW (00:52:44):

That brings up another question from Lenore, "What communities do you feel connected to or part of?" and "What is important to you about those communities?"

AT (00:52:53):

That is a really hard question.

EW (00:52:54):

It really, really is!

AT (00:52:58):

It is a really hard question, because as an educator and as someone who does the work I do, I was really amused to find out that people really consider me an extrovert. And the truth of the matter is I am actually very much an introvert, but I know when it is important to- I have theater training, and I know when it is important to be a little bigger and to be on stages, but it takes a lot out of me. So finding communities is really hard for me.

(00:53:24):

I value the friendships that I have, because I do not go out very much. In fact, I have learned to build the communities that I feel comfortable in, and find folks that I can be with that way. And an example of that, is that I was given a gift of an evening out, theater and dinner with a bunch of other people, over a decade ago. I wanted to send a thank you to the person who did it, but they had just sold a company.

(00:53:49):

I mean really what could give them that they did not have, or if they wanted it, they would have bought it. So how to come up with something? What can I give to someone who really could have anything? And it was people and it was community. So I decided I was going to start a book club and we would do it online 15 years ago. And then I realized that the friends I have, probably would just not find time to read the book, and then would fake it. And then what is the point of the book club?

EW (00:54:12):

That is why we do poetry.

AT (00:54:15):

So we changed it, and I called it a "Salon," and I did it with a co-host. And I said to this co-host, I said, "We are going to invite our friend who gifted us this wonderful evening. But I want you to come up with a list of five people that you know well, that you want to know better and you think I should know. And I will come up with a list too."

(00:54:30):

So in November, we sent an email to about 12 people and we said, "We would like to invite you to a Salon for the year. And what that means is that for 90 minutes, once a month, we are all going to join online." I forget, we were probably using Google Meets at the time. "We are going to join online. And you have to commit that you are going to come to all of them. We know you are going to travel once in a while, but you have to really commit to this. And you have to commit that you are going to host once. And when it is your time to host, you need to mail a package to everybody else in Salon, and we will not open it until that evening."

(00:55:00):

So once a month, this community where no one really knew each other, except for the two co-hosts who knew half of the group, each would get together. Perhaps an editor would have sent a paper that we all read and edited, and then talked about how we edited. Or maybe someone would send some LEDs and batteries. Or maybe someone would send a food sampler and we would taste different chocolates and talk about them. There was a biologist who sent a mouse and scalpel-

CW (00:55:23):

Oh, God!

AT (00:55:23):

We did not have rules against that. Everyone had their turn to share and to teach. At the end, we would have a gift exchange. The last session was usually right before the new year, and we would have a gift exchange where you send a gift to everybody. This was an interesting community, in that I set a rule that it had to end after 12 months and people would always want to extend them.

(00:55:45):

In fact, one group went rogue and extended it without me, but I would not condone extending them. This was a 12 month experiment. And then everyone should go start their own Salon with someone else from that group. Some people have done that, and taken one of the people that they met through Salon and started their own yearlong experiment, of people gathering once a month for 90 minutes and mailing out packages and building something together or tasting something together.

(00:56:05):

So that was one community that I loved and that Salon, I think we have done over ten years of that. I would have to go back and look at my list, but I got to meet these new people. I would always have a co-host and basically say, "I am shy. Who should I meet?" And they would invite their people and I would invite my people, and it just kept working. And I could do it in my pajamas from my house.

(00:56:24):

Other communities that I am part of that I really appreciate is, I always say I am a professor who aspires to be a teacher. I have nothing but the respect and awe of folks who teach, particularly at the K-12 level. And so I am incredibly fortunate that I get to spend a lot of time on projects with educators, and get to know them and have them as my friends.

(00:56:48):

Yeah, I think those are- Communities are kind of what you make them. And I think being part of that and being around people and intergenerational is what I aspire to. That is what is important to me. But I also am an introvert, so I love my books.

EW (00:57:02):

Our book club moved to short stories and poetry, because we admitted that we were not likely to finish books.

AT (00:57:08):

I love that.

EW (00:57:09):

I do get some of that. But as you went to different Salons in different years, did you invite the same people yourself?

AT (00:57:19):

No, never. No. So the deal, I made the rules and stuck to them. They have changed a little pandemic, but it would be me and a co-host and we worked together. We put together a group of ten, and each co-host should only know half of them. And then at the end of the year, I would allow myself to ask one person in that group to start the next one, and hopefully other people paired off too. So no, I did not get to repeat the same group of people. So now I have got dozens of new friends, thanks to that.

EW (00:57:43):

But that would mean you had to start out with more than 50 people you knew, if you did this over ten years and five people per year.

AT (00:57:51):

Yeah, well, people I know. But the crick was, if they are my best friends, I should not invite them.

EW (00:57:55):

Ahh. Okay.

AT (00:57:55):

So these should be people that I want to know better. Sometimes there were people that I really did not know. They were people that I- Actually, one person was a teacher who- Someone canceled right before, something happened. They were like, "You know what? I cannot make this commitment." And so I just went on, well at the time, Twitter which I used to be on, and said, "Is anyone free in the next hour? And if so, DM. And interested in-" I forget what I wrote, but "DM me." And this amazing teacher from Philadelphia wrote. They were an integral part of Salon for that year.

EW (00:58:24):

I noticed on Mastodon that you are not finding the transition to be good. That Twitter was better for you than Mastodon is.

AT (00:58:35):

I mean, that could just be me. I had just sunk everything into Twitter with my place, and I met so many people and I had followers, and there were discussions. Yeah, I am still learning on Mastodon. It takes time to learn a new tool. And I do not know that I have the time, so hopefully. Hopefully I will find my way on Mastodon. I am trying.

EW (00:58:53):

I have not been as engaged, and so I do not know whether the lack of community there is due to my own lack of engagement. But Chris, you have had better luck. You say that you are a lot more engaged on Mastodon.

CW (00:59:06):

Yeah, I do not know. I see a lot of people who say similar things like, "This is not working for me." I followed a whole bunch of people. When I started, I followed a whole bunch of hashtags. So it was like, "Oh, let us follow astrophotography and bird photos and music and drums," and whatever I was interested in. So I followed a bunch of hashtags to start with, and that brought in a lot of people who I did not know who talked about those topics, and then I would follow them.

(00:59:30):

But I follow a lot more people than I did on Twitter. On Twitter I usually followed about a hundred people, and I think I had a few thousand followers. Now I follow probably 500, three, four or 500 people. And so there is more stuff going on. It is a different place. I think also people with large followings and big interactions, you are starting over. You might pull some people over, but-

AT (00:59:56):

For me, that is what it is. I think it is not the platform, it is me.

CW (01:00:00):

Yeah. And it is years and years of building that community on Twitter. And now it is, "Okay, I want that immediately on Mastodon," but it is hard to build. But it is a different place in some ways. And some of the people I used to interact with are not there, and I have had to replace them with new people <laugh>.

EW (01:00:16):

I guess I have had more luck with hashtags, than I ever did with Twitter. But then sometimes those get dirtied with junk posts. But mostly I think it is my engagement. I think that in order to find the community I had before, I have to post more and wait for things to trickle out, and then follow the people who are following me, to find them. It is not finding people.

CW (01:00:38):

But it is funny, because many of the people you followed are there, so I do not know. But there is no obligation to do it either.

EW (01:00:47):

Well, the good thing about those communities, those big public communities, is that it is public facing. And you can talk to- I want to say strangers, but the whole internet is strangers. To strangers who you might have things in common with.

CW (01:01:02):

Right. <laugh> The flip side is they can talk to you.

EW (01:01:04):

That is the flip side. I am sorry, AnnMarie <laugh>.

AT (01:01:09):

No, I am learning. Yeah, I am trying to decide how I feel about social media. I loved that we could just go on things, once you have invested years in it. So Twitter, you could go on and I could get feedback right away. I just have to find the energy. I am a little busy right now. I am also a mom. I am like, "All right, I just need to commit to a platform and put the time in." I just have not managed to convince myself to do it yet.

EW (01:01:32):

I totally understand. I have one more question for you.

AT (01:01:37):

Sure.

EW (01:01:40):

This is maybe me being envious. You talked about the Lagrange point, and tying people up and making them spin around until they barf. Although I do not think that is how you phrased it.

CW (01:01:53):

You are paraphrasing this interestingly. <laugh>

AT (01:01:56):

It was not how I phrased it. There was no vomiting. If the university's lawyer or safety officers are listening, there was no vomiting.

EW (01:02:03):

And while you were talking about that, I was thinking about Kerbal Space Program, because that is also a fun way to learn some of the physics, that does not involve undergrads spinning around. But for the most part, kids get to learn things in a playful learning manner. We want them to be engaged. We spend a lot of time figuring out how to educate them so that they are amused and educated and interested and curious, enthusiastic and all those things.

(01:02:33):

But then when I have to learn something, it is like, "Step one, find the Lagrange point. Step two, create a matrix. Step three, I do not care anymore!" How do we- Is there any impetus- Is there anybody thinking about how to make adults have more fun with playful learning? And does the definition of "play" change, as you think about adults versus kids?

AT (01:03:08):

Oh, I do not know if the definition changes. I think our attitudes towards it change. We say, "Okay, stop playing around and get to work." That is a phrase we hear people say. I have even caught myself saying it a few times, unfortunately. We have prioritized what we call "work" over what we call "play." But I would argue that so many aspects of play could actually help you work better. Particularly if you are in a space where you are creating new things, that play can be a tool.

(01:03:38):

I have gotten to go to many companies and work with them, on what is play and how do we use it? And how do we use it to design? I think it is this false sense that growing up means that you have to get serious, and that play should go away.

(01:03:56):

It is interesting, even in the museum world sometimes, I have heard people- Some museums that are doing amazing work, and parents will say things like, "Oh, well, the kids are just playing around. They are not learning anything. This used to have more content." And that is not really how we learn.

(01:04:09):

I mentioned the Lego Foundation, and I love the research they have been championing from around the world on what it means to play and what it means to learn. It is a false assumption that now that you and I are older, that we should learn differently. Everyone learns differently, and some people love-

(01:04:26):

I did not exercise once at a conference, where I asked people to tell me their most meaningful learning experience. It was an hour and a half, and I told people that they were not allowed to comment on each other's. We just were going to listen to everyone's story. And lots of people told stories like things like circus, or we talk about, or doing something really active.

(01:04:42):

But there was one gentleman who said, "I love being in a large lecture hall and listening to a professor lecture, and watching them write on the board. And that is how I learned best." And a lot of people were shocked by that. I think actually that is beautiful. That is why we have such a diverse world and so many cool things. Because everyone learns differently. And everyone acts differently. And play looks different for many different people.

(01:05:04):

The play is about process, more so than outcome. Play is about choice. Play is about other people. The shorthand that I use in my lab, we are looking at anything, be it creating a class, or creating a workshop, or teaching a concept. My shorthand checklist, I literally write it down, are four things that I try to integrate into anything I am doing. Whether I am teaching adults, whether I am teaching my kids, anyone.

(01:05:29):

It is, where is joy? How do we make people smile? Where is the whimsy? How can we just be a little bit ridiculous? Where is the surprise? Where is something unexpected? So maybe it is not surprising that I have fallen for magic, because it is all about surprise and wonder. And then the last one is new people. You can play by yourself, but most play involves other people.

(01:05:53):

And those four elements, I do not care if I am designing a lesson for a five-year-old, or I am designing a lesson for a 95 year old. I want to make them smile. I want to make them a little surprised. It is not just surprised for surprise sake. It changes how you are learning things. When you are surprised, you are suddenly more alert.

(01:06:17):

I think play, we do not outgrow. I know we do not outgrow play, and I hope we do not expect people to outgrow play.

CW (01:06:23):

I think too, it is kind of hard, because there are certain things that play lends itself easier to. Your example of doing Lagrangian mechanics was interesting to me, because that is starting to get to the point where the mathematics is getting more abstract, a little more difficult. I was thinking of things like, "Okay, how would I apply this to, say, undergraduate or early graduate quantum mechanics? Which is a lot of math, a lot of symbols and stuff, and not a lot of things you can play <laugh> with, except on paper."

EW (01:06:54):

Not a lot of intuition, either.

CW (01:06:56):

Not a lot of intuition.

AT (01:06:58):

Yeah, but we can also be playful in our approach to it.

CW (01:07:00):

Yeah.

AT (01:07:00):

And again, if we are thinking about it like joy, it is something as simple as- I for a long time was running play dates before the pandemic for teachers, and I always brought food. I always brought cookies. I always brought some gluten-free ones also. And it was just about that moment of like, okay, they were kind of surprised that I brought food and was not charging for it, and we could just eat something silly. Just changing that approach, that this does not have to be a serious place. We can still learn new things, hard things, even if we laugh or we smile.

(01:07:36):

I have to confess, I have not completely read it yet, but a new book has just came out recently, that I have sitting here in front of me called "Sparking Creativity: How Play and Humor Fuel Innovation and Design." It is by Barry Kudrowitz who is a professor of design, who really focuses on humor, and bringing that into the innovation process.

(01:08:00):

I think these are all tools. I am not a very funny person. I do not really tell many joke, but if that is the way that you can bring some joy and surprise and whimsy to people, that is playful. And I think it is finding what works for different audiences. To me, play is about humans and it is about connecting with people.

(01:08:15):

Whether we are teaching matrices, whether we are teaching history, how can we remember that we are not- We are not teaching those things. We are not teaching history. We are teaching humans about history. We are teaching 18 year olds about quantum mechanics. And keeping play in mind, reminds us to remember that we are humans first.

CW (01:08:41):

I had a professor- To hear you talk about how to integrate some sense of playfulness. He would always remind us, as he was up there on the board, scrawling symbols and mathematics and things, that really doing physics, we are all wizards. Because we are all up here scrawling these arcane things on the whiteboard, to manipulate or understand how the universe works, and these are all casting spells. It was an interesting way to reframe things, that I always liked.

AT (01:09:11):

And that frame matters. The way you frame it, changes how you receive it.

EW (01:09:15):

It absolutely does.

AT (01:09:17):

And I think some of the sad things about STEM education, honestly, is that we have pushed so many kids towards it. It is this great field, but then they get to college, and historically, and this is changing, but historically, your professors who are teaching at universities, who are teaching particularly STEM topics like engineering or math or physics, they have a PhD in those topics, which we know they need to learn it, but they maybe have never ever learned how to teach.

CW (01:09:44):

Yeah. <laugh>

AT (01:09:44):

And many graduate programs, the focus is not on ever learning to teach. And of course, you would be being taught by someone who never studied pedagogy or psychology or assessment. The focus is on the research, and being a good researcher does not mean you are going to be a good teacher.

(01:10:07):

We then give people grades on these topics, and those grades can destroy us. I was not a, in quotes, "good student." My GPA in grad school was a 2.8. I could not have worked any harder. Thanks to teachers showing the grades on the board, I know exactly how low I was compared to everyone else. I would retake things as needed and I would try to understand them.

(01:10:29):

If the class involved building something, I got an A. If it did not involve a project, I did not get an A, and probably not a B. But I put a lot of judgment on myself based on getting that grade, that C. And stepping back, now that I am older, I was getting a C from someone who probably had never been taught what a C was, versus a B, versus an A, really from a pedagogy or learning objective standpoint. And yet it could have really broken me, and it did at times as a student. So I think that always worries me.

(01:10:58):

There is a great book called "The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America," that came out a few years ago. It is true. It sort of is amateur hour in a lot of ways. Thankfully learning science and pedagogy is being pushed to the forefront by a lot of universities, including my own.

(01:11:17):

But it is not the same training. If you are a K-12 student, if you were at a public school in the US, you have a teacher who is a, in most cases of course there are exceptions, accredited teacher who has studied pedagogy. And it was in learning circles, and has worked on these things, and gotten a degree in this.

(01:11:34):

That is different when you go to college, when you are this young adult trying to prove yourself. It can be really damaging to go into a class, where you are told that you are not cut out for this.

EW (01:11:44):

That would be. I totally- Pedagogy, I actually concentrated, minored in theories of learning and that. Those classes kind of broke my brain on the other classes I was taking. It was kind of like, "Come on!"

CW (01:12:05):

"You are all teaching this incorrectly." <laugh>

EW (01:12:07):

This set of teachers tells me how to teach, and then I watch you people and I wonder what you are doing, because it is not what they said that you should be doing. Yes. And the idea that we teach pedagogy and how to teach, to high school teachers, but for college professors, it is like, "Well, while you have been through enough years, did not you pick it up?" Is not really the right answer.

AT (01:12:33):

Yep. That is honestly why I am glad I am on sabbatical. Teaching is exhausting, because we are at any level, but I would also say especially at college in the US, we know how much money is being spent by the typical family to go to college. Wow. It is a big responsibility to be a professor. You have the ability to make a huge impact, positive or negative or none, on someone who could be anything five years from now.

(01:13:01):

It is why I do not have graduate students. I have had a few graduate students over the years, art history, I think they were all art history or education. But most of my students are undergraduates for a variety of majors. It is because I want to show them that it is okay to make mistakes. It is okay the projects do not work out. And that they can do these things.

(01:13:18):

I am so proud of these young adults and the work they do, but it is scary. It is terrifying. Even in my forties, if I teach this class, I could convince someone that they might love this field. But I could also just as easily convince them that they do not belong here, they are not welcome. And that could be it, that could be the end of that person pursuing that topic. I do not know that enough folks are scared about the power that we wield as teachers. It is daunting to me at times.

CW (01:13:46):

That almost happened to me, but then I got really mad, and went back and got a degree in the thing I hated.

EW (01:13:53):

<laugh> Yes, Christopher, why did you get a physics degree?

CW (01:13:55):

Guess I was so mad about undergraduate physics. So mad.

AT (01:14:01):

I am lucky in that I always had bad grades. I even got a "unacceptable in handwriting" in kindergarten or first grade. And I am one of the most avid readers I know, but I was in the Rocket reading group in first grade, which as we probably could all guess, means that I could not read to save my life, and they were trying to inspire us. But even now, I am a student at Gallaudet, and I have had to repeat a couple of my classes.

(01:14:22):

I think I learn a lot slower than most people around me and always have. But I became comfortable with the idea that if I do not learn it the first time, maybe I can learn it the second time. And that does not mean that I should never do this. I have learned that that is not necessarily how everyone approaches the world. I am incredibly fortunate that my parents instilled that, that I was not a failure if I literally failed a class, I just had to do it again.

CW (01:14:45):

Yeah, that is a super important lesson that I think many, many people do not understand. It is like, "Oh, this just is not for me, if I cannot do it the first time." Or think it is about them, and not perhaps the way it was taught. But yeah, people can learn things. Sometimes it just takes a little longer.

EW (01:15:06):

And sometimes it is harder for one person than another. It does not mean that either one is better.

CW (01:15:12):

And maybe taking twice as long means you know it better <laugh>.

EW (01:15:16):

Yes. Or that you can teach it better, because you understand all of the cul-de-sacs.

CW (01:15:20):

Pitfalls, yeah.

AT (01:15:21):

Yeah. I would be very worried of a teacher who has only ever gotten 4.0s. I want teachers who know what it is like not to understand something.

EW (01:15:30):

I feel like asking you for a final thought is kind of redundant after that, because that was pretty good. But do you have any thoughts you would like to leave us with?

AT (01:15:37):

That is a hard one. I think the biggest thing I have learned is that no one really has all the answers, and that we are all just doing the best we can. And to look for those people that you can help along the way, and be very grateful for the ones that are helping you. We do not know how long we have got those people around. So look for those friends, look for those helpers, and make sure they know how much you appreciate them.

EW (01:16:01):

Our guest has been AnnMarie Thomas, Professor of Engineering and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas. Check out her book "Making Makers" at a bookstore near you. And of course, there will be links in the show notes.

CW (01:16:15):

Thanks, Professor Thomas.

AT (01:16:16):

Thanks for having me.

EW (01:16:18):

Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Lenore and Windell of the Evil Mad Scientists Laboratories for the connection. Thank you to the Patreon listener Slack group for supporting us with cash and questions. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show@embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm.

(01:16:41):

And now a quote from Fred Rogers. "Play is often talked about as if it was a relief from serious things. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

(01:17:01):

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elecia White. Here- <laugh>

CW (01:17:09):

Eerrrh!

EW (01:17:10):

<laugh> I could not remember your name. I am sorry.

CW (01:17:12):

<laugh> You could not remember my name? Wow!