If you want to prepare a generation of children for a changing world, change the toys they play with.
Hello! To the Boys and Girls of America. The Gilbert Hall of Science is yours from this hour on. For me it is a dream come true—for you I hope it will be an inspiration, a guiding line in the middle of that seldom smooth road which leads the young and struggling engineer, chemist, railroad builder, scientist, research worker … to studying and learning, ever striving, that success at the end of the road is the only true success. Every student and builder who works for the sake of humanity finds in the end that he has worked mightily for himself, too.
Alfred Carlton Gilbert published this welcome message in 1941 at the opening of the Gilbert Hall of Science, a multistory showcase of toys located in New York City at Twenty-Fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. Gilbert was born in Salem, Oregon, in 1884 and had gone east to get a medical degree at Yale that he never used. He was interested in three things, he said: “athletics, sleight-of-hand, and scientific experiments.” He won the pole vault in the 1908 Olympics, tying for the gold medal, after inventing a better pole as well as the pole vault box that caught the pole and secured it for the pole vaulter to rise in the air. (Before that, the pole had a spike at the end of it that dug into the ground.) Gilbert’s first company was Mysto Magic, which created a series of magic kits, a business that was barely profitable. Then, while making frequent train trips from New Haven, Connecticut, to New York City, he was inspired by the steel girder construction of skyscrapers and bridges to create a new kind of educational toy, the Erector Set. He began producing the first sets in 1913, and they became an immediate success.
The Erector Set was one of the central toys of my childhood. It took its place alongside the other great American toys of the age: Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs. All were developed around the second decade of the twentieth century, and became very significant construction-based learning sets. Between 1913 and 1966, thirty million Erector Sets were sold in the United States. The Erector Set’s decline followed Gilbert’s death in 1961 and the bankruptcy of the A. C. Gilbert Company in 1967.
The popularity of the Erector Set spanned the technological era from the Ford Model T and the electrification of America to the age of aerospace, and the Erector Set evolved to keep pace with these developments. It reflected the optimistic, can-do spirit of the American Century, of a society that was rapidly gaining new abilities to solve problems and do ambitious projects because of science and technology. The Erector Set was an invitation for children to participate in that future—and do work with their own hands.
The Erector Set box was filled with steel girders, a small battery-powered motor, and the parts to make wheels and pulleys. Erector Sets were available in versions numbered 0 to 8. The higher the number, the more pieces there were. These kits contained the parts to build specific models such as a train bridge or a Ferris wheel. In the 1920s, the number 8 Erector Set cost $70 and weighed a staggering 150 pounds; it included all the parts to build a five-foot zeppelin.
The Erector Set was an ideal toy for the ideal American boy, whom Gilbert defined as competitive, clever, and curious, just like him. Perhaps the first to create advertising that appealed directly to boys, Gilbert spoke to them as a friend and mentor, characteristically opening his ads with the greeting “Hello Boys.” His slogans for the Erector Set included “Young Boy’s Paradise,” “1,000 Toys in 1,” and “World’s Greatest Toy.” Today, Gilbert’s American boy seems a little homogenous and corny, like a Norman Rockwell painting, but we still recognize him in ourselves and in our children—the girls too.
Historian Bruce Watson’s biography of A. C. Gilbert, The Man Who Changed How Boys and Toys Were Made, claims that Gilbert was not merely the inventor of the Erector Set; he transformed the image of the American boy from problem child to problem solver, from delinquent to constructive contributor. The Gilbert Hall of Science was not only a place but an idea: that if you give children the right tools, or toys, they will educate themselves.
We never quite let go of the toys we played with as kids. I enjoy asking makers about the toys of their childhood. Makers remember talking bears, bubble blowers, toy boats, racers, robots, and View-Master 3-D slides, all of which inspired them to see the world differently, as something they could shape, mold, shrink, and hack.
“I loved Shrinky Dinks as a kid,” exclaimed Michelle Khine, a biomedical engineering professor I met at a weekend summer camp for scientists called SciFoo. Michelle explained how Shrinky Dinks inspired her to come up with a new nanoscale process that led to her start-up, Shrink Nanotechnologies. By creating a design at larger scale and then shrinking it down, Michelle was able to find a simple and inexpensive method of making microfluidic channels for what she calls a “lab on a chip.” Her early prototypes were printed out on a laser printer and then baked in a toaster oven. One use of this process was to create saliva-based assays for infectious diseases.
Arduino cofounder Massimo Banzi, introduced in chapter 5, learned electronics through the Braun Lectron kit, a German-made electronics kit that used magnetic blocks to build circuits and connect other components. Many people fondly remember the Radio Shack 150-in-One Electronic Project Kit, which was like a large game board that used springs as connectors. Craig Smith of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, writes on the Make: blog: “I was one of the lucky kids that received a Radio Shack Science Fair 150-in-One Electronic Project Kit on Christmas morning. I spent hours making the different projects, such as sound effects, radio, and light experiments.” He said that he is in the process of recreating this beloved kit in wood as a work of art.
I once enjoyed a fancy dinner prepared by The Cooking Lab’s Nathan Myhrvold and Maxime Bilet, authors of the epic cookbook, Modernist Cuisine at Home. The book is an impressive effort to understand and explain the science of cooking and how to use such knowledge to develop new techniques and recipes. The Cooking Lab team works in a kitchen inside a machine shop inside an R&D lab in Seattle. For this dinner, there were more cooks busily preparing the meal than people eating it. One of the last courses was Nathan’s take on Gummi Worms, which were made from a gel infused with olive oil, vanilla, and thyme. The gel was poured into a mold used for making commercial fishing lures. Eating them was a delight, turning us into kids dangling wiggly worms above our mouths. It reminded me of food-making toys like Incredible Edibles, a 1960s-era Mattel toy whose secret ingredient was called Gobble Degoop. I remember dozens of molds for making insects with frightening appendages, all of which you could eat.
One maker who looks at toys for his parts is José Gómez-Márquez, director of the Innovations in International Health Lab at MIT. He has been rethinking the design and deployment of medical devices in developing countries. According to José, most of the medical equipment comes to these countries secondhand from developed nations. Often, the conditions in the field require that practitioners customize or hack these devices to make them work. In addition, it can be difficult to find replacement parts and make repairs.
“When you need a part, you don’t have access to McMaster-Carr or any parts supplier,” he said. “Yet there’s an amazing supply chain for toys, so you can find them everywhere.” Going to a toy store might be the best option to find a part. “From a toy helicopter, I can find a rack and pinion system.” José takes a DIY approach to medical equipment for developing countries, designing kits with parts for creating devices that can easily be adapted to field conditions.
At the Exploratorium’s Tinkering Studio in San Francisco, Karen Wilkinson and Mike Petrich have organized workshops on toy dissection that invite children and adults to examine what’s going on inside their store-bought toys. They set out a collection of toys along with a variety of hand tools such as scissors and handsaws. Then, without much direction, participants are encouraged to rip, cut and snap open these toys. Talking plush animals and dolls, as well as plastic noisemakers like a Speak & Spell, can reveal a circuit board, speakers, and even sensors. Once you have identified and isolated these components, you can put them together in new ways, creating a new toy from components harvested from old toys. If you want to try this at home and don’t want to take apart your favorite toys, you can find toys in bins at Goodwill and other thrift stores.
One of the more unusual toy hacking exercises is called circuit-bending, which involves opening up any battery-powered toy that makes sound and short-circuiting its electronics. In Make: volume 4, Christiana Yambo and Sabastian Boaz wrote about how to “bend” a Casio SK-5 sampling keyboard and turn it into a different kind of musical instrument.1 In the same article, they introduce the father of circuit-bending—the person who coined the term—Reed Ghazala. In 1967, while Ghazala was in junior high, he was craving his own synthesizer but couldn’t afford one. In his desk drawer he found a “junked mini amplifier made by Radio Shack, with the battery installed and the back off, exposing the circuitry.”2 After he closed the drawer, he heard strange sounds coming from inside. He realized that a metal piece had touched the circuit board and it was shorting out. His lightbulb moment was: What if you shorted circuitry intentionally? That’s how circuit-bending was born: by accident.
Most people would consider the sounds generated by circuit-bending to be “distorted” electronic music or, less politely, noise. As we have organized accomplished circuit-benders at Maker Faire, I’ve learned that circuit-bending is less appreciated as music and more appreciated as a way of making strange sounds, in the same family as the Theremin. Said another way, as much as circuit benders enjoy how they can make this music from children’s toys, few people want to listen to it, although it can be fun for a while to see a circuit-bender playing music using the knobs, sliders, and controls of a plastic toy. What circuit-bending demonstrates on another level is that we can modify and hack the internals of a machine and change its interface to suit our own purposes, none of which the manufacturer intended us to do.
I have a two-year-old grandson who, like many kids, enjoys playing in cardboard boxes, pulling the flaps in on him, as though it were a vehicle. Cardboard is one of the simplest, most widely available building materials, and its uses for young makers are incredible. All a pile of cardboard requires, to paraphrase Thomas Edison, is a good imagination.
As a nine-year-old, Caine Monroy hung out for summer vacation at his father’s East Los Angeles auto-body shop, where he began building out of cardboard what he called Caine’s Arcade, which was open on weekends to the public. The arcade was a set of imaginative games, all made from cardboard boxes that were leftover in the shop. Anyone could play the games for a little bit of cash and win prizes. Most of the prizes were Caine’s old toys.
Filmmaker Nirvan Mullick came upon the arcade while visiting the shop to buy a part for his car. After talking to Caine, he bought a “fun pass” for $2, which allowed him to play five hundred games. Nirvan decided to make a video of the young maker, whose sweet, playful nature comes across well on film. The video went viral, and Caine’s Arcade became a sensation, sharing a message of the importance of creativity in children’s lives. The popularity of the video led to an annual Global Cardboard Challenge that invites children to participate by creating new things out of cardboard and other recycled items.
Juniper Tangpuz is a grown-up artist (in his thirties) who creates intricate, kinetic sculptures out of paper and cardboard. I met him at the Kansas City Maker Faire, where he was smartly dressed, wearing a bow tie and suspenders. He showed me an expressive 3-D puppet head with animated eyes and mouth. He peeled open the head to show me that the structure was made out of a gift box and a lunch bag. Nearby was a black-and-white cardboard bear with needles sticking out of its skin, which he called the Cactus Bear. Another was a hard-to-describe musical instrument called Piano Face, in which a cardboard collar holds piano keys so that when they are pressed, several soft-foam hammers hit your cheek to make sounds with your mouth as a resonator. He demonstrated a cardboard violin that made no sound, but when bowed, activated a spinning zoetrope that had images of a dancer in motion. Born and raised in Kansas City in a family of Filipino descent, Juniper told me that he was one of those kids who had to keep busy, and his parents gave him paper and scissors so he could “make things from stuff lying around the house.” His art is now featured in galleries and museums.
Caine Munroy and Juniper Tangpuz show that simple materials can be perfect to allow one’s imagination to take over—something that some of the most expensive toys fail to do. Makers’ special appreciation for toys is leading to some of them to become toy makers themselves. Makers are bringing a new sensibility to play, sometimes inspired by their own experiences as children and other times from what the technology allows in the design and development of a new product.
Wayne Losey was a toy designer at a large toy company who left because he found that it was too hard to create new toys within the company. He said that Star Wars was the best thing and the worst thing for the toy industry. It was good because almost any toy that licensed the Star Wars name and characters was very successful. It was bad because the mainstream toy industry saw licensing as the secret to success, and subsequently innovated less with new toys. A company that sells mass-market toys wants to make sure it can sell millions of a toy from its initial release. Gone were the days, according to Wayne, of creating a new toy that might take a while to catch on and build a following. It was a better business to dress up older toys and make them look new. A good example is the Star Wars version of Monopoly.
Wayne left because he felt that the “toys were dumb,” and the ways the toys were made was dumb. He set out to create his own toy company. “I wanted to put toys in kids’ hands that surprise and challenge them,” he told me. “I wanted to build tools for creativity and imagination.” His goal became finding ways for kids to “become their own toymaker.”
On his own, Wayne set out to learn new skills such as 3-D modeling software and unlearn some of what he knew from working at a large company. “I had to shake the idea that I was a professional in the toy industry.”
His first product was called ModiBot, a modular snap-together system for creating 3-D-printed action figures. Wayne came up with a design for interconnecting elements and a base set of parts as a starter kit. New parts could be designed by the community of users and shared for download on home 3-D printers. Eventually, he teamed up with several developers to create a new company called Modio that produced an iPad app that made it easier to design the characters. He launched the product at Maker Faire Bay Area in 2014.
Wayne realized that he was way ahead of the market: too few people have 3-D printers at home. Even he was using a 3-D printing service, Shapeways, to create his base set of parts. He believed that this kind of customization was where the toy industry would eventually go, and he wanted to help lead it there. It was opening up new ways to think about designing and developing toys, and putting children at the center of the process. Modio was acquired by Autodesk in 2015 and renamed Tinkerplay, becoming more of a software product for designing your own playthings.
Alice Taylor had a similar notion that came to her while she was walking around New York Toy Fair in 2010. The fair is where the toy industry shows off its new product lines to retailers. While checking out the small space in the basement featuring digital toys, the idea struck Alice that the future of toys would combine physical and digital interactions. She wondered if she could create a system where kids could design their own doll character on a computer and then send the design to a place where a high-end 3-D printer could make it for them. She founded Makie Labs in East London and raised some money to build a software team and set up manufacturing. I visited Makie Labs early in 2015 to see six or seven people managing jobs at 3-D printers, in a small factory that not only produced the doll figure but also its hair and clothing, and then boxed it and shipped it anywhere in the world.
The key for Alice’s product is easy-to-use design software that gives children the ability to create an unlimited number of variations of a doll, changing shapes and colors to make a doll uniquely their own. Like other maker products, success depends on setting up a collaborative community for sharing. In that community, users might share clothing patterns for their own doll’s wardrobe. The dolls are also designed to incorporate wearable electronics. While more expensive than an American Girl doll or mass-manufactured dolls like Barbie, Alice Taylor’s dolls are truly one-of-a-kind, and they might serve a niche market of geeks and their progeny. Alice believes that the costs will come down, and that the appeal is broad, even bending the notion of what dolls can be for boys as well as girls.
Alice knows that the large toy companies are paying attention: she meets their representatives at Maker Faire who come “because it is a fertile ground for new emerging toys.” Makers like Alice Taylor are doing the advance work of innovation for the toy industry of proving that such a product can be made and that kids want it.
The most fundamental element of electronics is creating a circuit. A basic circuit consists of a battery, some wire, and an LED. Batteries have a positive and a negative output; LEDs have a long and short wire. They have to be put together using a simple logic test that it works. While you can use standard electronics components to build a circuit, there are other, more creative ways, too. Instead of messing with wires and breadboards, you can build soft circuits using conductive tape, thread, or paint.
One of the more fun examples is Squishy Circuits, developed by AnnMarie Thomas and her student Sam Johnson at the Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Squishy Circuits uses homemade playdough to replace traditional wires. It requires making two batches of your own dough, which involves heating a mixture of water, flour, oil, and cream of tartar. In one batch, salt is added as an extra element to make a conductive dough. In the other, sugar is added to make it an insulating dough. Children already know how to use the dough, so they can sculpt all kinds of shapes, but they can also learn how to attach a battery and LEDs to build a circuit that powers the LEDs. I have seen fourth-graders in a public school in the Bronx, New York, figure out things for themselves, adding buzzers and motors to the circuit while shaping it into creatures or sculptures. Squishy Circuits are a lot more tactile than working with wires, especially for little fingers, and the results are more expressive. Instead of a jumble of wires and components, the kids talked about something they made.
I once had several batches of dough in my carry-on at the airport, and it set off the alarms at the TSA checkpoint. The dough was wrapped in plastic, and one batch had been dyed pink. A man from the bomb-defusing unit arrived to look at my bag and interrogate me. “What is it you do?” he asked me. “I do science experiments,” was my answer, which seemed to satisfy him enough to let me go. My advice is to leave your playdough at home.
Paper craft can also be combined with conductive tape to create pop-up greeting cards that beep or light up. Marie Bjerede, a tech executive in Portland, leads this activity at her children’s school as well as at the Maker Faire in Portland. She uses construction paper, scissors, glue sticks, coin-cell batteries, LEDs, and a roll of copper tape. The point of her activity is that a circuit is only a mechanism that you can use in service of what you want to express in the card. A pair of red LEDs might act as the eyes of a dragon or a robot.
Jie Qi’s Circuit Stickers are one of the newest ways to combine paper craft and electronics. An engineer and an artist who is finishing her PhD at the MIT Media Lab, Qi was interested in pop-up cards as a form of creative expression, and she wanted to look at ways to incorporate logic and interactivity through electronics. She started Chibitronics with Bunnie Huang to produce “peel and stick” LEDs in the triangular shape of small guitar picks. Circuit stickers are fun and easy to use. The stickers are examples of low-cost flexible circuits, which Bunnie and Qie made in China by developing a new manufacturing process with a factory. They also raised $100,000 through crowd funding to support the development.
The Circuit Sticker Sketchbook kit is a plain brown book that takes a reader through various examples of building circuits and the switches that can be used to activate them. Conductive tape is used instead of wires and is placed along the lines of a diagram. The circuit stickers also work like tape, placed at the edges of the tape, connecting positive and negative. The sketchbook easily suggests how children might build their own book full of interactive pages that illustrate the story and bring it to life. I suspect we may see circuit stickers used in more children’s books in the future, upgrading popular sticker books with blinking LEDs. The Circuit Stickers Sketchbook provides an easy and fun entry point for children to gain basic tech literacy in the form of a book, showing creative activities that they can follow on their own.
Ayah Bdeir, who grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, saw herself as a maker when she was growing up, but she found engineering dry and uninteresting, preferring to explore her creative interests. Nonetheless, at her parents’ urging, she got a degree in electrical engineering. When she was accepted into the MIT Media Lab, she was able to combine engineering skills and creative work. “I started to create my own artwork using electronics: wearable electronic fashion, interactive installations, lighting art,” writes Ayah in the preface to Getting Started with LittleBits. “A little while after, I realized I was more interested in the tool than the outcome of what I was creating.”3
At the Media Lab, Ayah began working on a project that she called LittleBits, a modular electronics system that had the goal of reducing the complexity and the amount of time required to build prototypes. LittleBits is like an updated version of the Braun Lectron kit that inspired Massimo Banzi. Her first prototypes of LittleBits were made out of cardboard and used conductive tape. Eventually, through an iterative design process over three years, she developed the design for LittleBits as modular magnetic connectors called Bits, with different colored Bits for different functions. Blue Bits provide power, such as a battery. Pink Bits represent input, such as an on-off switch. Green represents output, such as a buzzer or an LED. Orange represents wire. A blue Bit and a green Bit are the most basic combination; a battery provides power to an LED, for example. LittleBits is an open-source library of modular connectors that range from simple to sophisticated functions, from lights and sensors to MP3 and Wi-Fi modules. An easy project for a beginner is to create a common household night light by snapping together a power module that connects to a nine-volt battery (blue), a slide switch that can adjust the sensitivity of the light sensor (pink), a sensor that detects light (pink), and an LED output (green).
She brought an early version of LittleBits to Maker Faire Bay Area in 2009 to share with people. Ayah soon noticed the lines of people waiting to check out her electronic building blocks. It helped her realize that there was a market for LittleBits. Ayah found investors, and by 2011, she was able to launch the LittleBits modular library. What started out as a project to build a tool at the MIT Media Lab became a product line and a successful company based in New York and run by Ayah. She has met every challenge that has faced her in growing the company with determination and grace.
Ayah has created an electronics toolkit that can be viewed as a toy by some and as a prototyping system for others. Either way, it succeeds in helping to demystify the technology that surrounds us and demonstrate that it is possible to create new things ourselves using these basic building blocks. “To elevate making into inventing,” writes Ayah, “we need to equip ourselves with a new language to understand the world around us, and a platform to reinvent it.”4 She hopes that LittleBits is a platform for more people to learn how to invent the future.
Just as A. S. Gilbert’s Erector Set was inspired by the girders hoisted in the air to build skyscrapers in New York City in the early twentieth century, Jasen Wang’s Makeblock, which integrates physical and digital modules, is no doubt inspired by makers who are furiously building things in Shenzhen in the twenty-first century. Makeblock is a construction kit that looks like a wholly reimagined Erector Set. It consists of blue aluminum beams, standard mechanical components, and plug-in electronic modules. It features an Arduino-compatible controller and standard sensors. “We combine a lot of new technology, including open-source technology,” explained Jasen. It’s perfect for building robotic creations that combine electronics and mechanical engineering. Makeblock offers a set of starter kits for building a musical robot or a drawbot, an XY plotter, and even a 3-D printer bot. All of the products are well designed, colorfully packaged, and competitively priced.
Jasen is an engineer, soft-spoken but with a gleam in his eye. Five years ago he came to Shenzhen wanting to start a hardware company after finishing his master’s degree. In 2011 he founded Makeblock and was accepted into the first class of companies in the Shenzhen-based incubator HAX. He ran his first Kickstarter campaign in 2013, raising $185,000, becoming one of the first people in China to use Kickstarter to raise funds. More recently, Jasen raised $6 million from Sequoia Capital and expanded his team from ten to ninety people, adding expertise in manufacturing, software development, and design.
At Maker Faire Shenzhen in 2015, Jasen showed me a new product called Mbot, an educational robot for kids. It offers a visual drag-and-drop programming environment modeled after MIT’s Scratch to control an Arduino-compatible robot. The Kickstarter campaign for Mbot wrapped up in May, raising $285,000 from 2,500 backers. The kit costs about $75. Jasen believes this robot is “affordable for every kid so they can learn both robotics and programming. Mbot comes in two colors, blue and pink, which will please some and infuriate others. Jasen was able to sell a lot of Mbots during Maker Faire, which he believes has exposed many Chinese parents to the Maker Movement. They realize that making is “important for their kids and themselves.”
Makeblock’s office is half an hour from central Shenzhen in the Nanshan district, which I was told was a high-tech center. However, what I saw was a set of nine empty high-rise office towers that were developed by the government. Makeblock got a good deal on space in one of the glass towers, a tangible sign that the government is interested in supporting start-ups and how it expects these companies to grow the economy.
As part of Shenzhen’s Maker Week, Makeblock was holding a forty-eight-hour robotics competition at its offices. The theme of the competition was “Lyre, Chess, Calligraphy, and Painting,” a prompt to build robots that could play music or chess, paint, or draw. A dozen teams were brought to Shenzhen to compete and provided all the Makeblock components they needed to build a project for the competition. I met teams from the University of Utah and the University of Trento in Italy. Nearing the end of the competition, the projects were nearly finished except for some last-minute testing and battery charging. Several hundred people were checking out the projects, and the teams occupied their “pits.” Several projects I saw were variations of drawbots—one was a watercolor bot, another splattered paint in creative ways. The winner of the competition was the Light Saber Chessbot from a French team called Dev/null. It was a two-foot-tall chess piece whose movement could be directed by a laser pointer. The teams certainly demonstrated ingenuity and teamwork, and that almost anything can be built with Makeblock.
Like LittleBits, Makeblock can be viewed as a construction toy but also as a cheap and powerful prototyping system, adding mechanical parts along with electronic brains.
Eben Upton’s original idea for Raspberry Pi was to design a really cheap computer that would encourage kids to learn to hack. He didn’t want the computer to hide that it was programmable. In fact, he wanted Raspberry Pi to help kids realize that programming computers was fun and powerful. In that sense, Raspberry Pi is intended to be unfinished: just a board that runs Linux. A kid would need to find a monitor and a keyboard and hook it up. A kid would have to make it do something valuable, such as writing code to create his or her own game.
Eben came up with a $25 price for the Raspberry Pi, and then had to work hard to figure out how to build it at that price. “There are 180 components on the Raspberry Pi and only two of them are chips,” he said. Those chips were the only components he considered when he first came up with the $25 price. (The basic model sells for $35, but there is now a $5 version.) Eben is also proud that Raspberry Pi is made in Britain, specifically at a Sony plant in South Wales, about ten miles from where he grew up.
In its first year, over a million Raspberry Pis were shipped, which is pretty amazing if not totally unexpected. By 2015 the Raspberry Pi community was celebrating its third birthday at Cambridge University’s William Gates Computer Science Laboratory. The two-day event drew about 1,400 people, many of them families with children moving among workshops, talks, demos, and a marketplace of vendors. Of course, being a birthday party, there were balloons, even Mylar ones that spelled Raspberry Pi. Later, there was pizza and raspberry-flavored beer called Irration Ale.
I had a chance to talk with Eben for a few minutes. We were interrupted by a young girl who sweetly asked Eben to autograph her Raspberry Pi board. I asked Eben what he was thinking about Raspberry Pi after three years. “The big thing is how the ten or fifteen people who work for me are focused. I think about how dwarfed we are, how few resources we have. We have to be really good, and my engineers need to stay focused on the core platform, the guts, the stuff we have to do right.” Upton believes his handpicked team is exceptional, made up of engineers who are ten times better than most. I asked him what it is in their backgrounds that he looks for that distinguishes them. “It was their hobbyist interest,” he replied, immediately and forcefully. “They hacked on computers as kids; they hacked on them at night. This is what they do.”
Eben was one of those kids who knew he loved computers at about age ten and started hacking them. He eventually went to Cambridge University in engineering but dropped out in his third year to pursue a start-up. “I knew how to code, but after a while I realized that I wanted to learn the theoretical bits,” he said. So he returned to Cambridge to get his degree and eventually his PhD. Now he is back at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory with his Raspberry Pi team and many mostly local contributors to the Raspberry Pi worldwide ecosystem.
To understand the impact of Raspberry Pi, Eben said, “Look at the kids.” He had an insight about kids at his first Maker Faire in New York in 2011: “I saw how many kids were lined up to talk to us.” He particular remembers a young maker nearby who was exhibiting an Arduino-controlled dollhouse, Andrew Katz.
Eben is very concerned that developed countries like the United Kingdom and the United States are not producing enough of their own engineers. Instead, countries such as China and India produce them for us. “We must do a better job of developing our own talent,” he cautioned. This implies also getting more people involved. “Certainly, we want to see more girls get into coding, but look at it this way: we also have only about five percent of boys,” he said. “That’s a rounding error.” He believes that more people should learn to code. “Having ideas is not a contribution. Implementing ideas is how you make a real contribution.”
If one needed further proof of the impact of Raspberry Pi on kids, a teacher named Sway Humphries offered it. She led a session that featured four of her students, who were around ten years old. Sway said she learned about Raspberry Pi and thought it would be good to use in her school. When she requested that her school buy them for her class, she was turned down “because they thought Raspberry Pi was too new and not yet proven.” Undaunted, she brought in her own and began working with the kids. Word began to spread with other children asking her what this “cherry pie” was. Through her participation in an Hour of Code challenge, she won a pack of Raspberry Pis for her class, and that got things started. “I gave them to the kids and said, ‘Have a go. See what you can do,’” she explained. They began building their computers, and just getting them up and running was a proud achievement shared by the group. She called her students “digital leaders.”
It was interesting to hear the kids talk about how they felt about computers. One said, “The first time I saw a Raspberry Pi, I thought—that’s not a computer.” In school, they were being taught that using Word and PowerPoint was what it meant to use computers. “Once you learned how to use those programs,” said one of the students, “there’s not much more to learn.” Another said that the Raspberry Pi was “fun to use and hard to use.” None of them felt that they understood computers until they began working with a Raspberry Pi. One said that he didn’t know how to code, but he was learning, and he could see that it was possible to do many things with it such as math, music, and games. That led to the following prize-winning remark by one of the ten-year-olds: “People who think we are too young to code are wrong.”
In another session, Paul Atkin of Cambridge Consultants explained the process of developing remote, real-time photographic stations for use in studying penguins in Antarctica and catching poachers of black rhinos in Africa. He walked through the list of requirements that one of his clients presented him, how he had to come up with a solution that could withstand temperatures to minus forty degrees, be able to take color photos at night and by day, and remain in the field for months running on batteries. Paul discussed how he could use the Iridium satellites in orbit to transmit photos in real time back to researchers. In the case of penguins, researchers would have had to install a camera, hope that it operated successfully for many months, and then return months later to retrieve the images. Now a Raspberry Pi–based solution packaged in a rugged enclosure would allow researchers back in England to see photographs on the same day they were taken in Antarctica. Paul said that it made no sense to develop a custom board when the Raspberry Pi was so capable—and inexpensive.
Raspberry Pi has become not just a cheap computer for kids to learn programming, but also, somewhat unexpectedly, a maker platform for a wide range of projects. Like many of the examples in this chapter, the best toys become tools for learning how to interact with the world. The applications are no longer just toys.
Mitch Resnick runs the Lifelong Kindergarten program at MIT Media Lab that explores the appropriate role of technology in learning. Mitch developed the Computer Clubhouse in the 1990s, and more recently, the Scratch programming environment for children. Resnick is tall, bearded, and eloquent, speaking just above a whisper. He looks nothing like what I think of as a kindergarten teacher, but that’s how he thinks. He is thinking not just about four- or five-year-olds but about everyone.
In a paper, Mitch asked the Sesame Street question: “Which of these things is not like the other: computer, television, finger painting?” He believes the nonobvious answer is television. “Until we start to think of computers more like finger paint and less like television,” he writes, “computers will not live up to their full potential.”5 Neither will our children.
Mitch was a student of Seymour Papert at MIT in the 1980s. Along with his grad students, Mitch developed the Scratch programming environment for children. Scratch allows children to learn to program using a graphical interface. They can build interactive stories, games, and animations. A very simple Scratch program might move an icon or character around the screen, spinning around in a loop and generating sounds. Scratch can be used as well to interact with physical objects so that it can be a platform for tinkering with hardware and software. Scratch is an online community where children can find code examples created by other kids that they can easily copy and modify. It is a coding playground where kids can play by themselves or in small groups. It’s fun, not a chore.
I spoke at Scratch Conference at MIT in 2014. It attracted educators, parents, and museum leaders. Bill and Amanda from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, came with their two sons, who are homeschooled. They were Make: magazine readers as a family, and they were trying to reinvent education in their own way. It’s not something everybody can do, but spending several days at MIT Media with hundreds of others and learning what they are doing is about as good an educational experience as one can imagine.
Jay Silver was a student of Mitch Resnick. Jay is the co-inventor of MaKey MaKey, along with Eric Rosenbaum. It is a small red-and-white board that connects through USB to any computer, and then, using alligator clips, you can connect things to control the computer. It is part computer, part toy, and more like finger painting than television.
MaKey MaKey changes the interface for computing to almost anything you want it to be. With MaKey MaKey, you don’t have to use a keyboard for your computer, so you interact with it in new, creative ways. Indeed, you can use bananas and apples to play a piano on your computer. Any number of YouTube videos show the wide range of amazing applications that MaKey MaKey enables. The package for MaKey MaKey contains a label:
WARNING: User may start to believe that they can change the way the world works. Extended use may result in creative confidence.
That you can create a banana piano with MaKey MaKey is a seemingly silly thing, but it is also surprisingly important. Jay calls MaKey MaKey an “invention kit,” a new kind of toy or game for “the simultaneous combination of exploration and creative action that leads to a new way of seeing the world.” He believes that everyone should learn a new “invention literacy.”
I sometimes wonder if young kids today have a “tactile deficit syndrome.” It is as though children’s sense of touch is underdeveloped. They are growing up as the generation of the touchscreen, accustomed to its glassy look and feel. While a touchscreen responds to a finger, it provides almost no sensation back. The iPad is more like a remote control: the child is controlling a device that engages eyes and ears alone, much like television. Jay wrote to me:
I really believe in the power of touch. My mom is actually a lactation consultant and has taught me how important skin-to-skin contact is between mother and baby. I have since measured the electrical characteristics of large groups of people holding hands, and of people touching plants and touching the ground.
What I call skin-to-nature interaction, which is most easily implemented with a MaKey MaKey, has special meaning to me. I couldn’t believe it when I tried hooking a MaKey MaKey from the leaf of one tree, all the way through the roots of the tree, into the ground, and up through the capillary system of another tree, into the tips of the branches and into the leaves of the second tree. They are connected through a long circuit: tree, roots, ground, second roots, second tree.
When you attach the alligator clip of the MaKey MaKey to the tree, it closes the circuit. Jay continued, “I once showed this to a kid while experimenting in Boston Commons and his mom e-mailed me the next day thanking me for teaching her son that ‘everything is connected.’” Indeed, every living thing that touches the earth is literally electrically connected, except on very dry ground. Jay explained:
Once I made an interactive jacket called “ok2touch” that I exhibited at the Exploratorium and at the Boston Museum of Science. Skin-to-skin contact with the wearer turned it on. It was a commentary on our modern society’s lack of touch.
I suffered from fear of touching nature during my childhood because it was “dirty” or “dangerous.” My wife, on the other hand, touches everything she sees in nature, and I’ve learned the wonder of the feel of moss, cat noses, and caterpillar legs. Touch is so important. And I did design MaKey MaKey quite literally on purpose to “force” people to touch everyday objects, nature, and each other. To give importance to skin-to-skin and skin-to-nature contact as an on switch or a trigger as a part of our fancy interactive technology.
Toys and tools created by makers introduce children to technology, and they also provide an alternative, maybe even an antidote, to screen time. Hands-on play improves sense perception and contributes to an awareness of our own body interacting with nature and the material world. If you can’t find the right toy for a child, remember that you have all kinds of materials around the house with which you can make things. Save the cardboard boxes from the things you buy.
The significant difference in the number of men versus women who identify as makers, as well as work in technical professions, must be attributable in some measure to the toys that were made for boys, which in turn gave boys the opportunity to develop the skills and self-image of themselves as builders and doers. Perhaps we have Gilbert and his Erector Set to blame in that he and others proved to be successful in the social mission to direct the energy of boys in ways that helped them develop as productive workers in the industrial economy. What worked for boys came at the cost of excluding girls. Today, the social mission of more and more toys is to encourage more girls to develop much the same skill set for a creative economy. New toys aimed at girls or at boys and girls can help introduce them to science and engineering as well as art and design outside school or even before they go to school.
Elizabeth Sweet, a sociologist and lecturer at the University of California, Davis, gave a TEDx talk in 2015 on the gender-segregation of toys in blue and pink aisles in toy stores. The toys themselves embed cultural norms for gender. “Toys for girls center heavily on ideas around beauty, nurturing, and domesticity,” she said. “Toys for boys are much more about action, aggression, and excitement.” She recalled playing with Tinker Toys, Lego, and Lincoln Logs as a child without thinking they were toys for girls or boys. From her own research, which entailed studying thousands of toy advertisements in Sears Catalogs throughout the twentieth century, she concluded that today, “toys are far more gendered than they ever were at any point during the twentieth century.”6
It’s not that gender was absent in advertising, and she shows an 1912 ad for Gilbert’s Erector Set clearly aimed at boys, along for one from the 1960s that featured a girl playing with an iron and ironing board. She found more examples of ads featuring boys and girls playing with the same toy. Yet she believes that the gender stereotyping found in toy stores today is worse, as consumer culture has exacerbated the problem. Its implication that boys can do certain things and girls do different things based on what toys they play with drives gender inequality in our society. We see it in the workplace where women are underrepresented in science and technology professions and men are underrepresented in the caring professions. When there are blue and pink aisles, even toys that are gender-neutral have no place to be. Sweet said that she more finds science kits in the blue aisle. Crossing from one aisle to the other is problematic, as it was for Sweet’s daughter, who found a green dinosaur-themed lunch box she liked, but had second thoughts when she read a tag that labeled it a “boy’s lunchbox.”
Gender stereotyping of toys hurts both boys and girls. Sweet said that these stereotypes tells kids to “abandon or deny parts of themselves that don’t fit” the stereotype, and perhaps exaggerate the importance of other parts that they care less about. These stereotypes narrow instead of broaden what is possible for children. Kids should be encouraged to “follow their interests, a diversity of interests” and not be limited to what fits within the bounds of traditional male and female roles. It is the diversity of interests and their intersections that breed creativity.
Sweet believes that the products themselves as well as the marketing can be more gender-balanced. She sees that a toy store without blue and pink aisles would offer children more options, a heterogeneous mix of toys. There could be an alternative world of toys that appeal to boys and girls based on their interests.
Seeking gender balance in toys and breaking away from prevalent stereotypes are a big challenge that the new makers of toys are tackling head-on. Anne Mayoral, an industrial designer and codeveloper of the SpinBot kit, wrote in Make: “As we design, make and buy STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) toys, we should think about the message they send to children. Toys and activities that support types of play that defy gender stereotypes will teach the skills, experiences, and intuition that foster an aptitude for STEAM fields.”7 That there are women creating many of these products is reason enough to believe they will drive change in both toys and toy stores.
Ayah Bdeir’s LittleBits was intentionally designed to avoid gender-based cues in its product design and marketing, which she admits is very hard to do, and LittleBits has boys and girls as users in the same numbers. Alice Taylor doesn’t see the customized dolls that her users create as limited only to girls. The potential for combining paper craft and electronics, as shown by Jie Qi’s Circuit Stickers, as well as electronics and fashion in wearables are promising ways to engage girls. New toys such as GoldieBlox and Roominate aim to reach girls and introduce them to science and technology through play. Mayoral writes that the goal for parents should be “to offer a variety of toys and a chance for hands-on discovery and making, either at home or in a local makerspace.” Let girls and boys explore all their interests, support their natural curiosity, and encourage them to imagine all that they can make and do.