Embedded - 459: Ideas Have to Come From Somewhere

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Professor AnnMarie Thomas spoke with us about playful learning through joy,  whimsy, surprise, and meeting new people.  We also spoke with AnnMarie about how adults can foster an environment that encourages innovation. See more about that (and the interviews of various engineers and makers) in her book Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation You can find AnnMarie on Mastodon: mastodon.social/@AnnMariePT If you want to know more about squishy circuits, check out AnnMarie’s TED talk: Hands-on science with squishy circuits (or the related book Squishy Circuits (21st Century Skills Innovation Library: Makers as Innovators)). She is the head of The Playful Learning Lab at the University of St. Thomas where she is a professor of engineering and entrepreneurship.  We also talked about the LEGO Foundation. More about that on LearningThroughPlay.com AnnMarie suggested the cephalopod-centric novel The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Elecia countered with The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery (non-fiction). And now, a question for you to ponder, what is your most meaningful learning experience? Transcript

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White, here with Christopher White. And I think I could use some silly. I could use some play. I could be a five-year-old with Play-Doh. Mix all that with electricity. Let's have Professor Anne-Marie Thomas talk to us about squishy circuits and learning and innovation and entrepreneurship. Hello, Professor Thomas. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me on. I'm excited to be here. Could you tell us about yourself as if we met at Hackaday's Supercon? 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. All right. And I believe that does include Play-Doh.

It definitely includes Play-Doh. We'd like to get started with lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask for much deeper questions until the end. Perfect. Favorite MBARI project? Favorite MBARI, as in M-B-A-R-I, MBARI? Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

I love their underwater robots. So their AUV, their autonomous underwater vehicles. You weren't expecting that one, were you? I wasn't. 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. Do you have any research project interns at MBARI this year? I did.

We are starting the semester here in Minnesota, but I had one student, Joel Rodick, who is a senior engineering student who was working there on camera systems this past summer. And last year, two years ago, we had an education major there. So at the Playful Learning Lab, we're big fans of MBARI. I was an intern there 20, more than 20 years ago myself. So it's, I feel old, but it's fun watching my students do things that were life-changing for me decades ago. I work on some of their projects, so I'm quite familiar with them and think they're a great institute. Yes. One of my favorites. Salty or sweet? Sweet. Steam, steam the acronym which is your favorite letter oh none of them i'm a fan of the holistic education approach can't have a favorite

rank these three schools in order of worst to best what caltech mit and harvey mud college Caltech, MIT, and Harvey Mudd College. That's a trap. I would like my friends to still speak to me, so I will have to plead the fifth on that one. Well, it's nice she didn't just say Harvey Mudd to start with is the worst because that's the only one she hasn't gone to. It's a great school. That's the only school I know that has a professional magician teaching in their math department, so I couldn't rank them down.

But as an alum of MIT, Caltech, I can't rank them down either. I've 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? Something for an hour. I think we would do storytelling if I just walked in. We'd write a story together. Complete one project or start a dozen? Oh, aspirational. I'd have to say if you're asking, I typically start a dozen, but I think if I would aspire to complete one.

Favorite fictional robot? BB-8. Do you have a tip everyone should know? Oh, I sound like a kindergarten teacher, which is also aspirational for me, but be kind to everybody because you never know what other people are secretly dealing with. With that set up, I thought you were going to say take more naps. I did too. Oh, take more naps too, but that goes without saying. So you said in your introduction, you're a professor of engineering and of business and education and playful learning. And how do all these things mix? You know, I'm now in my mid 40s and I have spent the last couple of decades trying to figure out how to make a nice linear path out of my life story.

And I think I can only do that retroactively. So to be honest, it's, I follow what is interesting at the time and often they lead to learning new things and going into new fields. And when you enter a new space, you often see how it relates to the places you've already been. So as an academic, I've been incredibly fortunate to be able to combine those. I, 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, and then wanted to teach. So I had to get a PhD because I'm old enough that we didn't used to have high school, elementary school, middle school engineering. And all of these things have kind

of 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 with anyone. You did a TED Talk about squishy circuits, about using Play-Doh to transport electricity to light lights. Where did that fit in with your art, business, engineering pyramid? 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.

And it was as the maker movement was taking off and 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 like bare conductive. But none of them really lent themselves to use by little kids with kind of toddler fingers or to classroom uses where if you limit a budget, you can only buy so many supplies. And so if you painted a circuit, like you'd have to buy more electronic, more conductive paint or more electric tape and really wanting a way that you could build something and then literally squish it up and do it again. And 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-Doh recipe and a non-conductive Play-Doh recipe. And my kids liked it. And then the schools liked it. And we were sort of 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. It's kind of funny because there have always been a few homemade Play-Doh recipes. And I shouldn't say Play-Doh because that's probably trademarked, but that's how we all know it, so going with it.

But, I mean, flour and water and cornstarch and salt was one of the recipes and the other was sugar instead of salt? Yeah, the main difference was sugar instead of salt? 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. Our tap water has so much stuff in it that it conducts electricity. So we, for our quasi-insulating or less conductive dough, we use distilled or deionized water. And when we were doing this, it seems so obvious now. And I had some engineers say, oh, well, you're not going to be able to make circuits that light up with Play-Doh as the wires. And it actually was apparently novel in education to look at it this way,

but the field of circuit benders, there were circuit benders making music using Play-Doh to short out kids' toys before squishy circuits came along. So that was fascinating. One of those things where the academic world doesn't always look at the same, well, typically will look at the same research, but not notice things happening in maybe the maker art world. So was this innovative in whatever that word is supposed to mean? Oh, that's a hard question to ask me because I tend to do projects when I feel like there's something that needs to get done and it could help the people around me. And I typically will then let others decide whether it's useful to them. 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. And it really was only because people started asking us for the recipes that we started sharing them. And it was always on our website, all the recipes, which battery packs to buy. It wasn't supposed to be a company. We didn't 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 and showing what people around the world were doing with it. The Squishy Circuits 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. And they said they'd love to use it, but they didn't want to solder the battery packs together and put the right little bits on them. And as a mother of two, a pre-tenure professor, it wasn't in my to-do list to start a company. So this young gentleman, Matthew Schmittbauer, started it. And wow, it's a decade later and that company still exists. So I wasn't asking if it was innovative or if it was going to change the world. I was saying, you know, can I do this?

And would this help the kids and the teachers that I know? You know, a cheap way of making the circuitry that they can reuse. And so it's been delightful seeing how it has taken off. But that wasn't the mindset I set out to explore in. It ended up being a pretty high profile project. Very much. Are there other projects that have had similar starts that you wish had gotten more attention? Oh, that's a really good question. You should thank Lenore for that one because she totally

fed me that. You know, it's 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, you know, really constitutes about 25 undergraduate research students and a couple of the professors who play with us, we set out to do the work because we think it's important, not because it'll get attention. And some of them get attention, but we often, we don't really care about the big press. We care about attention in the communities we work in. So for example, we, years ago, a student who had actually applied to work on the Squishy Circuits project,

it wasn't the right fit for a project for her. But the question I asked her at the end of the interview was, well, if I didn't hire you for this project, is there something else you'd like to work on? And she paused. Her name was Brynn Casper. And she paused and thought about it and said, well, part of my family is deaf and deaf and hard of hearing kids don't have the same opportunities that hearing kids do in STEM. So I guess I'd want to work on that. And 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. And 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. And so while many people won't know that project per se, I think it got attention from the right people. We were able to get the resources to the schools that needed it. You know, that's one of the joys of this work is we can find an immediate

need and go do something, even if we're not going to get tons of attention for it. So to directly answer your question of are there projects I wish had gotten attention, I don't think so, because I've never set out with a project hoping to get attention. We always hope to do the work, and if the people we're doing the work for like it, then we've been successful. And often attention just means that you get to bring that work to more people, which is a privilege. And did that work turn into playgroundcamp.org or is that something separate? Oh, yes. Yeah yes so the summer of 2020 um we had we oh going back a little further as we all know the world changed a lot in 2020 um particularly in the spring and summer of it um and in our lab we were very focused on a few projects

but then everything changed um and i was actually in den or in early March of 2020 and had won an award. Our lab had won the Lego prize, which comes with research funding. And as I'm rushing home, the conference that would have been conferred at didn't happen. And I'm rushing home. I was getting emails from a lot of my research students who again are all undergrads and so much uncertainty. And over the coming weeks, some students lost family members, but almost actually every student lost any summer internship they lined up. Companies have dropped internships. And 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. I said, we'll 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're 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. You know, this was a really tough time for our community. And 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've got to do something there. But the kids at Metro Deaf School have all been sent home. And some of them are deafblind.

And all of them, some of them have family members who don't sign. And school was the place they communicated. How could we create something to help them? And so using the Laker Prize funding, we created hundreds of videos that were all different STEM activities. And 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 didn't speak English or didn't sign. And 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 and it had 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'd leave them outside because remember we didn't know how long you had to let something sit before you touched it if someone else had um so yeah that that project that project um came out of the work of this student who applied for squishy circuits about eight years earlier and didn't get the job and yet found this need and you know at the time i knew nothing about the deaf community um a decade later i'm a student um in the extension program at gallaudet university um i've taken about seven classes on American Sign Language and Deaf Culture.

I'm not an expert by any means, but I have incredible colleagues in the deaf community that I can work with. And actually this past summer, so summer of 2023, we have been working on coding in the deaf community. And we ran a course for teachers of deaf and hard of hearing kids who were learning how to program in the Scratch programming language. And they got some squishy circuits and makey makeys and other things. 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. Some of the videos on the playgroundcamp.org, I mean, 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. I mean, a lot of it is stuff you can get at home or, or, or make like, like the Play-Doh, but how much of it was about the fun, the playfulness, the doing something and how much was it about curriculum? Oh, we did that summer. We didn't really care at all about curriculum. You know, when you were in a city during a pandemic, kids are at home. We're having all the challenges the Twin Cities were having. Our main goal was connecting kids to each other. So there would be Zoom calls where they were signing with each other.

And, you know, this is also happening the same time we launched the playground. We also had something called the Play Line in March of 2020. As I mentioned, I was flying back from Denmark, rushing home before I wouldn't be allowed to fly back anymore. And on the plane, I was emailing the only other person who had come from the US to Denmark for that event, Carly Shiraki, who was a kids' TV host. And the two of us were commenting on how

this was gonna change education around the world. No one really knew what was coming in terms of the pandemic and how do you switch online and that teachers were going to have to help each other and how could we connect them? And 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 play line and just chat for half an hour. And it truly was, we did them twice a day because we had people around the world. And it was a chance for teachers to hour. And it truly was, we did them twice a day because we had people around the world. And it was a chance for teachers to just laugh

or share what was going on or cry or vent. And what was really fascinating for us was because it was started, we started immediately mid-March, 2020, things were worse in certain countries, kind of 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 didn't have Wi-Fi. It turns out that was going to be an issue in Australia. And, you know, 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. And that's very different than if we're creating an in-school program and maybe in that class, we're going to start with a curriculum. But I think it's very important for us always to look at what are the goals of what we're doing? Sort of to your earlier question of which projects don't get attention. Well, if the goal is attention, then that's problematic. But in some cases, it's just doing the work. And so if the goal is to have kids be engaged and enjoy their time, well, maybe that's what we focus on. And we look at the playfulness less so than the exact standards that we're covering.

On the other hand, if we're teaching a class that is crucial to another course in a student's academic trajectory, well, then we're 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. You know, 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're teaching someone about springs and pendulums, you can swing a pendulum on a string, or you can take a little spring, or you could partner with a local circus school and have your engineering students put on, you know, harnesses. And 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 and you take measurements and you look at their oscillations. And you can take

something that's 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 don't have to be separated, but which one you consider first maybe depends on the setting. What sort of projects are you working on now? So I'm very lucky. I am a professor, which means that I'm on sabbatical. Well, I can have sabbaticals once every seven or eight years. So I'm on a sabbatical.

This is actually going to be the first year, first time in 19 years I've gone more than 12 months without teaching. I've never done that. I don't think I've ever gone more than nine months without teaching in the last 19 years. So I'm not teaching this coming year, but I am working on a couple of projects. One, we're finishing up writing up a bunch of papers with my awesome undergrads that just submitted one to a journal. It was accepted yesterday. I'm 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. We're also working with the Minnesota Children's Museum. We've 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, they, in summer of 2024, they're going to have an exhibit called Monsters on Summer Vacation. And so I'm actually doing some exhibit design, which I haven't done hands-on by myself in a long time. So 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. And my kind of secret project, I always feel sabbaticals, you should do some projects, they'll 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've had a magic tutor. And one of my daughters is quite skilled at sleight of hand.

So I'm diving into that. And 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. I'm really fascinated by magic as a teacher because it's all about what you believe and what you notice. And I feel like there's 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? And so that's the question that I think people have been wrestling with for a long time in magic, but maybe not from that direction.

So I've been deep diving in the history of magic and the psychology of magic. There's phenomenal books that have come out recently by some psychologists on magic. And then frankly, it's just fun to look at the engineering behind a lot of the different illusions that are in that repertoire. And then a project that makes six-year-old me inside somewhere deep down super happy is I'm spending some time working with one of my favorite companies. I'm 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. But they have an amazing Lego education team there looking at the use of Lego in schools. And so I'm delighted to get to spend some time with them, just starting out with that project though. This is an overwhelming number of things.

You overloaded me. I feel like asking how many hours are in your day? I don't think my brain works the way other people's. This is funny. Then the question of, you know, how we do it all. It's just always been that way. I'm lucky that I can kind of follow interests.

But hours in a day is a hard one, Christopher, because I'm trying to work on Danish time schedule. Yeah. So my days are quite early. Yes. Okay. I have questions about Legos,

but first I want to, I want to go back to the magic because i noticed it on the playground camp uh site that you had magic tricks and i wondered how that worked in the curriculum and then i was like well teaching people to be skeptical is really important so i'm glad you mentioned that. But on the site, there are things like how to do the French drop, which is one of the things that when you're making it appear like coins happen in different places, the 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, 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 it appears to be in. So that when it isn't in the hand that it appears in, you're just doing the same physical reactions. And I really, really liked that. And it made me want to go through all of the magic lessons because the truth is, I don't know how to do any of this stuff and it's cool. I could totally trick Christopher if I tried.

Yeah, you know, all credit for all of that goes to Patrick Roche. Patrick was a, gosh, the time that was all happening, I think he was a, he was a fresh, freshman or sophomore, maybe sophomore engineering student, electrical engineering, also professional magician, also spent part of his time in college flying out to New York to be an assistant on a magic show. And when we had our all-hand 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,

this incredibly diverse community that was really roiling then after George Floyd's killing. And all the students kind of brought out, well, I could teach this. I could teach that. And Patrick said, you know, why don't we 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. And through Patrick, I also learned there's a long history of deaf magicians, really rich history. And 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's why every box that was left on their doors also always had snacks. We were just trying to make kids and their families smile. And Patrick was right that like magic, and 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. Okay. But fast forward to today, or last week is the case maybe, because you were in Denmark at the LEGO headquarters. Mm-hmm. There are so many things you can learn with LEGOs, from mechanical engineering to, I mean, 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. That's a beautiful way of putting it. I'm like a kid in a candy store. I did grow up with Legos. The kits were a lot less elaborate in the late 70s and early 80s. But yeah, it's this empowering tool that kids and adults gravitate towards,

and it can be used in so many different ways. And to me, that's really sticky. That's really intriguing. And 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 there's a separate foundation

called the Lego Foundation. And 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. And they have done incredible work in Ukraine for decades, I think, and throughout the world that they have had major projects in Mexico and South Africa and 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, you know, maybe aren't exceeding in a typical classroom? 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. And again, you know, it is the Lego Foundation, but it's not about the bricks. It's about play broadly. And just if you're an educator listening, stunning research. So through that philosophy, I've gotten to meet some incredible researchers and designers and engineers at Lego. And I'm delighted that over the past couple of years, have gotten to work with them on some projects. They've had a playful schools network of administrators from schools around the world. And I got to work with Italian teachers and actually

the executive director of Metro Deaf School. And so I think that's, you may, we all, many of us smile when we think of Lego, the toys and the bricks. I'm 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. And I just hope I can help with the work that they're doing. 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 of the kids are also blind. So 13% are deaf blind and Lego has a Lego Brill block kit that the kids loved playing with. So yeah, there's so much you can do with it. And I'm 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. And just, yeah, in terms of companies, that is one that I've long admired. So the chance to spend part of my sabbatical working with them is a joy. 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. Yeah, I guess I wasn't a good business person in some ways, but I'm a huge, huge fan of the open source hardware movement. So that fit in. You know, 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. And 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 Kelly and IDEO, many business schools try to teach design. And I'm fortunate at the school that I'm at. We are multidisciplinary. And 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'm the rare professor who left her position right after getting tenure. And I left

to be the founding executive director of the maker education initiative back in around 2012. And so through, through those experiences, I was working on nonprofit management, but also innovation. And how do we teach, how do we help others come up with new ideas? And so that's, that's my role more in the business school is I am there to help with idea generation. I'm there to help kind of nurture how do we find a need and build off of it. I love learning. So the other reason I'm 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 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's how to build stuff for business students. 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 don't 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're not engineers, they're majoring in entrepreneurship

or they're majoring in finance. In the spring, I teach a class on environmental sustainability. And that's just a joy. That class is looking at, you know, the world of things and how it relates to business. But yeah, I'm 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. And I think engineers need entrepreneurship, right? Engineering, we need to know how to implement our ideas. Entrepreneurship doesn't just mean making money.

It means finding a need and finding purpose and how to bring ideas to reality. And I think there's a really rich space for opportunities working across those disciplines. Does it also mean figuring out when something's not a good idea? Oh, I love that. Yes.

Figuring out when something's not a good idea. Like which ideas should that. Yes. Figuring out when something's 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 right. If I say, if you're trying to get to Mexico, you're trying to drive South or Minnesota, trying to drive South to Mexico, but your car is pointing towards Canada. Even if you slow the car down, it's 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 doesn't matter if you slow it on or speed up, you were going in the wrong direction. And learning how to do that is super important. I'm in the Twin Cities where we have lots of medical companies and often we'll have those employees

come and help out in our classes. And when I was a very young professor, I remember talking about the joys of the design process and iteration. And one of these gentlemen from a medical company pulled me aside and said, you know, the way you talk about iteration isn't really accurate. He said, you know, 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 that the design was wrong, it would have been nice if you could have figured that out in software. So I think there's a nuance there, right, of how do you know when something's not going to work? And that's something that I think

maybe wasn't my strongest suit when I was younger. I would bang at things a lot longer. And I hope I've gotten better. And 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's through projects and experience, you learn what's going to work and what isn't going to work. And some of those signs

for when something isn't going to work. It's a little bit more of an art than a science, figuring out that intuition. I have a couple of more questions from Lenore of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. What are your favorite things about working with undergraduates? My favorite thing about working with undergraduates

is that for many of them, they don't 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've been working for a long time. And they can really throw a lot of energy and enthusiasm and all the skills that they have by being typically young into those projects. And that doesn't just mean energy. I think we forget sometimes that when we're growing up, everything is new. It's amazing the kids are not constantly overwhelmed by the world because everything is new as you're growing up and different. And so you're constantly being

thrust into new situations by definition. And everything requires you to do, to really do things that you haven't done before. And so that mindset is incredible when you're working on projects. I remember a project about five years ago, I read into the lead singer from the rock band, OK Go, and I was a fan and we decided to start an education project together immediately. And we were suddenly filming projects with them. And within months, we had launched a major website with education materials led by, in creation, like led by these students who were 18 to 22 year olds and coming up with lesson plans and testing them in classrooms. And I remember someone, one of the

funders of that project saying, it just shouldn't be possible to do all of this in three months. Like this, this shouldn't be possible. And I get that a lot. I get when students, we have low expectations for young adults, I think, and 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 haven't been told no as often as maybe those of us who are a bit older have been. Yes. That optimism, that certainty you can do it, that ability to believe and to get it done through belief. Yes, that's all very inspirational. It's right.

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 fairs, some of the audacious projects that were happening and people doing things that they hadn't been formally trained for. And the ability to just be persistent. And so I interviewed dozens of folks who create physical things about their childhoods and about what they do. And honestly, I mean, 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. And if you're the kind of person that goes about assuming you can figure things out, that doesn't seem revolutionary to you. But there are a lot of people that see hard things and think, well, I couldn't 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. I mean, that makes sense. You're not going to make changes if you don't believe you can. And that's something if you look at history and you read a lot of history, we see that play out. Maybe we're even seeing that play out today in many realms. So one of the reasons reading science fiction is something I think is important

because it's the opposite. It's trying to think of all the different things that could happen and just thinking that they could means that they can. 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. And quite a few of them will say, well, I'm good at math and science. And my teachers told me, you know, I should, I should do that. And that's a valid answer. But I don't think it's all of it. I really think that engineering and particularly engineering design, those are tools. If you were, if you wanted to be a novelist and you memorize the dictionary and all the rules of grammar, that wouldn't mean that you'd 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. And I think engineering and design are very similar in that you can learn all the physics and you can, you can learn all the physics and you can learn all the calculus and you can be really good at chemistry. But those textbooks don't 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 don't do that. You need something else that you apply the tools of math and physics and science and English, et cetera, too. And if we just focus on the core classes and experiences, we aren't giving kids the tools to dream up the things that they then want to apply those tools to. And I think you're completely right, Alicia, that it's science fiction.

It's stories. It's taking a walk. It's the history class. I'm 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's incredible. And I think it's not just nice. I think it's essential because you need to learn how to dream big and how to come up with new ideas and you have what better place than literature to inspire some of those. I'm an

avid reader, so I'm there with you. I have a comment and then a question. The comment is what you're describing about just not synthesizing all of this, you know, the dictionary and such and facts and figures and then expecting ideas to come out is exactly why I'm not impressed by large language models. So thank you. Thank you for... Gotta get that dig in. Oh, I'd love to have that conversation with you, Christopher. I think there's a lot... Yes. Oh, I have an education comment on FGPT. If you want to ask me, I'll give it. The second question, have you already come up with the reading list for the science fiction class?

Oh, no. We could just have another show right now. It was a hot exercise, the class. And I don't 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. I'm a huge fan of the writings of Mary Robinette Cowell, who wrote The Calculating Stars,

but she's also written... I worked in a research lab when I was doing my PhD. I didn't work on the project, but other people in the lab worked on brain-computer interfaces, something that's come close to home as I've lost two friends to ALS. And she wrote a very thought-provoking and kind of chilling story about brain-computer interfaces and locked-in syndrome. And I think authors such as Mary Obenet and so

many others, I'm looking at my desk right now, and the best book I've read this year is Mountain in the Sea by Ray Naylor. Incredible. I cannot recommend it enough. It's about AI. It's about cephalopods. How do you not know about this book? How have I not read this book? Cephalopods. She's read every book about cephalopods. Oh, everyone. I have given Ray's book to over 20 people at this point. Man, I bought a bulk order and I've been shipping them after I read it because it's incredible. And a bulk order and I've been shipping them after I read it because it's incredible. 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 and the Sea, you will see that,

literally you will see that symbols make, they're quite important in the story. And I actually asked Dre, I called Dre and asked Dre if, how that was handled in the audio book, because I wanted to give it to a blind astronomer. And he had a great answer in that they had thought of it very thoughtfully and it wasn't an afterthought. So stories like that just make me think through what technology and science and what humans can be. And so I know it's sometimes a badge of pride for people, particularly in engineering, to say that they read nonfiction. I don't read fiction. And I think it's very sad when people tell me that they won't read fiction.

They don't have time for it. Because I think we need those bursts of inspiration. We need those bursts of ideas. And yeah, that's different than your textbooks. I would argue that reading stories is just as important to being a designer as learning the tools. I see. It's a new book.

It's full price. That's why I haven't read it yet. And our library isn't open yet. Another few months and our library will reopen. Ooh. Okay. Sorry. Sorry.

I'm so excited about the book, Cephalopod AI. It's incredible. It's incredible. I got it because it book Cephalopod AI. It's so, it's incredible. It's incredible. I got it because it had a cephalopod. I had an octopus on the cover and I researched how part of my PhD was researching how octopi and other sea creatures, cetaceans swim, not cetaceans.

Cephalopods. Yeah. Cephalopods. I did cetacean swimming in college research, but grad school, it was cephalopods. And I just thought the cover was beautiful and I wasn't sure what I was getting into. And before I'd 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, like just an incredible book. Have you read Cy Montgomery's Soul of an Octopus? I haven't, but I am now writing it down as I talk, and I'm going to read that.

It's 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. Okay, so you are perfectly set up to read The Mountain and the Sea. That is kind of at the crux of it. And I should be clear that I'm a fan of reading all things fiction and nonfiction. So I've stacked much to the chagrin of my partner. My four husband would love my library to go fully Kindle, but I love having books around me. I'm pretty good with the electronic because I like, but I love having books around me.

I'm pretty good with the electronic because I like to have all of the books around me all of the time. But that's why I don't pay full price. I think I'm a very spatial learner and I love the physicality of books. So I can kind of remember like where on a page and like how far in my hand was on something. Yeah. Books, books, books. You mentioned writing a book. Was that making makers, kids, tools in the future of innovation? Oh, yes, that is the book. Yes.

She was worried there for a second. Yeah, that is the book. I've been fortunate. I've, as we've kind of hit on, I never know what's coming next. And so there's, there's been a lot of, I love, I so respect editors and authors. And yeah, so the, the longest book I've ever written, I guess, is Making Makers, Kids Tools and the Futures of Animation. And I think many of your guests, past guests, I think are some of the people that I've've interviewed, and it was such a joy to hear their stories. 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 their 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. 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 Hill has talked a lot about the books that he read read and he's done some pretty interesting forward-thinking things since then. And actually we mentioned underwater robotics early on. And one of my mentors, Paul McGill, who's at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, incredible builder of robots. But as a kid, he read lots of books, loved books about adventure and actually convinced his teachers in, I think it was like 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 like a little flickering light and everything, which was pretty advanced making at that age. I thought you were going to say he convinced his teacher to let him go to the Arctic, but that really didn't make sense at fourth grade. Oh, no, it didn't. 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. And what I love about Paul, when I wrote the book, I didn't 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. And he sent me a book. I 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 is very expensive to work on. And I asked him about it and it's named the Phoenix. And I thought this

was an added 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 don't have Amazon deliveries there. And the ROV that they've brought on the research mission went under the ice and didn't come back. And you're paying a lot of money every day and you've got scientists and they're all really frustrated. And 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. And they actually built a new ROV that they titled the Phoenix that swam under the Antarctic

ice and got the data that Avari needed. So, you know, the story's like that. I just, I love that ingenuity and that persistence. And that was a little boy who, well, he did take things apart, but he was right with you reading everything he could get his hands on. So this book was published almost a decade ago. I feel old. Sorry. That's okay. I teach undergrads. I feel old every day. Is there anything you'd change now? The maker movement has changed in the last decade. Is it? Oh, the maker movement has changed immensely. And, you know, I consider myself

really lucky that I got to be there for a lot of the early days and 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, um, and working with schools and libraries, 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. Um, the preface talks a bit about the maker movement as we might describe it historically. Um, but the mindset I think is pretty evergreen. And it was my attempt at figuring out what that would be.

But, you know, I said, here are the things that make a maker. And I said, it's curiosity, it's playfulness, it's risk, it's responsibility, it's persistence, it's resourcefulness, it's generosity, it's optimism. And I think I would stand by all of those things. You know, whether we call it making, yeah, it doesn't 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're 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.

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're older. A child is too young to do that. I remember I came across a toy that was called, I won't name it, but a toy that was a construction toy for kids. And it prided itself on how it wasn't 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.

You know, if we look at John Dewey and the Chicago Laboratory School, they were building their own clubhouses at like 10. So I think I don't, I would, well, maybe where the maker movement was going changed a 10. So I think I don't, I would, well, maybe where the maker movement was going changed a little bit. I think the heart of it hasn't changed. And I think that's partially because it's 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 along as long as there have been humans. Okay. 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? That's a really hard question. That's a really hard question. It really, really is. It's 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'm actually very, very much an introvert. But I know when it's important to, I have theater training, I know when it's 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. I value the friendships that I have because I don a lot out of me. So finding communities is really hard for me. I value the friendships that I have because I don't go out very much. And in fact, I've learned to build the communities that I feel comfortable in and find folks that I can be with that way. 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. And I wanted to send a thank you to the person who did it, but they had just sold a company. And I mean, really, what could I give them if they didn't have, or they, 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. And so I decided I was going to start a book club and we'd 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's the point of the book club? That's why we do poetry. 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're 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'll come up with a list too. And so in November, we sent an email to about 12 people and we said, we'd like to invite you to a salon for the year. And what that means is that for 90 minutes,

once a month, we're all going to join online. I forget, we were probably using Google Meets at the time. We're going to join online and you have to commit that you're going to come to all of them. We know you're going to travel once in a while, but you have to really commit to this. And you have to commit that you're 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 won't open it until that evening. 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 and perhaps an editor would

have sent a paper that we all read and edited and then talked about how we edit it. Or maybe someone would send some LEDs and batteries. Or maybe someone would send a food sampler and we'd taste different chocolates and talk about them. Or there was a biologist who sent a mouse and scalpel. Oh, God. We now go against that. And everyone had their turn to share and to teach. And at the end, we'd have a gift exchange. The last session was usually

right before the new year. And we'd have a gift exchange where you send a gift to everybody. And this was an interesting community in that I set a rule that it had to end after 12 months. People would always want to extend them. In fact, one group went rogue and extended it without me, but I wouldn't condone extending them. This was a 12-month experiment, and then everyone should go start their own salon with someone else from that group. And some people have done that

and taken one of the people that they met through salon and started their own year-long experiment of people gathering once a month for 90 minutes and mailing out packages and building something together or tasting something together. So that was one community that I love. And that's the one, I think we've had over 10 years of that. I just had to go back and look at my list, but I got to meet these new people. And I'd always have a co-host and basically say like, I'm shy, who should I meet? And they would invite their people and I'd invite my people.

And it just kept working and I could do it in my pajamas from my house. Other communities that I am part of that I really appreciate is I always say I'm 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. And 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's what's important to me. But I also am an introvert, so I love my books.

Our book club moved to short stories and poetry because we admitted that we weren't likely to finish books. I love that. I do get some of that, but as you went to different salons in different years, did you invite the same people yourself? No, never. No, I would. So the deal, I made the rules and stuck to them and they've changed a little pandemic, but you know, it would be me and a co-host and we were together, we put together a group of 10 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 didn't get to repeat the same group of people. So now I've got

dozens of new friends thanks to that. But that would mean you had to start out with more than 50 people. You know, if you did this over 10 years and five people per, per, per year. Yeah. Um, well people I know, but the crick was if they're my best friends, I shouldn't invite them. Um, so they should be people that I want to know better. Um, and so sometimes there are people that I really didn't know. Um, they, they people that I like, actually one person was a teacher who someone canceled right before something happened. They're like, you know what, I can't make this commitment. And so I just went on, well, at the time, Twitter, which I used to be on and said, you know, is anyone free in the next hour?

And if so, like DM and interested in, I forget what I wrote, but DM me. And this amazing teacher from Philadelphia wrote, and they were an integral part of salon for that year. I noticed on Mastodon that you are not finding the transition to be good, that Twitter was better for you than Mastodon is. I mean, that could just be me. I had just sunk everything into Twitter. It was my place. And I met so many people and I had followers and there was discussions and yeah, I'm still learning on Mastodon. It takes time to learn a new tool and I don't know that I have the time. So hopefully, hopefully I'll find my way on Mastodon. I'm trying. I haven't been as engaged and so I don't

know whether the lack of community there is due to my own lack of engagement. But Chris, you've had better luck. You say that you're a lot more engaged on Mastodon. Yeah, I don't know. I see a lot of people who say similar things, like this isn't working for me. I followed a whole bunch of people. When I started, I followed a whole bunch of hashtags. So I was like, oh, let's 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 didn't know who talked about those topics, and then I would follow them.

But I follow a lot more people than I did on Twitter. On Twitter, I usually followed about 100 people, and I think I had a few thousand followers. And now I follow probably 500, 300, 400, 500 people, and so there's more stuff going on. It's a different place. I think also people with large followings and big interactions, you're starting over kind of.

I mean, you might pull some people over, but. Oh, that's for me, that's what it is. I think it's not the platform, it's me. Yeah. And it's years and years of building that community on Twitter. And now it's okay. I want that immediately on Mastodon, but it's hard to build. But it's a different place in some ways. And some of the people, you know, some of the people I used to interact with aren't there, and I've had to dirtied with junk posts. But mostly I think it's 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. But it's funny because many of the people you followed are there. So I don't know. But there's no obligation to do it either. 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.

It's strangers who you might have things in common with. Right. The flip side is they can talk to you. That is the flip side. I'm sorry, Anne-Marie. No, I'm learning because I'm trying to decide how I feel about social media. I loved that we could just go on things once you've invested years in it. So Twitter, I could go on and I could get feedback right away.

And I just have to find the energy. I'm a little busy right now. I'm also a mom. I'm like, all right, I just have to get, I just have to find the energy. I'm a little busy right now. I'm also a mom. Like, I'm like, all right, I just need to commit to a platform and put the time in. And I just haven't managed to convince myself to do it yet. I totally understand. I have one more question for you. Sure.

And 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 don't think that's how you phrased it. You're paraphrasing this interestingly. That wasn't how I phrased it. There was no vomiting. If the university's lawyer or safety officers are listening, there was no vomiting. And while you were talking about that, I was thinking about Curl Ball Space Program, because that's also a fun way to learn some of the physics that doesn't involve undergrads spinning around. But for the most part, kids get to learn things

in a playful learning manner. Like we want them to be engaged. We spend a lot of time figuring out how to educate them so that they're amused and educated and interested and curious and enthusiastic and all those things. But then when I have to learn something, it's like, step one, find the Lagrange point. Step two, create a matrix. Step three, I don't 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? Oh, I don't know if the definition changes. I think our attitudes towards it change. And, you know, we say like, okay, stop playing around and get to work. Yeah. That's a phrase we hear people say. I've even caught myself saying it a few times, unfortunately. And we've 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. And particularly if you're in a space where you're creating new things,

that play can be a tool. I've gotten to go to many companies and work with them on, you know, what is play and how do we use it? And how do we use it to design? And I think it's this false sense that growing up means that you have to get serious and that play should go away. And it's interesting, even in the museum world, sometimes I've heard people, some museums that are doing amazing work, and parents will say things like, oh, well, the kids are just playing around. They're not learning anything. Like like this used to have more content.

And that's not really how we learn. This is I mentioned the Lego Foundation. And I love the research they've been championing around the world on what it means to play and what it means to learn. And it's a false assumption that now that you and I are older, that we should learn differently. Everyone learns differently. And some people love, I did an exercise once at a conference where I asked people to tell me their most meaningful learning experience. And it was an hour and a half. And I told people they weren't allowed to comment on each other's. We just, we're 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. But there was one gentleman who said, I love being in a large lecture hall and listening to a professor lecture and watching them right on the board. And that's how I learn best. And a lot of people were shocked by that. And I think actually that's beautiful. That's 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, but play is about process more so than outcome. Play is about choice. Play is about other people. And the shorthand that I use in my lab, we're looking at anything, be it creating a class or creating a workshop or teaching a concept. My shorthand checklist, I write it down, literally write it down, are four things that I try to integrate into anything I'm doing, whether I'm teaching adults, whether I'm teaching my kids, anyone. And it's where's joy? How do we make people smile? Where's the whimsy?

How can we just be a little bit ridiculous? Where is the surprise? Where is something unexpected? So maybe it's not surprising that I've fallen for magic because it's all about surprise and wonder. And then the last one is new people. You know, you can play by yourself, but most play involves other people. And those four elements, I don't care if I'm designing a lesson for a five-year-old or I'm designing a lesson for a 95-year-old. I want to make them smile. I want to make them a little, a little surprised. You know, it's not, not just surprise for surprise sake. It changes you how you're learning things

when you're, when you're surprised, you're suddenly more alert. So I think, I think play, we don't outgrow. I know we don't outgrow play and I hope we don't expect people to outgrow play i think too it's kind of hard because there's certain things that play lends itself easier to your example of doing lagrangian mechanics was interesting to me because it's that's starting to get to the point where the mathematics is getting more abstract a little more difficult um 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 with not a lot of intuition not a lot of intuition yeah but we can also be playful in our approach to it yeah right again if we're thinking about it like joy, I mean, you know, it's 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, you know, 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 wasn't charging for it. And we could just, you know, eat something silly. Just changing that, changing that approach that this is not a, this doesn't have to be a serious place. We can still learn, we can still learn new things, hard things, even if we laugh or we smile. I have to confess, I haven't 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 Hum humor fuel innovation and design. And it's by

Barry Kudrowitz, who's a professor who of design, um, who really focuses on humor, um, and bringing that into the innovation process. And I think these are all tools. I'm not a very funny person. I don't really tell many jokes, but if that is the way that you can bring some joy and surprise and whimsy to people, that's playful. And I think it's finding what works for different audiences. To me, play is about humans and it's about connecting with people and whether we're teaching matrices,

whether we're teaching history, how can we remember that we're not teaching those things? We're not teaching history.? We're not teaching history. We're teaching humans about history. We're teaching 18-year-olds about quantum mechanics. And keeping play in mind reminds us to remember that we're humans first. I used to have a professor to hear you talk about how to integrate some sense of playfulness. And he would always remind us as he's up there on the board, you know, scrawling symbols and mathematics and things that really doing physics, we're all wizards because we're all up here scrawling these arcane things on the whiteboard to manipulate or understand, you know, how the universe works. And these are

all casting spells. It was an interesting way to reframe things that I always liked. And that frame matters. The way you frame it changes how you receive it. It absolutely does. And I think it's one of the sad things about STEM education, honestly, is that we push so many kids towards it and it's this great field, but then they get to college. And historically, and this is changing, but historically, your professors who are teaching at universities

or 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. And many, many, many graduate programs, the focus isn't on ever learning to teach. And of course you'd 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're going to be a good teacher. And so I think we, and we, 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. And I would retake things as needed and I would try to understand them. And if the class involved building something, I got an A. If it didn't 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'm 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 pedagogical 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. There's a great book called The Amateur Hour, college teaching. Yeah, the history of college teaching in America that came out a few years ago. And I mean, it's true. Like it sort of is amateur hour in a lot of ways. And thankfully, learning science and pedagogy is being pushed to the forefront by a lot of universities, including my own. But that. It isn't the same training.

You know, if you're a K-12 student, you have if you were at a public school in the U.S., you have a teacher who is, in most cases, of course, there are exceptions, accredited teacher who has studied pedagogy and who is in learning circles and has worked on these things and gotten a degree in this. And that's different when you go to college, when you're this young adult trying to prove yourself. And it can be really damaging to go into a class where you're told that you're not cut out for this? That would be. I mean, I totally, pedagogy, I actually concentrated my nerd and 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. You're teaching the thing correctly.

Teachers tells me how to teach. And then I watch you people and I wonder what you're doing. Cause it's 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's like, well, while you've been through enough years, didn't you pick it up? Yep. Isn't really the right answer. I mean, it's honestly why I'm glad I'm on sabbatical. Teaching is exhausting because we are at any level, but I would also say, especially at college in the U.S., we know how

much money is being spent by the typical family to go to college. Wow. It's a big responsibility to be a professor. You know, you have the ability to make a huge impact positive or negative or none on someone who could be anything five years from now. It's why I don't have graduate students. I've had a few graduate students over the years, art history. I think they were all art history education, but most of my students are undergraduates for a variety of majors. And it's because I want to show them that it's okay to make mistakes. It's okay. The projects don't work out and that they don't

have that. They can, they can do these things. I, I, I'm so proud of these young adults and the work they do, but it's scary. It's terrifying. Even in my forties, if I teach, like 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 don't belong here. They're not welcome. And that could be it. That could be the end of that person pursuing that topic. I don't know that I don't know enough of us are scared about the power that we

wield as teachers. It's, It's daunting to me at times. That almost happened to me, but then I got really mad and went back and got a degree in the thing I hated. Yes, Christopher, why did you get a physics degree? Because I was so mad about undergraduate physics. I'm lucky in that I always had bad grades. I even got like an unacceptable handwriting in kindergarten and or first grade. And I was I'm one of the most avid readers I know. But I was I was in the rocket reading group in first grade, which, as we probably could all guess, means that I couldn't read to save my life.

And they were trying to, like, inspire us. But I got I even now I'm a student at Gallaudet and I've had to repeat a couple of my classes. 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 don't learn it the first time, maybe I can learn it the second time. And that doesn't mean that I should never do this. And I've learned that that isn't necessarily how everyone approaches the world. And I'm incredibly fortunate that my parents instilled that, that I wasn't a failure if I literally failed a class, I just had to do it again. Yeah. That's a super important lesson that I think many, many people don't understand. It's like, oh, this just isn't for me if I can't do it the first time. Or maybe, you know, or think it's

about them and not perhaps the way it was taught. But yeah, people can learn things. Sometimes it just takes a little longer. And sometimes it's harder for one person than another. That doesn't mean that either one is better. And maybe taking twice as long means, you know, it better. Yes. Or that you can teach it better because you understand all of the

cul-de-sacs. Yeah. I would be very worried about teacher who has only ever gotten 4.0s. I want teachers who know what it's like not to understand something. 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'd like to leave us with? That's a hard one. I mean, I think the biggest thing I've learned is that no one really has all the answers and that we're all just kind of doing

the best we can. And to look for those people that you can help along the way and those, and be very grateful for the ones that are helping you. You know, if we don't, we don't know how long we've got those, those people around. So look for those friends, look for those helpers and make sure they know how much you appreciate them. Our guest has been Anne-Marie 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'll be links in the show notes. Thanks, Professor Thomas.

Thanks for having me. Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Lenore and Wendell of the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories for the connection. And 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 at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. 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.

Welcome to Embedded. I am Elysia White. He- I couldn't remember your name. I'm sorry. You couldn't remember my name? Wow.