ManyLabs Hosts The Fluency Project: Numbers & Narrative Design Workshop

"Paper-meets-electronics-meets-open-data" is an revolutionary concept fueling San Francisco based NEXMAP. With a mission to provide learners with readily accessible, hands-on experiences that "connect the principles of engineering, systems thinking, and creative expression", NEXMAP's Hack Your Notebook Project and Open Data / Open Minds initiatives open-up a new kind of #FutureReady innovation. It is this type of thinking that aspires to support underrepresented and underserved populations in developing the core competencies of creative confidence, problem-solving, critical thinking, and collaboration.

David Cole introduces the themes for the design-thinking workshop and establishes relationships with members of the Fluency Project on our Bay Area research tour. (Photo Credit: J. Lanas)

Our Fluency cohort and team members met David Cole & Elisabeth Sylvan in the indie-industrial workspace of ManyLabs. As is the legacy of many fabled Bay Area / Silicon Valley start-ups, think-tanks, and entreprenurial incubators, this creative collective calls its home-sweet-home the friendly confines of a garage in San Francisco's dog-friendly Soma neighborhood. After touring all three floors of their facility, including the mindblowing, "data-driven food" aquaponics lab run by Eryk Maundu of Kijani Grows, we initiated our design-thinking workshop.

Eryk Maundu demonstrates how the arduino's sensors transmit nutrient information back to an easy-to-understand computer interface. Kijani Grows is a play on the Swahili word for "green", hence the idea "green grows". (Photo Credit: J. Lanas)

The aptly titled workshop "Numbers and Narrative" was broken-into three segments: a hands-on demo working with paper circuitry, an applied-ideation session facilitated by creative process worksheets (polished and beta-tested), and finally designing for data, or a glimpse into how experimentation and fabrication can lead to students collecting and working with data.

Elisabeth Sylvan emphasizes that science is an iterative process of asking and answering questions. (Photo Credit: J. Lanas)

Three immediate take-aways:

• ManyLabs and The Fluency Project share common goals around developing "habits of mind" and "fluency" around a "process-oriented" approach to Student Learning, Data Literacy, and Technological Integration.
• In many instances it becomes almost too easy to become enamored of the technology, or maker-ed tinkering components and lose sight of the learning. A process-oriented approach to learning and constructing meaning with empathy at its core is a safeguard to losing sight of what matters most.

Pigeons vs Seagulls: A prototype fabrication and design project to facilitate student data collection and interpretation. (Photo Credit: B. Slezak)

• Quick-fix approaches to educational disparities too often throw money and an illusive promise of new technology as a panacea that will cure underperforming schools.
• Shiny new baubles are not designed to address systemic inequity. A pedagogical shift is necessary to ensure that we are meeting our students' diverse needs and cultivating a culture of curiosity that empowers students to take control of their learning.

Brett, Lauren, and I are simply transfixed as we develop ideas for our own data collection prototypes. (Photo Credit: J. Kaminsky)

• Sound research and strong practices of teaching and learning drive innovation, civic engagement, and data literacy--not just in the classroom, but in all realms of existence.
• We are helping to shape and mold the next generation of thought-leaders, innovators, and change agents. We want them to represent all of our communities and to design solutions to problems that they face, to answer burning questions that they have, and above all else, to see the power that they already have as vested stakeholders in our collective future.

How might we build inquiry muscle and cultivate a disposition of critically noticing? Authentic inquiry, case making, and advocacy are central tenants that will remake learning, transforming a system built upon compliance to one that empowers all learners to follow their curiosities. (Photo Credit: J. Lanas)

Wow-- talk about exploring just the tip of the iceberg. There is so much more to come from this site visit and trip as a whole... This is just a first draft reflection while it is fresh in my mind. Already I am envisioning the educational implications of this type of design, fabrication, and data collection process in an interdisciplinary project. I dream of empowering my students in this manner.

My gratitude to our hosts, David and Elisabeth of ManyLabs, as well as the awesome CREATE Lab Fluency team, and my incredible Head of School at Holy Family Academy who pledged her support for me to go on this Bay Area tour.

-Jennifer Lanas #thefluencyproject

21st Century Notebooking (Video Credit: NEXMAP)