Founder's Notes

Salon 01 - Five Dangerous Things Every School Should Measure

Last night marked the start of a new program that has been in the works for almost two years.

The salon format (casual, interactive, mutually supportive) proved to be the perfect context for me to share a very rough sketch of a talk that I have been working on. Working from my notes, and heavily using the whiteboard to capture feedback and "live edit" the structure of the talk itself, the 20+ participants worked with me to refine and shape not just the talk but the ideas themselves - a perfect example of collaboration!

Bratislava, Slovakia

Next month, from the 6th through the 12th, I'll be in Bratislava, working with a group that I met 12 years ago and helped get an afterschool/summer tinkering program started. They have invited me back to give the new talk I just mentioned and to participate in some workshops and salon-style conversations. Last time I was there, after the talk, I took a 4-day train tour of the country at the behest of the American State Department. I was assigned two "handlers", who turned out to be CIA field agents who were very smart and fun to travel with. We were scheduled to visit rural schools, and I had insisted on bringing a provocation to share with students. Before leaving the capitol city, I hastily assembled a vertical wind tunnel that we brought with us everywhere.

In each school I would be introduced to some staff, they would then stand by one of the walls and watch as I worked with kids to create the best flying/floating object with the odd materials that I had scrounged. Often, the teachers would scold the students. After the third school, I asked why the only students I met were Roma. My handlers explained that they were the lowest performing students at each school, and the Minister of Education wanted to see if my hands-on approach would work with them... I suddenly realized that I was an unwitting part of a political agenda.

Upon return to Bratislava, I ended up in a dinner conversation, at the American embassy, with the Minister of Education and one of his advisors. The advisor was proposing a plan to separate Roma children from their families, raise them in special boarding schools away from their culture. I politely pointed out all the times that this had been tried in the US, Canada, and Australia, and that in all situations it had never worked and that they were just going to create a worse situation in the years to come.

There was a dramatic pause, and then the Minister and his advisor started talking very rapidly in Slovakian. One of my handlers leaned over and explained that the Minister had not heard about these examples and had thought that the advisor had come up with the plan. The conversation got so heated between them that the Ambassador's wife had to step in and direct them to another room. It was like a scene in a movie, and I'm happy to report that they did not enact the separation plan.

Boxbots

Some of our students have played a valuable role in helping us develop this flexible robotics solution for use in schools anywhere. Just at the end of last year, a shipment of 300 was sent from a factory in Shenzhen, China to test the manufacturability of the current design. We learned a lot from this iteration and have been working on an updated design after successfully running multiple weeks of robotics camp this summer. One highlight was the adoption of the boxbot platform in Pajaro Valley Unified School District. This is a great example of what we mean when we say "authentic projects" and it has been my great pleasure to mentor this project that started in 2020. I'm sure you'll hear more about boxbots as our collaborators and students get introduced to them in the coming weeks.