Emily Pilloton needed to teach fundamental social and life skills to her students, so the teacher and designer did that the only way she knew how — through an innovative, hands-on shop class.
Now, the shop class has followed her from Bertie County, N.C., to Berkeley, Calif., where she founded Camp H, an after-school camp that teaches design and building skills to girls 9 to 12 years old. Why girls? Pilloton told Slate she noticed her male students were more willing to readily tackle problems while female students usually wanted a set of directions or steps before attempting the project. “There aren’t enough spaces for girls to be together as girls doing things that feel audacious,” Pilloton told Slate. “I don’t want girls to just be given a hammer and say ‘You’re holding a hammer, that’s awesome!’ I want to teach them how to weld. And to work on projects that don’t feel artsy and craftsy. Not like straight-up wood shop, but to balance the creative and the artistic side.”
Pilloton is now teaching an after-school class that will teach girls “to fix the things that need repair, installation, and maintenance in our everyday lives,” which will include checking the air pressure in tires, fun experiments and core math and science concepts — subjects that students often become bored with during Pilloton’s target age group. In the future, the program plans to have students build furniture and lighting for women’s shelters.
“I want the projects either to have a personal connection or to teach the girls about being a citizen,” Pilloton told Slate. “I will never ever just give a girl or a student a set of plans and tell her to follow instructions.”
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Tag: design education
These Kids Are Designing the Future — and 3-D Printing It in Their Classroom
How exactly does a 3-D printer work? You can ask the students at Glen Grove Elementary School, who are using one to solve potential urban problems. The students are taking part in the City X Project, an international educational program that challenges kids to come up with ideas for new devices that could help the imaginary residents of City X. The students use tablets to design their objects, then make models out of clay. Then they can use the 3-D printer to create real plastic prototypes. The kids at Glen Grove, outside of Chicago, are working on a device that would clean up a river after an oil spill, for example, and a pair of headphones that a city dweller might use to dampen urban din. The overall goal of the City X program is to use technology to teach students valuable problem-solving skills. It’s not only a great way to get students thinking and learning about design, but also to prepare them to work with the cities and technology of the future. Watching the kids build their models layer by layer with the 3-D printer, one teacher described it as the “coolest thing in the world.”
Watch These Kids Be Better City Planners Than the Pros
Watch this inspiring video to follow 16-year-old Alexa around the playground that she and other students are designing and building. They’re in Philadelphia, the backyard of Public Workshop, a program that creates learning opportunities outside the classroom to educate students as citizens, leaders and designers.