John Todd Langdon

My first ‘maker’ project was as an eight-year-old who was given a crystal set radio that my older cousin tried to get to work and could not. It used a coil wound around a Quaker Oats box, and a galena crystal and “cat’s whisker” electrode for a detector. I had a very favorable location for reception via crystal set: Corpus Christi, Texas. I had some of the highest ground conductivity soil in the United States, a pair of ragged old palm trees to support a wire antenna, and the Bell System telephone ground rod installed right outside my bedroom window. I had hours of time to tinker, and after my parents thought I had gone to sleep I donned the headphones and searched for any radio signal I could find.

 

My devotion to trial and error soon rewarded me with broadcasts of baseball games from Houston, local radio shows, and Wolf Man Jack, on radio station XEG broadcasting from Saddleback Mountain near Monterrey. This was one of the most powerful broadcast stations in the world at the time, and after the sun set, it boomed into my little signal powered receiver from 250 miles away. I was fascinated. (The modern version of this radio appears here: http://boyslife.org/hobbies-projects/projects/40/catch-some-radio-waves/ )

This led to listening to short wave radio broadcasts from all over the world. I listened to the Voice of America, the BBC, and Radio Moscow, and heard vastly different version of the “news” about the events of the day. It was a marvelous window to the world outside my little hometown.  I listened to amateur radio operators both local and far away.

​

When I was a boy scout, the radio merit badge was my first.  I learned Morse code and listened to amateur signals from Russia and India, buzzing with auroral flutter from their passage through the artic ionosphere. My insatiable curiosity led me to try to learn all about electronics and radio, and soon I had my own license to transmit. This lead to an afterschool job at an electronics distributor, essentially an apprenticeship. I learned much more from this job than I ever did in school – it was all experiments and projects that had to work for my employer to collect revenue.  I read about the Northern Lights and the Kennely Heaviside layer, and found I had already heard evidence of both myself in those fluttery signals coming over the pole.

A local Explorer post was given permission to use one of the backup NASA tracking station site dish antennas to listen directly to the “S-band” transmissions from an Apollo spacecraft. Later, when a professor asked what personal and direct evidence we had about “accepted scientific facts” and controversies such as if the Apollo landing was faked, I had personally observed the doppler shift on the signals from the Apollo command module. I could not say if they landed on the moon, but I could say from personal observation that they went around it.

​

I realized that I had direct experience and evidence about things that most folks only heard about second or third hand.  I had observed what others only memorized.  In my time at the University of Texas, I had ways to remember things that most students did not. My connection to the lessons in physics was much stronger than average. But it wasn’t just science that benefited from my “maker” background, I also had direct experience with propaganda, politics, and censorship.

​

I want to bring that same kind of experience to my students – to have them experience firsthand the possibilities, strengths and weaknesses of technology.  Making means not just carrying out inquiry based learning, but being able to tinker and play in a learning environment.  To be comfortable and familiar enough with tools and materials to create new things. To see the direct connection between math and art, and be able to work with both.

Technology has been one of the most powerful forces for social change throughout history.  The horse collar changed the world in ways its inventor never anticipated. As did the automobile - changing social mores and culture as much as it did transportation. So, too, will many technologies and inventions yet undiscovered. I want my students to be part of that future.

​

I also believe that “making” leads the way to a new educational model which is much more suited to the modern, global world.   For hundreds of years, education has been on a “tops down, learn a skill through completing a drill” activity. Teachers were gatekeepers, deciding the sequence and specifics of what students could learn, and dictating what students were and were not “ready for”. This gave the educator lots of control, but very often stunted or even extinguished student enthusiasm.  I believe this model developed because many teachers own understanding was limited to their previous “skill and drill” experience, so they had little way to place things in context or to connect things to a student’s life experiences.  Although telling a student “you’re not ready for that” may have been arisen out of good intentions, it may also have been that the teacher was not ready to go beyond their specific course objectives.  Especially in many scientific disciplines, students were not deemed ready to even encounter certain concepts until after having completed certain courses of study.  This may have served educational institutions well, but perhaps not the students.

​

It has been said that the best science takes place in the interstices between traditional disciplines, and I believe that is true. I also think some of the best learning can take place in the gap between what a student is familiar with, and what they are interested in but do not yet know.  This is beyond what is sometimes called the zone of proximal development, and is a new experience and new context for constructing knowledge.  The experimental nature of working in a maker space, of simply trying things without completely understanding how they work, is essential in constructing the kind of working set of knowledge that today’s world requires.

An example of the traditional model, in a lab environment, is a traditional “cookbook” chemistry lab exercise, otherwise known as a zeroth level of inquiry model.  The student is given a canned procedure to follow, told what data to gather, and what results to expect, and that the results should confirm and verify something they have already learned through traditional direct teaching.  From this is progression from the confirmation model to structured, guided, and open inquiry models, where the students learn more and more from the inquiry exercise itself. A maker space is the next level of openness, somewhere between open inquiry and play. When properly used, specific leaning objectives can be met even when there is little or no structure to the activity.

​

As Paulo Blikstein suggests in “Digital Fabrication and ‘Making’ in Education: The Democratization of Invention”[i], the ultimate maker lab would allow the students to build atom by atom, like constructing an algorithm in a programming language.  Each experiment would be its own instant assessment, and suggest the next experiment.  The knowledge constructed in the student’s mind would be immediately tested, validated, and tied to very memorable experiences. I would like to see the student’s need for “direct teaching” be driven by what they discover in the lab.

​

This article also touches on one of my personal philosophies of educating engineers: sometimes you have to “let them flounder” as they search for answers.  In my brief teaching experiences at the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders, I discovered that many of the students had a basic misconception about engineering. The believed that an engineer was someone who already knows the solutions to problems. That an engineer could read a problem description or design brief and immediately begin construction of a viable solution.  So, the main point of one of the lessons there was to teach that trial and error was a central part of any design process. I used a very simple technology that could be observed, used, experiments with, and modified without any real study or even understanding of all the underlying science. The point was to teach the students to just jump in and try things.

​

A proper maker educational space is inherently that way. It would never occur to the students not try things, nor to quit in frustration after just a few tries.  I believe that in the world of the future, science and technology will be too fluid and dynamic for a standardized skill training approach to properly prepare students. It will take solution mindset combined with continuous learning and a result oriented set of values to succeed.

​

My lessons developed about wireless were intended to address the fact that in today's world everyone uses wireless technology, but very few know how it works.  They should be familiar with it through he kinds of hands-on experience I had, and with today;'s technology it is even easier to do. 

​

I also believe that the technologies around energy and its wider availability will be the most important technical, political and ethical issue for the next 100 years.  A society’s standard or living in the modern world is directly proportional to its access to and ability to manipulate and use energy.  Freeman Dyson, an physicist and futurist, wrote that if we encountered extraterrestrial civilizations we could classify their technology level of achievement by how much energy they controlled.  A class one civilization, as we currently are, could use energy at a level lower than the output of their sun. A class two civilization could capture and use all the output of their star. He envisioned a “Dyson sphere” that surrounded a star, with an inner surface facing inward that captured and used the entire energy output of their star. If there were such highly advanced civilizations, we might never see or hear them, since all the radiation from their star would never reach us.  Finally, a truly advanced, class three civilization could generate and use more energy than the output of one star.

​

I believe in the concept of energy justice – that each person should have access to enough energy to read at night, wash themselves and their clothes, heat and cool their living space, have access to clean drinking water, and be able to travel to other locales.  Access to energy the real reason modern civilizations have much better infant mortality rates.   I completely reject the concept of happy peasants at one with nature, who live in huts and don’t need as much per capita energy and technology as, for example, the United States currently uses. It is political Pablum, promulgated by those who already have highly developed economies and want to keep other economies in poverty.   The growing middle classes in Asia and Africa aspire to the same standard of living that the “Western world” currently has, and the only way that this can be achieved is by giving them access to the same level of per capita energy consumption.

The total number of people and total amounts of energy required are staggering[ii], and the consequences of not meeting this challenge are poverty, famine, and war.  We must develop energy technologies that can meet this challenge at lower costs and with less environment consequences than today’s fossil fuels. Energy Justice does not mean simple eliminating fossil fuels and relegating everyone except the elite few to a lower standard of living.  It means finding energy sources that can replaceme fossil fuels and allow a higher standard of living for all. This could also allow widespread access to clean water by making desalinization and reverse osmosis purification affordable for all.

 

 

[i] Blikstein, P. (2013). “Digital Fabrication and ’Making’ in Education: The Democratization of Invention”. In J. Walter-Herrmann & C. Büching (Eds.), FabLabs: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors. Bielefeld: Transcript Publishers

[ii] “The Terawatt Challenge”, by Mike Feld, Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering Magazine, Winter 2009