Invent-abling: enabling inventiveness through craft

This latest paper, "Invent-abling: enabling inventiveness through craft", is a departure from the usual science.  

For the outreach component of the NHS Graduate Research Fellowship Program, and I've teamed up with Deren Güler to explore ways to make early STEM education more engaging and accessible for a diverse array of young people. 

We've been running workshops that merge electronics educational lessons with crafting—origami, sewing, etc. The idea was that STEM education disguised as arts-and-crafts would engage children of all genders and diverse backgrounds more equally. We felt that this would be a more natural and accessible, in contrast to simply, say, making pink breadboards. 

We learned a lot, especially about circumventing biases and preconceptions concerning gender identity and patterns of play. The hands-on and open-ended approach of these workshops was also inclusive of children with differing skill levels. We presented what we've learned at the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, as a conference paper [PDF]. You can cite it as: 

Guler, S.D. and Rule, M.E., 2013, June. Invent-abling: enabling inventiveness through craft. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children (pp. 368-371). 

The plan for the future is to establish a LLC to produce the lesson materials and components, and provide these materials to educators who wish to host similar workshops.

Edit, circa 2019: Epilogue

Thanks to Deren's dedication and persistence, this outreach program has grown into a full-fledged company, Teknikio. Teknikio provides both individual kits and classroom kits for educators. In the years since the first workshops, we've developed new workshops added many more re-usable components for kids to incorporate into their inventions.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation SPARK Award was instrumental in providing start-up capital. In 2018, Teknikio received an NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) phase I grant to prototype an Internet-of-Things (IoT) kit for the classroom. In 2019, this grant was extended to a phase II award to begin commercialization. Great things start small.