No more Yoda heads: Teaching students to design with meaning
'It's incumbent on us as a society to figure out creative ways in which we can leverage innovation and technology to help people in our community'
Educators and makers should adopt a 3D printing mantra: fewer tchotchkes.
Avoiding the dreaded “keychain syndrome” is critical, Winchester Thurston School’s Graig Marx told nearly 80 attendees of a 412 Ability Tech event on July 25.
Marx, a teacher at the independent school and program director of Access:Innovation, a summer program for local rising 10th-12th graders, said countless educators fall prey to a predictable pattern after receiving a 3D printer: Together with students they treat the machines as something merely capable of making “Yoda heads or ninja stars to throw.”
In lieu of creating tossable trinkets or figurines, teachers should embrace a different mindset, Winchester Thurston colleague David Piemme said. “We want students to go out and change the world.”
Small designs, sizable solutions
Under the guidance of both educators and Alexander Geht, an industrial designer and founder of Testa-Seat, several local high school students are aiming to do just that. Working alongside people with disabilities, the teens designed projects for easing daily activities.
In the past three weeks, groups of young learners built devices to assist with everyday tasks such as opening a refrigerator, taking selfies, carrying gravity bags, finding shower supplies and putting on jewelry. Each daily activity, and a design for easing performance, was demonstrated.
According to the students, opening a refrigerator often requires one to move while cracking the door. Making a modifiable handle that addresses the refrigerator’s magnetic lock, while allowing the user to maintain some distance, is one way to deal with the issue.
For those with visual impairment, the challenge of locating shower supplies could be offset by creating colored, textured, bottle covers that allow people to find and feel different items.
People who use gastronomy tubes often need gravity bags attached to large metal poles. A 3D-printed clasp can replace these bulky rods, giving users more freedom of movement.
For many jewelry wearers, the challenge of manipulating tiny clasps, links and clips could be mitigated by swapping out end pieces with magnets; in doing so, dexterity becomes less of an impediment for donning and removing necklaces and other pieces.
While there’s enjoyment in seeing the students’ creations, the “main goal for today is explaining and showing how just working with a person with a disability creates the passion in students to work on these projects,” Geht said. These students are “really changing people’s lives — they’re not just creating some engineering piece of equipment for a STEAM program.”
Repairing the world in name and deed
Helping support Friday’s program was Tikkun Olam Makers. Originating in Tel Aviv, the organization partners with communities worldwide to create and disseminate “affordable solutions to neglected challenges of people living with disabilities, the elderly and the poor.”
Geht, a member of TOM: Pittsburgh, told the Chronicle, “There is no other way that I was able to learn about disabilities than through Tikkun Olam Makers.”
Apart from supporting summer programming in Pittsburgh, the group works with students at the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and Duquesne University. Together, TOM:Pittsburgh fellows and members have made dozens of adaptive toys and specialty wheelchairs for local distribution.
Globally, TOM operates on nearly 80 campuses in 34 countries. The organization has enlisted more than 10,000 volunteers and delivered about 300,000 solutions, but the work in Pittsburgh is especially impressive, Edun Sela, TOM’s CEO, said. “In Pittsburgh there’s a tremendous ecosystem of innovation — something that we at the global scale don’t see very often — of people who have the commitment, the passion, the ability, to do the work both locally and also make an impact nationally, here in the U.S., and also globally.”
Sela splits his time between New York and Israel, but traveled to Pittsburgh for the July 25 program because he felt it was important to see what’s being accomplished here.
“What we see in Pittsburgh, in a specific way, is that you have a vibrant innovation mindset and you have an ecosystem that wants to operate as an ecosystem,” he said. “You have care professionals, you have designers, you have engineers, you have educators, who are all willing and interested to use their innovation, design and making capabilities, but also to help their community and focus these efforts on their community.”
Duplicating Pittsburgh’s cooperative practices is a goal, Sela continued. While promoting an open-source model internationally, TOM is trying to “help this community grow and this movement grow in a way that will ultimately affect as many people all over the world.”
From Israel with love
The organization, whose team is primarily located in Tel Aviv, isn’t interested in only “serving the Jewish community,” Sela said. TOM wants to “help people all over the world, and we see ourselves as leaders and orchestrators of that movement that speaks one universal language — that’s tikkun olam, repairing the world.”
An organization with a strong Israeli base and numerous college contacts isn’t immune to recent challenges. For many, campus unrest and anti-Israel sentiments have driven discourse for the past two years. TOM isn’t oblivious, its leader explained.
“It’s a challenging climate, for sure, but what we’re trying to do in this polarizing reality is actually bring people together,” Sela said. “We’re active in more than 40 campuses across the U.S., and over the course of the past two years all of our activities continued — both Jews and non-Jews participating and leading these activities and doing so in a very efficient and effective way, without these activities being disrupted.”
TOM has managed to continue, and grow, because “there is resonance for people to say, ‘We as a community can actually come together and help people in our community and potentially around the world,’” Sela said. “That’s a really powerful message, and I think it resonates with people, and that’s really the trend, or the counter-trend, if you will, to what we see in our society in general that is becoming more and more polarized.”
Having viewed Pittsburgh’s inventive and harmonious activities, Sela intends to share his observations with others.
“It’s incumbent on us as a society to figure out creative ways in which we can leverage innovation and technology to help people in our community,” he said. “Everyone can and should join this movement of people who want to do good in their community. We all can make a difference.”
Seated throughout the presentations and remarks was Rabbi Larry Freedman, director of the Joint Jewish Education Program in Pittsburgh.
Before the nearly 80 attendees broke for lunch, Freedman told the Chronicle he was inspired by both the students’ projects and their comments.
Freedman, who works with K-12 students from Congregation Beth Shalom and the unified religious schools of Rodef Shalom Congregation and Temple Sinai, acknowledged he hadn’t yet determined how to integrate Friday’s learnings into J-JEP’s curricula.
One possibility is making a sukkah more accessible. Another idea is creating a shofar holder to help individuals interested in hoisting the holiday instrument. Mostly though, he said, “I’m trying to avoid keychain syndrome.” PJC
Adam Reinherz can be reached at areinherz@pittsburghjewishchronicle.org.
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