Online DIY Challenge

I did make something this week, but it was 3D printed, so I'm going to save its story for next week's blog post. Instead, I'm going to talk today about a cosplay I made last year entirely by following an online tutorial. Just in case you're unaware (i.e., just in case I haven't blabbed about this project enough in class!), exploring cosplay--portraying a fictional character through costume creation and wearing and/or roleplay--is my contribution to the Re-Crafting Mathematics project, in which we're investigating educational connections between traditional textile crafts and math. My craft is sewing, and cosplays are what I sew, because I am a nerd and proud! This has the additional benefit of connecting to interests that many youth have in favorite media, so it could be a route to math learning that they may actually enjoy.

Cosplay is not often cited as an example of the Maker Movement, but I think the two are compatible (as well as compatible with constructionism). Both makers and cosplayers follow their interests and passions to make items that are personally meaningful, intending to share them with others. Both sometimes use online resources and in-person mentors to learn how to make their chosen project. They even both have big events where they can show off their work--Maker Faires for makers and fan conventions for cosplayers.

Just as you can find Instructables and other online tutorials to make items that are more stereotypically "maker," like laser-cut constructions, Arduino projects, or drones, you can also easily find online tutorials to create cosplays, as long as others have made the same costume you want to make. I have used online resources for all the costumes I've made so far, even if sometimes only to find reference images. In the case of my cosplay of Dirk from the webcomic Homestuck, however, I followed an online tutorial for almost every step of the process. I also did more of this costume by myself than with any other major costume I've made. The result was recognizable, but not perfect.

Here's what Dirk looks like, wearing the outfit I made:



I had already bought the shirt, and I laser-cut and 3D printed the sunglasses and sword, so the tutorials I followed were just for the hood, cape, shorts, and gauntlets. Here's where I found them:

• For the hood and cape: http://lovejoker.tumblr.com/post/36777829263/dirks-god-tier-hood-cape-tutorial
• For the shorts: http://lovejoker.tumblr.com/post/44436922287/god-tier-bloomer-tutorial
• For the gauntlets: http://www.instructables.com/id/Easy-to-Sew-Fingerless-Gloves/

It's worth noting that lovejoker put up his cape tutorial before we had seen this outfit in complete form in the webcomic, so the cape is a tiny bit inaccurate. Instead of a single point as in this tutorial, Dirk's cape has two points that extend outward to his sides. I wanted those points to look stiff and triangular rather than droopy, so I also came up with the idea to add stiff interfacing between the two layers of the cape. So these are two examples of modifications I made to the online tutorials.

To make this costume, I had to do a ton of math. I had to take the recommended measurements before buying the fabric in order to figure out how much fabric I needed in the first place. I needed to redo the measurements when drawing the pieces out on the fabric. And that's where I ran into issues. In conventional sewing, you trace a full-size pattern from paper onto your fabric. I didn't have a full-size pattern; all I had was some not-to-scale drawings online, with measurement guidelines. So as much as I measured and re-measured, a ruler wasn't going to help me with things like angles. I ended up messing up the angles for the back of the cape. I didn't realize this when I drew on or cut out the fabric because I hadn't yet sewn the pieces together and incorporated seam allowance, which makes the final product an inch or so smaller than the pieces you cut. That's another mathematical/spatial aspect of sewing that I haven't gotten the hang of. You need to be able to not only envision the two-dimensional fabric wrapping around a three-dimensional body, but also envision that fabric missing half an inch along all its edges for seam allowance. None of this was in the tutorial; basic sewing skills were assumed. But it's not something you can really learn until you try it yourself--several times!

Here's the cape, with too wide of a central angle and not enough space between the top and the midpoint.

I had tried to make this cosplay entirely by myself based on the online tutorials, the way a lot of cosplayers do when they have no one else in their lives who knows how to sew. But this was an over-ambitious goal. I ended up taking the costume to a Mending Day at our local public library, where my sewing mentor Gail Hale helped me problem-solve all sorts of things. For instance, when I told her that the online tutorial had made the front pieces of the shorts the same size as the back pieces (resulting in shorts that didn't fit me well in the back), she told me that almost no pants are ever really like that and showed me an example of some scrubs pants that someone had brought in. This shows how sometimes you need real-live help even if you're following online instructions.

Basically, there is always more to the story than the steps you find online. You often need to customize, the way I had to modify the cape shape and add stiff interfacing. The tutorials often don't help you troubleshoot problems you run into, like with the cape angles. And without an expert on hand to ask, you have no way of knowing if the tutorials are actually advocating the "wrong" way to do something that is conventionally done some other way that works better (like the size of the shorts in the back). Ultimately, however, it worked out in my case! Take a look:

I have improved the sword since this photo was taken!



 

Froebel's Gifts: Gift 2

I explored Froebel's second gift along with Josh. As you can see in the picture below, the second gift consists of a sphere, cylinder, and cube with loops for hanging so they can be suspended from a frame with string, and holes drilled in them so you can put them on a rod and slide and spin them. Our box came with an extra set of the solids, without holes or hanging loops, to explore their "pure" forms.

I hadn't known much about Froebel's Gifts before reading about them in the Inventing Kindergarten book. I had been expecting the cognitive and aesthetic dimensions, but not the spiritual ones. That made quite an impression on me, as someone who also believes that the divine can be encountered in nature. With Gift 2, we begin to see the natural harmony inherent in geometric forms. A cylinder sort of looks like what would happen if you morphed a sphere and cube together. And when you spin a suspended cube, you can see a cylinder form within the spinning after-image. When spinning a cylinder on its side, a sphere appears. These solids are all intimately related to one another, and are the basic "building blocks" (a metaphor that would not exist without Froebel) of solid geometry.

When playing with Gift 2, we tried the spinning as suggested by the instruction booklet. But we also explored physics concepts by hanging the shapes up and making them swing like pendulums or hit each other to see how every action has an equal and opposite reaction. We explored rolling to see how things move. I found the sound that the sphere made when it knocked against the box to be very aurally satisfying. We further explored sound (which is both aesthetic in the form of music and physics in the form of sound waves) by seeing how the different pieces sounded when knocked against each other. I wondered what I would have done with these shapes when I was a child. I told Josh I probably would have tried to turn them into people. I then proceeded to stack the sphere on top of the cylinder on top of the cube, in the iconic column that's pictured above. I had a sudden flash of insight and passed one of the two rods through the cylinder, giving my figure "arms." I concluded that it now looked like a person.

I'm kind of glad that the forms of nature, knowledge, and beauty are not huge deals in the second gift just yet. They become more prominent in subsequent gifts. As is clear from the description of Josh's and my play above, we regularly blended symbolic play (forms of nature, e.g., the "person" I made) with aesthetic play (forms of beauty, e.g. in the musical sounds we made) and play with natural properties (forms of knowledge, e.g., in the physics of movement and forced that we explored). It was hard to tell the difference between these forms. I think this may be true with all the rest of the gifts too, which makes me wonder why Froebel and his followers were so keen on separating the forms. It's true that each form has something unique to offer: forms of nature provide an appreciation of ordinary objects and the beginnings of symbolic thought (Vygotsky!). Forms of knowledge bring attention to scientific and mathematical properties. Forms of beauty bring an appreciation for aesthetics, symmetry, and relationships between parts and wholes. I just think it's hard to truly draw the line between the forms, and wonder if they were ever negatively constraining to the first kindergarteners.

It's interesting that the order of Froebel's gifts seems to follow a progression that begins with solid, 3D geometry, and only later introduces 2D geometry in the form of flat tiles, then lines (1D) in sticks, and finally points in the form of perforating paper (then, of course, the progression reverses in the remaining gifts). By beginning with solids, which are the most concrete and the most likely to resemble real objects that children would encounter in their everyday lives, and progressing to more abstract 2D and 1D forms, Froebel was foreseeing Piaget's progression from concrete to abstract. But then by reversing the progression, and ending once again with 3D forms in peas-work and clay, Froebel "re-valued" the concrete, as called for by Papert. Froebel truly was way ahead of his time!

Paper Circuit Lightsaber

I've made paper circuits before, and in fact at a Maker Faire once, I bought circuit stickers and a conductive pen with real silver ink. So when we made paper circuits in class, I wanted to challenge myself by going beyond the basics. Looking back at my process now, it seems to fit pretty well with Resnick's (2007) Kindergarten Spiral from this week's reading.

First, Imagine: I knew we were doing paper circuits, so I started thinking about what I could make. Since I've been so involved in geek culture and cosplay, I wanted it to be relevant to that somehow. I've recently been deeply entrenched in the Star Wars fandom, so...the obvious answer was a lightsaber! And since my favorite character is Kylo Ren, clearly I was going to start with his lightsaber. Here's what it looks like:

 

Create: Once I had the materials in my hands, I knew I wasn't going to use my stickers or pen. The conventional LEDs shed more light than the stickers, and silver wasn't the right color for this. I tried out three LEDs on a coin cell battery to see if I could get the effect I wanted. The answer was yes!

 

 



When I tried sketching out the circuit on paper, though, I realized that the copper tape would interfere with the look I was going for:

 



Then I had the idea to fold a piece of paper, put the positive legs of the LEDs on the outside, poke holes, and put the negative legs on the inside of the folded paper! I had never seen a paper circuit done this way before. I had to figure out a way to make it work without having a prior example. So even though I knew how to make paper circuits, I created a new challenge for myself because I wanted my final product to look a certain way. Here's what my outside originally looked like:

 

And the inside:

 



I made a hole in the paper over where the battery went so that the positive lead in the front could touch the positive side of the battery. But... I found it only worked when I pressed the tape in the front down so it would go through the small hole. And even then, it was temperamental, sometimes lighting only 1 or 2 of the 3 LEDs. This is where I started playing around to try to improve things.

 

Play: I tried various techniques in order to improve the connections, since I knew stronger connections would make the lights shine more easily. I reinforced the connections on the inside with additional tape, and put some tape directly on the negative side of the battery. After doing so and seeing that the circuit no longer worked, I realized I needed to move the tape so it did not touch the positive side of the battery at all. That's why there's a bit of a clump of copper tape below the battery in this picture:

 

It worked much more easily now! (I still had to press down on the battery, though) It was time to go show it off!

 

Share: I excitedly showed my lightsaber to my neighbors. Both Justin and Josh (also Star Wars fans) had pretty much guessed what it was supposed to be. I took it over to show Kylie as well, and while I was over there, I saw Charlie's project. He was making a cube with small square holes in it, and there were tabs of copper tape sticking out of the holes. Of course! I should make a tab for my battery! Behold the power of sharing! I later went back to Charlie to find out more about his project, and I ended up helping him figure out how to make his circuit work. So sharing goes both ways!

The tab bringing the positive lead through the hole, to more easily contact the positive side of the battery

 At last my circuit worked with little effort. Here is the final product:

Does that look Sith-y enough for you? :D

Reflect: In reflecting on my learning process by writing this post, I saw again and again how constructionist concepts played a role in my learning. My goal was interest-driven: I wasn't satisfied to make a simple circuit. No, I already knew how to do that. I wanted to make a lightsaber. And that required challenging myself to do something I'd never tried before: build a paper circuit on two layers. Manipulating the materials helped me to better understand both how they and how circuits work. I had to make many mistakes in order to achieve my goal. And finally, sharing turned out to be one of the most useful contributions to this project.

 

...Back to Imagine Again: I now can't help but think about how to extend this project. Perhaps I could make a blue or green lightsaber (and the silver pen would work well for those). I've also been thinking about making a full-size Kylo Ren lightsaber, ever since I cosplayed him a few weeks ago at an anime convention. I borrowed a lightsaber then; I don't have one of my own. Why not make one? The important thing is to never stop imagining!



Creative Learning Space: Bloominglabs

Bloominglabs is an adult maker/hackerspace here in Bloomington, located in a warehouse. While it has a paid membership structure, once a week on Wednesday evenings they open it up to anyone. I visited on two Wednesdays (once from 9pm-10:45pm, and the following week from 7:40-10:40pm).

The diversity of projects is incredible. The projects involve electronics, computers, 3D printing, laser cutting, woodworking, metalworking, and even sewing and painting. They even have welding and are setting things up to be able to support auto repair. It seems most projects come from individual interests or needs—for instance, one man painted with acrylic paints on laser-cut acrylic just because he wanted to test how it would turn out, while another had a busted carburetor on his motorcycle and needed to fix it. The most impressive project I saw was an electricity-generating bicycle that lights up a giant Menorah, which as far as I can tell was made only because its maker wanted to do it. It seems it’s pretty common for non-members to bring items in for repair on Wednesday nights too; I brought in a voice-changing mask I bought for a costume, but the voice-changing part wasn’t working and needed to be fixed (it just needed to be re-soldered). Another man brought a sewing machine that he couldn’t get to work, which one of the few female members of Bloominglabs helped him out with. Sometimes members work on improvements to the space. For instance, I saw someone using the wood tools to make a shelf on which he mounted a TV above the door in the big room, to keep a watch on the laser cutter, which has a camera on it.

The bicycle-powered Menorah! I couldn't get a better angle because it was tucked between a shelf and the wall.

The community ranges in age from teenagers to upper middle age, and they all seemed very welcoming and friendly. Most of them are men, though I know one female member well and saw or heard of a few more during my visits. Some people seemed content to just hang out and watch videos together. Others helped each other out with projects, like an expert welder helping weld a broken piece of the motorcycle carburetor, or the woman helping with the sewing machine. Others worked on projects alone, such as a couple people modeling objects for the laser cutter or 3D printer on their computers. Visitors are always welcome on Wednesday nights, and there’s always someone willing to show them around. When I walked in the first week and explained my problem, people seemed to know who would be most helpful to me, and he immediately wrapped up what he was doing and turned to my project. There seems to be opportunity both for watching an expert help you with your project, as I did, and learning from them how to do it yourself. They also seemed very willing to help each other and work on the same project together depending on their strengths. For instance, one young man was taking apart his broken PlayStation 3. He occasionally called over a friend to help him with the difficult bits. Once he was done disassembling it, he gave it to an expert in electronics to solder the broken parts. They seemed to divide labor based on skillset rather than on authority. There were no clear leadership structures or hierarchies that I could see.

Besides values of general friendliness, there also seems to be a DIY spirit, a quirkiness, and an openness to ideas and guests, no matter who they are or how crazy the ideas. There’s also an etiquette to cleaning up your tools (there were signs all over saying, “Don’t maroon tools on uncharted workspaces!”). Each tool has its proper place, or at least an area where others like it are kept (like a wall on which you hang screwdrivers and other hand tools).

These posters showcase some of Bloominglabs' values: a repair-it-yourself spirit and an expectation to clean up after yourself.

The space is large, loud, and eclectic. There’s a front room with large tables pushed together in the middle, where people gather with their computers and smaller-scale projects. The large table supports social interaction, to help build a more cohesive community and a spirit of helping each other. There are wires everywhere here, as well as shelves, old arcade game consoles, screens, and a 3D printer. A smaller room to the side of this one houses the laser cutter with its ventilation system. In the large, main space, there are huge power tools for working with wood, metal, vehicles, etc., as well as more ordinary hand tools. I spotted one sewing machine (besides the one the man brought in), but no fabric or thread, except for a lone spool of conductive thread that no one was using. There are also quirky objects spread around the space, like a USB hub made out of an old lamp, or giant circuit boards that decorate the walls like framed art. While members claim that the space is more organized than it used to be, thanks to the untiring efforts of a man who spends almost every day in the space, it is still crowded and cluttered with stuff. The function the clutter serves within the culture of this space is to provide constant access and inspiration, even if not for the exact thing you’re looking for, at least to the look and spirit of the kind of thing you could be making. There are some kinds of projects that are less likely to occur to you in the space's current material configuration, such as more crafty low-tech projects, but there are even exceptions to that, with the painted laser-cut acrylic, a small table loom built from scratch, and a project I heard about involving light-up fairy wings. So the creative process is well supported, and even if the materials may not seem to call out for certain types of projects, the people in the space are receptive to any idea and will help your dreams become reality.

Part of Bloominglabs' large main space

 

Dollhouse-To-Think-With

When I was quite young, perhaps 3 or so, my parents bought me a large Playskool dollhouse for Christmas. Molded out of white and pastel plastics, it came with several rooms, furniture, and a doll family consisting of a mother, father, baby, and teenage girl who I guess was supposed to be the babysitter. Over the years I accumulated more dolls and pieces to add to the dollhouse. It became one of the main foci of my play for the next several years.

My dollhouse looked something like this, though this one has more pieces than mine did.

 Playing with the dollhouse probably helped structure my ideas about gender roles and what families are like, but that's not what I remember most fondly about it. Instead, I remember how much fun I had making the dolls characters in my stories. Even if most of the stories I played out with them were about mundane everyday life, I enjoyed having characters in my control and putting them in various situations.

My story-making wasn't limited to the dollhouse; it's just the oldest and longest-running example I remember. I did the same with baby dolls, Barbies, stuffed animals, McDonald's toys, imaginary friends, and nearly anything I could personify. While media helped me figure out what a story was, these toys helped me to create my own. I really think pretend play with these toys helped me to structure my thinking in a narrative manner, something that persists to this day. I also still greatly value good stories and imagination. But more importantly, by taking on the perspectives of these toys-as-characters, I practiced empathy, perspective-taking, and emotional skills. Because I was the oldest child, it was several years before my sister was old enough to play with me. So pretending with my toys and imaginary friends was how I started to practice getting along with people.

I believe these experiences were crucial for my development, both as a storyteller, and as a person who tries to get along with others and make a difference in their lives. Narrative is still my favorite form of literature both to consume and write, and concrete examples described as narratives are best at helping me to understand complex phenomena. And I still think of my life primarily in terms of the way I relate to other people. So the dollhouse and other toys like it helped me structure my thinking both cognitively and emotionally.

Here I am, c. 1994, with the Playskool dollhouse beside me.

How I Think Learning Works: A Diagram and a Story

Imagine a girl, a teenager, perhaps. She wants to learn a new skill: sewing. In order to truly learn, there must be a relatively permanent change within her as an individual. In this case, because the content to be learned does not involve mere declarative facts, the change must be both mental/internal and physical/external.

The girl wants to learn how to sew because she wants to make a cosplay costume. This illustrates that the learning process must have a fairly deliberate starting point: activation. This can be as simple as getting a classroom's attention so they will remember the material, but it works better when it comes from a learner's own intrinsic motivation, goals, and interests. The girl is motivated because she and her friends love a certain TV show, and they want to express their love by dressing up as characters from that show. She has to sew the costume, because it is strange enough that assembling it from already-existing pieces of clothing would be impossible. Besides, all her friends are sewing their costumes too, so she wants to learn along with them.

The girl finds an online tutorial for how to make the costume. She buys the fabric recommended in the tutorial, and discovers that there are hints about how to work with the fabric embedded within the material itself. For instance, one side of the fabric looks better than the other, implying that only one side of the fabric should face outward. Fabric is flat, but it can also (and must also) curve. Even examining the way her purchased clothing is put together shows her some things about how sewing works, like how seams are almost always on the inside of the garment. Knowledge, then, does not always exist only in the individual mind. It can be distributed within the minds of others, within resources, and within the nature of materials themselves. Knowing how to find this distributed knowledge is just as important as—and can be done instead of—memorizing it.

Now comes the hard part: actually doing the sewing. The permanent change indicating that learning has occurred may not happen until the learner actually practices/otherwise externally demonstrates the knowledge/skill. The girl follows online how-to-sew tutorials in order to practice with the sewing machine inherited from her grandmother, and not until she does so does she understand, for instance, why most sewing is done with the fabric inside-out.

Finally, the girl finishes her costume, and has a blast wearing it at a fan convention with her friends. This has been possible not just because of her internal state, but also because of external supports from the sociocultural context. The TV show she likes provided inspiration for the costume. The convention provided a context in which to wear it. Her friends and family helped and supported her. And ultimately, she has begun to appropriate the norms practices of sewers and cosplayers, becoming a fuller member of the cosplay community.

The fun she feels while working on and wearing the costume are not secondary to the more “cognitive” and physical skills she’s learned. These positive emotions represent a relationship with the new skill that, while not always strictly necessary in order to learn, is crucial for developing an identity as the kind of person who likes and is able to do such things.

All of these elements—mind, activation, distributed cognition, doing/making, sociocultural context, and emotion/identity—are complexly intertwined within the learning process, and all are equally important.

(In order to keep track of the process of making this story/diagram, here is the "first draft" of the diagram I drew last week in class:)