Low-Tech Lab

technology, n.: the branch of knowledge that deals with the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society and the environment, drawing upon such subjects as industrial arts, engineering, applied science, and pure science.

Up until this point, my library's Teen Tech Squad has been teaching 'technology' workshops, by which we meant workshops where you do stuff with computers. We decided, for kicks, that we should try interpreting 'technology' more broadly, so we held our first Teen Tech Squad Low Tech Lab in December when all school districts were on winter break.

We set up 3 stations in our meeting/storytime/community room. The first station consisted of a windtube--a box fan with a plexiglass tube attached. Anybody could grab something from our big pile o' crap (pipecleaners, tissue paper, paper cups, etc.) and shove it into the base of the tube and watch the wind from the box fan carry it up the tube and out the top.

At the second station we had a mini version of the ambitious Fruit Jams programs we hosted over the summer. Using Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu) we wrote a program that plays different notes/instruments/sounds depending on the amount of electrical impedance the sensors (Pico Boards) detected. Essentially, kids could stab wires into lemons, eggplants and bananas and see what these fruits sounded like if they could sing.

The third station was an old standby--oobleck--making a non-Newtonian fluid by mixing cornstarch and water (and a bit of food coloring.) Of course, once one kid comes running out of the meeting room with a ziploc baggie of brightly colored goo, EVERY kid in the building stampedes in to see what we are doing.

All in all we had about 30 people--kids, teens and adult--show up for a program that we did not publicize in any way, shape or form. That's pretty good turnout.

So, I know simple science experiments are a staple of library summer reading programs, but this was all kind of new to me. I can see why such programs are popular--they're pretty cheap to do, and the participants (and staff) have a lot of fun running the program. I wonder though, what the participants ultimately learn in such a workshop where there is noise and chaos and simplified (hinky) explanations of phenomena. I had coached my teen staff on the various concepts we were demonstrating after spending a couple days reading and whittling down somewhat complex scientific ideas to simple explanations. The teens were a little glazed/alarmed by my explanations, and were not comfortable enough with the concepts to try to explain them to the youth in our workshop. I'm taking for granted my fluency in sciency-words that is a result of a long-time interest/education in the sciences, but their hesitancy makes me wonder if 1)I need to prepare them better 2)the state of science education in high school is even worse than I thought. But they performed admirably with all the stuff I threw at them in the chaos of our program.

So what did our participants learn? I don't know. How do we quantify it? How do we know they really learned it? We need to get the kids to demonstrate that they're actually processing the info we're giving them. But is it our job to teach kids science? Or are we just there to provide a fun activity the keeps our younger customers from physically dismantling our building and driving our staff nuts for a few hours during winter break? This whole informal education thing is still a bit oblique to me, but we soldier on...