Improvising a Classroom: Hands-On at Quelab

We recently attended a community event at Albuquerque's own home-grown hackerspace: Quelab!  The event, "Becoming an Eco-McGyver", was to teach hands-on ideas about sustainability, efficiency, and reusability.  That meant turning Quelab into a classroom.

Quelab is a house that has retrofitted into a set of workspaces.  Members of Quelab build up dynamic spaces to create what they're interested in.  The result is a shifting melange of parts, manuals, works-in-progress, and a general sense of intuitive chaos.  A very good space for the creative mind at work, but confusing and cluttered for on-lookers.

The challenge was to turn the spaces into activity areas that were easy to approach, comprehensible, and gave attendees something to walk away with and use at home.  In doing this, the members became teachers.  Quelab is a physical space without many chairs, rows of desks, or other classical classroom accoutrements.  How did Quelab's teachers turn the chaos into a classroom?

Unusual Activities that Are Accessabile and Inspired

We noticed that the activity spaces insisted on using materials found around the home.  One activity involved using an iron to fuse grocery bags together into a stronger material.  Another showed how pennies could be used to generate electicity.  In the backyard, people cooked hot dogs with mirrors while others launched plastic soda-bottle rockets with a tire pump. 

These were interesting uses of everyday, overlooked objects.  It was easy to imagine doing the same things at home.  Because the materials were so common, most exhibits had you fashion something you could take out with you.  Compare that experience to a science museum, which may have hands-on exhibits, but are usually engeneered, stationary creations that the museum owns. 

Which space are you doing more authentic and transferable activites: a museum or a hackspace?  How is your classroom like either one?

Focus of Space

The various spaces were seperately arranged around the house.  Usually there was one to a room, but in larger areas, there were seperate tables with only the gear required for the activity.  It was easy to mentally resituate oneself into a new learning experience by going from table to table.  Even cluttered spaces can be focused spaces.

Most spaces had something to read to give focus to the understandings there: typically, a short page of history and instructions would be taped to the table.  The penny/battery space, for example, had a history of the Voltaic pile.  The hologram creation table had instructions on how to use glass and a radial compass to create 3d images.  In each, a newcomer could learn with a quick glace how to make a battery with the pennies, but more detailed information was available to follow up with.

It added up to there being just enough to work with and no more, while leaving the option for more detailed discovery.

How do you focus distinct experiences in your classroom?

Teacher Presence

All the Quelab teachers were familiar with how each exhibit worked and what it was for.  They exemplified the inquiring, clever, and resourceful mindset that becomes a maker and hacker.  Any given teacher could proficiently demonstrate what could happen in each space and relate it back to ideas that would work at home.

We saw that the teachers tended to leave a lot of the main work up to the attendees.  We really appreciated the ability to work in unsual ways on our own terms after getting a little guidance.  Linda made a wine bottle bag from her own inspiration, and Cameron learned new techniques of composting that could be adapted to a system already in place at home.

Attendees would often take the intiative to teach newcomers what they were doing.  Their interest in the activity, the construction of authentic samples, and the availability of references made it easy for attendees to teach back in the absence of a Quelab teacher.

Making Classrooms

Classrooms are really just spaces where learning is available, guided, and solidified into transferable understandings.  How those spaces are configured comes from a negotiation between the teacher's expertise and the learners' own goals.  The space is important, but it is what happens inside the space that makes the real difference in learning.

Teachers at Quelab adapted their creative working space into a learning space with little difficulty and to good effect.  By using materials and methods that could be easily remembered, they helped promote transfer of understandings out into the world.  Spaces were structured to give focused experiences, so lessons from activities had a distinct impact.  Teachers freely mingled and moved while still providing structures for learning.

Quelab teachers also provided technical and historical information as environmental cues.  This allowed learners to pursue their own interests in depth or teach back with real understandings.  In this way, they promoted teach-back opportunities for the attendees.

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