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Parenting Makers

My dad was a maker. He was a professional designer and a classically trained painter. Back then, he was designing and building window displays for Oxford Street shops. One of his things were paper sculptures. He made galleons, desert islands, trees, and fairy tale characters of exquisite detail out of carefully cut and folded snow-white sheets of fine card.

My dad was a maker. He was a professional designer and a classically trained painter. Back then, he was designing and building window displays for Oxford Street shops. One of his things were paper sculptures. He made galleons, desert islands, trees, and fairy tale characters of exquisite detail out of carefully cut and folded snow-white sheets of fine card.

He was a decent carpenter too, and he built the furniture for our living room. For us kids, he built a slide for our tiny back garden, and a rocking horse following the designs laid out by my sister. Once it was finished, it seemed so enormous to four-year-old me that I cried when my mother tried to sit me on it.

Although he didn't want us, his children, to be artists because he thought we would always be poor and miserable, he tried to instill in us his love for DIY and creative handicraft. He bought us tools and gave us leftover pieces of wood and, at the weekend, we'd go out into our back garden and toil away with hammers, saws and sandpaper, trying to build a rocket, a go-cart, a Dalek, or what have you.

Everything would go swimmingly until we would start arguing over the tools. There were three of us: my older sister, my younger brother, and me. My sister, two years my senior, would have a plan and would order us boys around. My brother, at three, was pretty bad at following instructions and would play with the tools instead of using them for what they were intended.

As for me, all I wanted to do was saw things up. This meant I would be hogging the saw all the time. My sister would yell at me to give it up, because she needed it for her project. She would yell at me again when she discovered that a piece of wood she had set aside had been sawn into tiny, unusable slivers.

I would then complain to my parents about how "Mia" was being a bully. She would counter with how it was not her fault I was stupid and then punch me. I would cry, and my brother would join in on that because he had hit himself with the hammer, stabbed himself with a screwdriver, or just because.

The point is we were too young to work efficiently as a team and ended up never building anything. I suppose that wasn't the ultimate goal anyway. My guess is that my parents just wanted us out of the house on a Sunday morning so they could enjoy some peace and quiet.

I made the same mistake of assuming that kids, given something exciting to do, will just get on with it. Not so. I taught kids English for a long time as my day job. Then I decided to teach them a bit more, this time for free, this time maker stuff, using Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, LEDs, motors and sensors [1].

I thought that children were just bored of English and that's why they'd act up in class and get on each other's nerves. I thought that the fascination of machines and having them work on their own projects in teams would make teaching them about DIY electronics smooth sailing. Boy, was I wrong.

It turns out that kids suck at cooperating across the board. You probably know already that toddlers play in parallel, not sharing and not interacting. Older kids *will* interact with each other, but, as my parents discovered, this interaction usually involves fighting.

There were the two tweens that ousted all the other students from their team and would only work with each other because everybody else, including me apparently, was "silly". Then there was the kid that annoyed his teammates with his unhealthy obsession with smoked pork products. If you turned your back, he'd stop what he was doing, get up out of his seat, and write "bacon" all over the whiteboard. When the rest of his group was researching, all he would google for was "bacon." His notes consisted of the word "bacon" repeated over and over, in various forms of capitalization and a variety of fonts, adorned with baroque marginalia made up of surprisingly well-drawn and detailed pictures of rashers. There was nothing wrong with this kid. He was a perfectly normal, bright 10-year-old. He was just going through, according to his friends, a "bacon phase." They failed to see anything strange in this at all.

These two cases were extreme, but I had to remind every single child at one point or another to not hog the tools, to not annoy their colleagues, and to try and get along.

So take it from one of your own, teachers and parents: teaching kids to be makers may be fun, but it is also infuriating.

Paul Brown

Editor in Chief

edit@raspberry-pi-geek.com

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