Tuesday, September 8, 2015

1. Book Review

Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Innovation (Thomas, 2014) is an extremely interesting read. As I recall from my reading, the author AnnMarie Thomas is a mother as well as an educator. She writes from various perspectives. Being a maker herself, she writes from the perspective of a maker observing other makers. Yet as a mother, she writes as a maker mom who is learning to raise her kids to also follow in her footsteps. Being an educator, she writes in the perspective of a researcher and observer. She interviewed various makers who also have kids of their own and are also learning to raise them as makers. Throughout the book, I could just see all these perspectives playing specific roles at specific instances she mentioned but at the same time, the collide into each other, sometimes having several roles appear at the same time.


In this book, it seemed to me that the tools, materials, and products that were used and created could have been anything. Tools ranged from the simple paper and pencil to computers and math, sewing machines to eating utensils. Materials mentioned comprised of wooden blocks, tape, dough, broken electronics, and even gunpowder! And what did they create with these? Alien maps, sports score algorithms, clothes, working electronics, Squishy circuits, and rockets and explosives. The items mentioned were definitely a wide range and variety and it seemed to have roots in the maker's childhood activities.



AnnMarie Thomas included many childhood stories of makers, including her own. Many of them were kids back in the day when there were no computers. These makers are now probably between the ages of 35 to 50 and many of them have their own children or are educators who teach PK-12 and university courses about making. Since the book is more focused on how to make kids makers, which could be anything they had interest in, the types of making was also widely varied from a museum exhibit director who is also a seamstress, to a young owner of an engineering consultancy, focused on industrial machine design projects.



AnnMarie Thomas puts it very well on the first page of her book: "Makers make things... It isn't a title conveyed after passing some test or degree program; rather, it is a self-identification". This definition is very clear and straightforward and I agree whole-heartedly with it. Furthermore, according to AnnMarie Thomas, she provides a list of traits that makers generally have. Though it is not an exhaustive list neither will every item apply to every single maker but I feel that it is sufficient. Makers are curious, playful, willing to take on risk and responsibility, persistent, resourceful, sharing, and optimistic.



I definitely appreciate the content of her writing and found it to be very helpful and useful not only for when I babysit my nieces, nor for when I take care of the kids at Sunday church service, but even for my own future family and future children. This is such an awesome way to raise kids, allowing them to do what they want to do in order to explore and learn and play at the same time. I grew up in a really sheltered environment so I did not have the opportunity to grow the way these people did as makers. But somehow, I believe somewhere along the way, especially because of the curiosity my father instilled in me since childhood, I have an extremely inquisitive mind. I always wonder "what is this", "what does it do", "how does it work", "why did someone create it", "why did they create it this way", "what if it was created that way", "what if it does this instead", etc. Due to this constant desire to understand things, the little maker in me still managed to grow over the years. I wouldn't call myself a full-fledged maker due to the many prohibitions in my activities during childhood. But still, I somehow made stuff. I drew cartoons, made wooden boxes with only skewer sticks and string, machine-sewed a wallet and a stuffed animal shirt, hand-designed ambigrams, made 4-page cards / bookmarks without staples nor glue. Eventually the things I made and did got more and more advanced. I made a bigger version of the wooden boxes with dowels, repaired cracked iphone / ipad screens, filmed a short in Australia about how my sister and brother-in-law met, made their wedding ring box, etc. All these little projects stemmed from the little maker in me I didn't know existed. But I do remember, just as AnnMarie Thomas has heard from all the makers she interviewed, the great sense of accomplishment and pride of having made or fixed something all on my own through tinkering and just lots of thinking. So as I read this book, I felt that it was constantly describing me (except for taking risks, I was not allowed to do much of that). I would like to learn from these makers' childhood experiences as well as how they are raising their kids now and apply these to my own future experiences.

1 comment:

  1. Loved reading about your past experiences, as well as how diverse they were!

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