Month: August 2017

Conclusion & Final Recommendation

This journey has made me very optimistic about the future of Making in education. In general, I found the members of this community to be very welcoming and encouraging to one another, which was refreshing to see in the technology world. However, before this movement can be used to help address the diversity crisis in STEM I think the leaders of this movement need to do more to show the many faces that make up this community.

Gender and race had little to no effect on identity within the online community. When looking for female role models I turned to blogs and larger scale publications like Make to find inspiration. Unfortunately, these sources usually just served as a reminder that I was a female trying to navigate a very white male dominated world. If the maker community is as diverse as they claim to be, then they need to start showing it. And I mean that quite literally.

Dr. Leah Buechley, an Arduino developer and former associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, discussed this issue in a Keynote address at the Third Annual FabLearn conference at Stanford University in 2013. In this presentation, she said “the movement has grown large enough and influential enough that it’s time to turn a critical eye to the culture and the community and think about what we really want it to be and what it actually is.” Her issues stem from the fact that our definition of the word “make” is too closely tied with the for-profit business Make Media. She believes that their definition of a maker and what constitutes making is too narrow, and I could not agree more.

At the time of her keynote, Make had produced 36 issues over the span of 9 years. Over these 9 years, they have focused on a very narrow scope of traditionally masculine themes. Table 3 shows the themes that came up on the Make covers.

Table 3

Make magazine cover themes
Theme Percent of covers
Electronics 53%
Vehicles 31%
Robots 22%
Rockets 8%
Music 5%
Source: Buechley, 2013

 

Of the 36 covers that Buechley examined, 40 people were featured. 85% of the covers featured males, 15% featured females, and 0% featured people of color. The editorial staff for Make at the time reflected similar stats; of the 15 editors, 87% were male, 13% were female, and 0% were people of color (2013). As one of the leaders in this movement, this lack of diversity is problematically limiting our definition of this community, implying that white men and boys are the only people who make things. I agree with Buechley’s challenge to Make Media. They can do better, and it is there responsibility to do so.

Vincent Purcell, a teacher and maker whose work focuses on social and environmental issues, has similar concerns. Purcell argues that, “to truly realize the ethos of an open-source, democratic community, we need to educate those most in need, highlight role models who look as diverse as we as humans are, and shift power to underrepresented people who themselves can design and build appropriate solutions to critical social challenges” (2015).

After experiencing the Maker community first hand, I have remained optimistic about the movement and its potential to help us reimagine STEM education in the U.S. This movement is already helping to break down access and affordability barriers, and its foundations in openness and sharing is promoting collaboration across disciplines and encouraging people of varying skill levels to work together. However, it is hard to imagine what you cannot see. If the leaders of the maker movement can begin to show the many faces that make up this community, then I think we can attract a more diverse group of people. Makers are stronger together, and if we can diversify the making community I think we will be well on our way to rebranding STEM.

Sources

Buechley, L. (2013). Closing Keynote. [Presentation]. Presented at the Third Annual FabLearn conference at Stanford University. Stanford, California. Retrieved from http://edstream.stanford.edu/Video/Play/883b61dd951d4d3f90abeec65eead2911d

Purcell, V. (2015, November 18). What the Maker Movement Needs to Learn. Impact Design Hub. Retrieved from https://impactdesignhub.org/2015/11/18/what-the-maker-movement-needs-to-learn/

Journal 5: Completing and sharing my own project

The maker culture and Arduino community embrace all open-source values and view openness and sharing as essential tools for progress. Sharing projects of all kinds is essential to the growth and sustainability of this community. Therefore, my goal for the final phase of my journey was to create a project of my own and make it available for anyone to access online.

I decided to use the last project that I completed (called Arduino Web Server LED Control from startingelectronics.org) as a starting point for this one. In this project, the Arduino and Ethernet Shield are used as a web server. Together they serve up a simple HTML page with a form that allows you to control an LED on the breadboard that is also powered by the Arduino.

I made the following modifications to this project.

Adding Styles

With my design background, I was interested in learning ways to add CSS to the web page. I learned how to add HTML and CSS files to the SD card as templates and also learned how to add styles directly to the Arduino sketch. I felt that this addition to the previous project could be very helpful for new developers who are not familiar with CSS. Styling is rarely addressed in tutorials that I have seen. The styling that I added is very minimal, but it gets newbies set up to easily add more if they would like.

Adding a second LED

To get more familiar with the code from the original project I decided to add a second LED to the breadboard and adjust the sketch accordingly. This required me to create a new LED variable, a new HTML form element, and define a new ProcessCheckbox function. After making these changes, we now have two checkboxes on the web page, which separately control the two LEDs on the breadboard.

Making a fixed IP address accessible to outside networks

Typically, when you reference the Arduino’s IP address we are just calling an internal address. This means that only devices connected to the same network will have access to the page. I started looking into fixed IP addresses and ways to access the web page outside of my local network. This requires messing with router configuration and by nature will be a different process for each person, therefore, I did not include this in my tutorial. I was, however, able to successfully get a fixed address set up for my device!

I found the following resources very helpful in getting that configured:

Sharing the final project

I made a tutorial for the final project and posted it on instructables.com. Instructables.com was one of the easiest sites to use and ended up being the quickest way to get a tutorial posted.

Below are screenshots of the set-up and a video of the final working product. Code and tutorial are available at https://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Web-Server-LEDs/

Figure 1. Arduino Circuit Set-Up

Figure 2. Screenshot of webpage served up by the Arduino

The Maker Mindset

I learned through this process that vulnerability often comes with the openness and sharing part of the maker culture. Posting my first tutorial was very scary for me, and if I had not set this requirement for myself early on I probably would not have done it. My project is quite simple, most likely not perfectly coded, and has very little real-world use as is. In the tech world that I am used to, posting something like this would immediately be criticized by other developers. However, I am slowly learning that every accomplishment is worth sharing. The act of sharing is an important part of the learning process. Makers are simultaneously playing the role of student and teacher. And I think that is one thing that makes this maker culture different than others that I have experienced in STEM.

While this project may seem quite minuscule to compared to other projects, I hope it can help a newbie like myself learn how to make adaptions to a beginner project. With each new post, I expect my confidence to grow. I also hope that this post can help others like me overcome their hesitation to share and celebrate their work, regardless of the complexity!

 

Sources

Hammel, B. (2008). Connecting Arduino: Programming And Networking With The Ethernet Shield. CreateSpace Publishing.

Startingelectronics. (2013). Arduino Web Server LED Control. Starting Electronics. Retrieved from https://startingelectronics.org/tutorials/arduino/ethernet-shield-web-server-tutorial/web-server-LED-control/

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