Well, hello and welcome back. We are here at Hillbrook School. My name is Bill Selleck. I am director of Technology. I'm here with Clara. Clara, who are you?
Hi. I am currently the director of Hubs at Hillbrook.
You are? And Clara, you've not always been the hub director at Hillbrook. I met you when you were hired as a math teacher. Can you give us like the quick hero's journey of Clara at Hillbrook?
Let's see. When I first started here, I taught math in the 8th grade and science actually in the 6th grade. And then I came and I was really into electives because at my last job I was teaching design through the NYP program. And so I asked if I could teach some electives courses and from there they kind of knew like I was really into it. So eventually there was a position available to be a Hub maker and design teacher and I was able to go into the Hub loft and be a full time electives teacher.
That's awesome. And so in this episode, we're going to just do a deep dive talking about making design the Hub. It's just the two of us this week. Yeah. So now your Hub director, walk us through what that looks like and what that means.
So different than an electives teacher. So as an electives teacher, I was just teaching my own classes. But as the Hub director, I'm now integrating with other teachers and in their courses how to integrate the Hub and making and the thought process and the mindset of making into their classes so that they're able to apply the learning. In addition, there's a lot of open Hub time where kids could just come and make whatever they kind of can dream about as long as we have the materials.
I love that. And if we roll way, way back, the reason we actually call it the Hub is because it's over kind of on the south side of campus that used to be just kind of some trees and dirt on the ground and not much else. And since we've built that building, the Hub, it has become like the Hub of activity and of, I would say innovation in our campus.
Yeah.
So design, what does design mean to you? I think we all have our own ideas and our own brains of what design is. Why do we do design here? What is design to you? Like frame it for us in this episode.
So I think design is this concept of solving a problem for someone else. Usually sometimes they do design to solve a problem for themselves, but there are certain criteria that you need to meet to do that. And then you go through the planning process, the making process, and even before all that, the researching process, and you just iterate through the process and you eventually present your design to your client to see if that's actually what they wanted or asked for. I also think, interestingly enough, martine, who is also a maker teacher in the Hub, we just had this conversation of, like, why do we call it design and making? Why don't we call it design and.
Oh, and so why?
That's a good question. I think we want to shift to engineering.
Okay. Away from design and making. To design and engineering.
Yeah, because there's actually a lot of engineering mindsets as well that goes into it. And he then asked me, okay, well, do you see yourself as a designer or an engineer? And I didn't study to be an engineer. I didn't even know what engineering was, actually.
Oh, my gosh. I was just going to make a confession to you. My first two years of college, I was a materials engineer. When I applied to Cal Poly, St. Louis Obispo, I didn't know what engineering was. No one used that right. Ever. Ever. My mom actually met someone at an apple farm in Sea Canyon, and he was a materials engineer, and she told me about it, and I was like, sure. I was, like, 17. I didn't know it's like, let's try that. So I actually did two years of engineering and then switched to music and was like, okay, this is my jam. Both kind of academically and also literally.
Yeah, well, mine kind of was the opposite. Like, I never knew what engineering was, but I knew I loved math. When you go to college, you have to pick a major, and I knew what math was, so I became a math major, and by the time I found out what engineering was, it's too late. Like, once you're in your second year of college, you can't become an engineer unless you want to waste another couple of years. In my heart, I would love to be an engineer.
I think you are. You are an engineer. Absolutely. The other interesting thing, the way you talk about this I think the way we talk about engineering and math and making and design and all the things with kids as young as possible is because I almost switched, actually. Halfway through college to a math major, and I had gotten through calculus four and never knew why I was doing any of the math. The only response is because it's the next page in the book. And the last math course I ever took was when the professor said, all right, we're going to spend a month on this one problem. I was like, Whoa, we're in it now. This can't exist in the world we know. But if it could, what would the answer be? I was just like, Give me something I can see. And that's tangible. And then a couple of months later, I was studying sound design and playing classical guitar, and I was like, I know why I am doing this. Right. But for engineering? Well, to that to some extent, they're like, you can build a space shuttle. And in my dorm, I had a piece of the space shuttle on the floor. It's just aluminum foil, way more than you would think it was. So I got that, but I was, like, short of building a space shuttle, what am I doing? And for math, I'm even told directly, like, this doesn't exist in the world we know. And so I had to pivot to something. Right. And I think this is where it gets really interesting, talking with kids about design and engineering and solving for people, right?
Yeah. So, interesting enough, I thought I was always good at math, and that's why I wanted to become a math major, because when I was going to school, math was about just solving the problem, getting the right answer. And I was really good about the rote stuff.
Yeah.
And then when I became a math major in college, it was about doing proofs. And I was like, what? This is not the math I remember. And I remember it was really hard for me, but it was pretty magical to actually understand math in that way after and I tried to translate it back when I became a math teacher, but a lot of people were pushing back on this idea of understanding why you're doing things or noticing patterns and trying to do investigations. They're like, no, that's not how you teach or learn math. You just give me a problem, tell me how to solve it, and let me do it 20 times.
Rinse and repeat. Yeah.
So I tried this mathematical mindset in my math class, and it was really hard to convey to people about it's about the soft skills. It's about the reflecting. How do you know something is right? How can you prove something is right? That's what math is about. And also, how do you communicate your thinking in a math in a clear way that other people can read and understand. So that's why I became, like, a making and electives teacher. It was to reach the kids who didn't necessarily like math or know math, but they liked making, and everything was more like visual and concrete, and you.
Knew why you were making a thing and what the outcome would be.
Right. And there's immediate feedback. If you cut something at the wrong angle, then you know you calculated it wrong.
Yeah. As opposed to just like, a red check, which is wrong.
Yeah. And it was the teacher who was dictating the red check or whatever. Knowing and seeing the thing really gives you immediate feedback, and they know why they're learning the math that they're learning well.
So you just said a few things that are brilliant, and we're going to dig into those and break those down. The first one is that it's not on the teacher, and then I'm going to pause that for a SEC. We also need to dig into the soft skills, and I think that is going to be the rest of the episode. But when you say they cut at the wrong angle, they don't need the teacher to tell them what's wrong. That's a pretty significant shift away from the teacher being kind of the center of gravity of a classroom and a learning experience to the students really owning their own learning.
Right.
Tell us more about that.
Well, I'm just thinking about these kids in fourth grade are really into making go carts right now.
These are human sized. Like, they fit in the go cart.
They fit in the go cart. And I said one group was already on one, another group wants to make one. And I said, okay, well, before we make this go cart, tell me how big you want this go cart, right? And they're like, big. I was like, give me a number. How many inches?
Okay.
And they just thought of a random number from their head. They're like, I want one to be 38 inches wide. I was like, okay, let's go cut this piece that's 38 inches wide. They're like, oh, that's a little bit too big. I was like, okay, well, now, you know, numbers are important. Of what else would you want? Like, you want to be able to fit in it. So your body how long are your legs? Is it going to be too far away from your legs? So, yeah, it just makes everything more concrete.
Well, and that's where number sense comes in, I think for parents about my age, kind of those that grew up, like, older than millennial, but for sure not Gen X, there's this shift in math where what we learn from math and what kids are learning now is really different.
Right.
It's almost the same computational, but the why and how it's framed is a different thing. And one shift that I think is really concrete for parents to go like, oh, got it. Is that number sense of, like, when you say 38 inches, a fourth grader is going to be able to not go from this finger to this finger and hold it out in front of their face, but to have a better idea of what 38 inches actually looks like. And my wife makes fun of me all the time for this. When I say, like, oh, it's half an inch wide, she does modern quilting, and so she's dealing with quarter inches and half inches and 8th inches and whatever all the time, and seam allowances is some tracting quarter and some tracting and eight. We even have, like, a cutting board that's I would say on our dining room table more than it's not. And so when I say half an inch, she knows what half an inch is. And I kind of do, like, maybe my pinky finger is half an inch, and maybe weekly she's teasing me that my thinking of what half an inch is. Like, my number of sense is just so far off compared to kind of her expertise around that. And I think she's an outlier with that. But I think the moral of the story here is that really having a better sense of, like, about this many and about that many, the sum of that is about this many, right? And inches and all that kind of stuff.
Yeah. Usually when I try to gauge how the measurement sense of the students are is, I tell the students to put out in their fingers, like, how long do you think five inches is? So there's 15 kids putting out different measurements. Some are really long, some are really short, and some are correct. And I tell them to look around, like, notice everybody has a different number, but you guys should all have the same distance between your fingers. So then I get on a roller, then we measure, and they're like, oh, I didn't know that. So I love making things more concrete for the kids to see.
Yeah, I love that so much. So let's jump into the soft skills. So if you're vaguely tangential related to education, you've likely heard of the four C's, right? Let's do them together. Maybe we can back and forth. So, communication, critical thinking. I was going to say critical thinking. Is creativity one of them?
And so we said creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and collaboration.
So those are the four C's, and you've blown that up there's more.
Well, how the exercise started was I was telling the students, okay, there are four C's, these soft skills that I want you to work on while you're in my class, because the jobs that exist in the future don't exist today. So, yes, measurement is important, like learning how to drill, learning how to saw is important. But some of you guys will use those skills in the future, and some of you guys won't. But these soft skills, no matter what job you have in the future, you will be using these skills. So these are the four. They all start with C. Can you guys guess what these four C's are?
You didn't tell them the four because adults have decided what those four C's are, right? Yeah.
And so some of them came up with them. But what is more amazing is they came up with ones that I had never thought about. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's also really important. And so some of them were curiosity, choice, challenge, cleanliness, conservation, calmness and celebration. So currently we have twelve C's that I made a poster of that they also deem is important.
I love that. I also asked chat GPT what you mean? Ten c's? Here's the original four, and about half of them are the ones already listed. The other four that Chat GPT added are Coding, cultural Awareness, Conflict Resolution, and Civic Engagement, which actually connects to our work around social entrepreneurship in a really interesting way, also. But I love two things about this that, again, it's less about you as teacher, and it's more about the students, what they think, what they want, and getting them more ownership of it. I also love that it's not just these four things. There's a lot more to it.
Yeah, there are so many, and they keep developing over time. The other one that somebody brought up this week was compromise.
That's a good one.
I guess it's like with collaboration, they had noticed that it was hard for them to decide two differing opinions in one group of what fabric were we going to make cornhole beanbags from? One kid wanted these two, another kid wanted those two, and they had to compromise.
Yeah. That's such an important skill. And I think it's becoming so repetitive just to hear, like, we're raising kids for a future that we can't imagine, for jobs that don't exist. But even in the last six months, there have been so many AI related jobs that this has always felt to me like something that we say in education that's like, yes, but also I don't know. But to see just hundreds of new jobs, most notably prompt engineering, being this thing that pays up to like 250,000 a year, and it did not exist six months ago, and now it's like a very in demand job, well paying job that's just in the last half year. So to imagine, as these surrogators are running past us out in the village at Hillbrook, what their careers are going to look like when they're 2030, 40, 60. That's where if we can copy and paste the next six months. And look at the change. Not even exponential, but just like same rate of change. It really is like the job they're going to need. We genuinely can't imagine. But these skills to get to your point are going to continue to be so important.
Yeah. So somebody often we ask kids, like, what do you want to be when you grow up?
That's the wrong question.
Yeah. So the question is, what problem do you want to solve when you grow up? And that will help them figure out what they want to do and how they want to get there.
Yeah, I love that. I love that. That hits kind of a design thinking approach. It's also very similar to what Annie at the Scott Center for Social Entrepreneurship asks, what matters to you? And the follow up is, what do you do about yeah, I'm over the what are you going to be when you grow up?
Yeah, I didn't know all the professions. No, the answers were doctor, firefighter, teacher, lawyer. Lawyer?
Yeah. There were like, five jobs, and both of us are counting on one hand what those five jobs were. And short of that, I mean, maybe that's why we ended up being teachers.
Those are the only things that I knew.
It was like the game of life. Well, the lawyer pays the most. So for a while, when I realized money was a thing, like in middle school, I'm like, I'm going to be a lawyer, because that pays a lot. But yeah, like, the game of life, five jobs is not a good way to raise kids.
The way I tell the kids is also, social media wasn't a thing when I was their age, so then they can imagine, like, oh, this is the reality. There are so many jobs that maybe won't exist today, but new ones that will be created in their job time.
Yeah, no, absolutely. So what are you excited about for this year? What are some maybe some projects that you have planned for us? Things that students are already working on. You mentioned kind of the go carts, like looking ahead, particularly if there's families or educators listening now of what's coming up. What are we going to check back in on? Be like, dude, this happened. This was so cool.
We're trying to work on a scope and sequence and getting 3rd, 4th, fifth, and 6th to build the foundations of all the things in the Hub. So with the foundations would come with woodworking coding, digital fabrication, and just general making and engineering. So that should be pretty exciting. I'm really also excited about our teacher PD that we do in the Hub. Last time you're there, Bill, making little.
Anytime you can do design and making and win. I am in.
Yes. So we made little race cars, and Bill got the fastest, of course, with some use of Chat GPT or no.
Well, so all I did for Chat GPT, so it was a design challenge. We were given like three bottle caps from like, a two liter bottle, a straw, a skewer, a wooden skewer, one little motor, three wheels.
That was the bottle caps.
Oh, the bottle caps.
Two Popsicle sticks, a foot of duct tape, and some batteries and a glue.
Gun, and then two batteries and a little holder for the batteries. And that was it. And it was like, make a car. So I was with Greg, our photography and yearbook teacher, and we made one that worked, and it went straight and it went fast. I noticed some people took those bottle caps and were just drilling holes, just kind of eyeballing where the center of it was. And I thought, if we want this to go fast, we really need it to be centered. And I knew there's a thing in math from high school where you could find the center of a circle. And that's all I knew. So that's where I hopped into Chat GBT and said, like, I have a circle. How do I find the center? By drawing lines. And it was you basically just draw a random line called this segment sure. From one spot to another. And then you find the center of that because you can measure that, draw a line perpendicular. And so it's just kind of a random spot. And then you do that again. You just draw, like, a random line, get 90 degrees perpendicular, draw a line, and where those 290 degree perpendicular lines intersect, that's the center. And so once I had that, I basically had an X. Then I drilled that, and I did that three times, and then that gave me the center. So the wheels, they weren't perfect, but they spun pretty well. I saw a couple of other people's wheels that, once you actually connect it to a motor and they're spinning, was like, oh, that's not super centered.
Yeah, that was fun. And we all practiced the twelve C's through that thing. We sure did. And then the next project we're going to do is ornaments.
This is for adults.
This is for adults, yeah. And so one of them is going to be laser cutting ornaments. One of them is going to be sublimating ornaments, and another one might use vinyl on the cricut to make ornaments.
Can we talk about each one of those things? Because I think this is one of those if people have made it this far into the episode, they're probably interested in making an InDesign. So, laser cutting ornaments, what does that mean? They're flat ornaments.
They're flat ornaments. Yeah, I've just looked at Cuddle. It's Cuddle Xyzcudlecuttlexyz, and they are great at making templates. So the idea is you can make an ornament with all of your family's names on it.
Oh, yeah.
And it's like a Christmas tree shape. Yes. And we export SVG, and then we could cut it out with a laser cutter.
And SVG is something that Illustrator can read that goes to our laser cutter. I actually made one of those last year, and it took hours to make by hand.
Yeah. So I think with the Cuddle template, it will probably take us about ten minutes. What? Yeah. So that should be cool.
That's amazing.
And then the sublimation would be another, I don't know, 1015 minutes, depending on for the making. But the designing part is usually the hard part.
Right. And that's also the great thing, is that there tends to be a bottleneck in maker spaces, but the bottleneck is actually not relevant because it takes so long to design. That's probably 90% of your work. And so sublimation what you're doing is, you design a thing, it can be full color. You print it out, but instead of printing it out on, like, regular color paper, you print it out using sublimation ink onto sublimation paper.
Right.
And if you don't know anything about this, you look at it and you're like, this just looks like ink and paper. Like, there's nothing particularly different or special about it. And you kind of develop an eye. You're like, oh, this is the sublimation paper. Right. You also have to flip it, mirror image. And then you put it under a heat press. Heat press, which is a giant iron, basically.
Right. So you put the ornament down, you put this piece of paper on top, and the heat is coming from the top, and you press it down and.
It kind of melts it.
Yeah. The ink transfers from the paper to the ornament.
There it is. And you can do this with ornaments, you can do this with T shirts.
You could do it with puzzles, coasters. Koozies this is how they get ink on, like, mugs. You could put your photo, do a.
Heat transfer onto a mug.
Yeah.
That feels complicated.
You need a special heat press for it.
Okay. That's probably why it's complicated.
Yeah.
Oh, very cool. So that's the sublimation. We covered that one sublimation ink. And this one, I think if you had to pick one, like, the laser cutter route is fairly complicated and expensive.
Right.
Sublimation ink. The sublimation printer wasn't that expensive.
No, it's a regular printer, actually. It's the Epson eco tank printers. And then you just put sublimation ink.
In them, but just needs to have something that can accommodate the sublimation ink at a relatively reasonable cost. So that's relatively straightforward. You can even use an iron, I would imagine. It's just not nearly as handy as.
You just don't know the temperature of that iron. So there's different temperatures depending on what you want to sublimate. And the heat press tells you tells you the temperature.
And then the last thing is using.
The Cricut and vinyl stickers.
So Cricut is like the famous on Etsy, like, I can design and it's.
Like modern day die cut machines.
Yeah.
But you can program the image you want. So with one machine, you could do I know, Bajillion images rather than before the die cut machines. It's like one piece was one image, and you could scale it to whatever you want.
And the Cricut can do it has a little blade, so it can cut shapes. It can give you, like, a template. You print it and then put it in, then it will cut it. What else can it do? You can attach a pen to it.
Yeah, you could attach a pen to it. You could cut leather with it. You could etch things on it.
What do you use most of the.
Time with students with the Cricut, I have them make vinyl stickers, but they can also have heat transfer vinyl. So it's the kind of same concept. You just put a different material into it and then they could heat transfer things onto shirts and stuff like that.
Nice. Oh, so you could just write words with just, like, vinyl sticker and then put that onto a shirt and use the Cricut to cut out the vinyl letters.
Right, right.
Yeah. And I've done versions of that at big maker Spaces, and actually getting that to work is pretty complicated. But the Cricut is actually more consumer level.
Yeah. It's like your home machine, like a lot of people can have it at home, and you could put up to a twelve x 24 piece into it because it rolls nice.
Very cool. The other hack that I love about that is that you can take Illustrator files and throw them in. I would imagine similar with Canva, you can design another software and bring it in. Because Cricut moved similar to the glowforge, we have to pay for each shape, and that gets to be a bummer very quickly. So a great workaround is design it in other software and then bring it into Cricut.
Right. So any vector design software will help you do the cutting. But what's also really cool about the Cricut that kids are loving is they make general stickers on it. So they'll draw a sticker on Procreate, and what the machine will do is you can cut it into like, a sticker that they put on their water bottle in full color. So it's like the print and cut mode.
That is so, so cool. And that for sure gets very popular very quickly. Is that also how you're doing buttons?
Yeah, sometimes we do buttons on there because if we want a perfect circle, the machine will cut the perfect circle. I can't cut a perfect circle by hand.
I'm so bad at cutting circles. Oh, my gosh.
Yeah.
And I know fourth grade, when they were doing their biography project, they made a custom button. So it was the classic trifold that you see, like, in science fairs across the world. I would imagine they walked you through who their person was, but then they also had a button that they were wearing that definitely had more personality. I feel like the trifolds were pretty standard. Like, if you're listening, you can imagine what this looked like. If you want to hear about Susan B. Anthony, panel one, panel two, panel three. But then you look at the sticker and suddenly there's like, all this personality. And there were some spicy quotes there that you wouldn't necessarily see on the trifold that felt very generic in a way. That the stickers they made. Same project, same person on the biography. But there was something about like, you're making a button you're going to wear.
Right. Well, what was cool, the other thing that I want to teach them with that project was how to use Canva. And so they designed their button on Canva. And in my mind, I had the hopes of, okay, now they're going to use Canva to make all these other things.
Yes. Evil plan. Steeple your fingers.
Yeah, they can do presentations on it. They can make T shirt designs. They could make posters to plan events just by teaching them from one. Like, they're like, oh, we can use all these things, too.
And I'm seeing it my 6th grader, she uses Canva for all the things she's making wallpapers for her iPad. She does all her presentations in Canva and not Google Slides. And I don't know that an adult said, do this or don't do this. It was just like once you get into Canva, you're like, wow, this is really cool. And Canva for education is completely free. It's like the pro version. So it's amazing.
Yeah, it's really fun.
Yeah. Well, great. Any last thoughts, Clara, about making, about design? About maybe what people can look for with students or kids or teachers listening, like, ideas they can try?
My whole big thing about design, and I'm also trying to remind myself always is, just try it and do it, and it's okay to fail. You will learn well.
And I feel the same way, actually, about technology. One of my favorite quotes was from Rush and Hurley, who's actually just north of us in Santa Clara, when he tries new technology, he'll actually name this is a new thing. I'm not an expert. Although I think he is. Right? I'm not an expert in this. I've never actually done this with kids. It's a new thing. This might work and be amazing. This might completely fail. And so he teased that up, and then he kind of pauses it and then talks to teachers in his keynote. And he's like, this might be the only example that these kids ever see of an adult failing. And so I think there's a lot of pressure that teachers put on themselves that everything has to be an excellent lesson and that the outcome always needs to be excellent and amazing, and that they need to know what the outcome is before they finish. Right. Like, that's what lesson design is. What's the outcome? There's backwards lesson designing. Here's the outcome, and then I'm going to work backwards, and then here's how I start my lesson or my unit. And sometimes that's great, but also sometimes failing or being open to failing for you as an adult and for those kids in the room is possibly like a more important lesson that they're going to learn.
Yeah, I want them to fail. If it's their first time doing something, I say it's okay. Nobody does it perfect the first time.
Yeah, I love that. That's the difference between a novice and an expert. The expert's already failed a whole bunch of times.
Yeah.
That's really the only difference. This doesn't work. This doesn't work. This doesn't work.
Now you know not to try it again.
Well, great. How can people see some of these projects and learn more?
Great question. They can follow me on Twitter. I have some of the projects on there. It's at clara? No. Which is C-L-A-R-A underscore N-G-O.
The Hillbrook Insta page at Hillbrook School.
Yeah. Hillbrook School. Yeah.
Awesome. Well, Clara, thanks for doing a deep dive, talking about design, making, engineering, why failure matters, why all these things matter. The twelve C's. The 14 C's. The 24 C's.
There might be a million later.
A million?
I don't know. If there's that many a million, let's throw C's in the dictionary.
Generative.
I don't know.
Give me 1 million things that could stand for the four C's. That's awesome. Well, Claire, thank you so much for joining us. And thank all of you for listening.
Thank you.