Failing Forward and Taking Flight

As we look into the future of education, we see a world where innovation and creativity are king and students and teachers, alike, must know the value of failing forward. As a collective learning community, it is important that we empower one another to take risks and let go of our fears of failing. As educators, we must create an environment in which students feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them. Additionally, we should nurture the same type of environment for ourselves; an environment where teachers take the plunge into the use of educational technologies and learn to accept when things don’t go as planned and celebrate and share our growth through each explorational risk we take. If we want our students to spread their wings and fly with the winds of their intuitions, we must first show them that it can be done and that falling is inevitable and acceptable.

Sara Trowbridge & Shari Saddision

One of our major MAET Year 3 projects was to work in small groups to design and build a robotic sculpture that conveyed our vision of educational technology and its implications for the future of education. The image to the right is an accelerated animation of the robotic sculpture of our vision: Failing Forward and Taking Flight. In this representation, you’ll see a bird branching out from the safety of a tree and experiencing a cycle of challenges, successes and repeated efforts to take flight. We feel that this is a meaningful representation of the notion that reaching our goals takes time and although we are likely to experience setbacks throughout the process, we grow and become stronger from it.

Below, you will see images of our design and ideation process. We began by completing a rough sketch of our vision; the prototype.  We then used the Hummingbird Duo Base Kit to program various lights to illuminate and a servo to spin in order to put the bird into motion. After our prototype was completed and shared with our peers for feedback, we added an additional servo to enhance the experience of the little bird’s success of flying.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this project and found meaningful takeaways throughout. Not only did my partner and I create a representation with a strong, relevant message, but we actually experienced the very sentiment itself throughout the process. From start to finish, we were faced with several technical challenges we knew little about. In the end, some of our ideas were actualized, while others morphed or faded completely. Regardless, we achieved our goals and came away with a remarkable portrayal of our vision. We flapped, we flew, we fell, and we flew again!

Sharpening The Senses With Cinemagraphs

Our first big project in year 3 of the MAET program, was to use Adobe Photoshop to create cinemagraphs. For this task, we imported a video clip into Photoshop and the program converted it into a series of layered images. As the creator (and visionary), we were then challenged to choose a concentrated portion of movement to highlight, while suspending or freezing the other portions of the image. As you will see below, the effect can be very interesting to observe and sometimes even mesmerizing. As with many instances of the exploration of a new concept or tool, the process was slow, aggravating at times, but in the end, enlightening. I tackled yet another complicated task and walked away with something intriguing and a beautifully fit for the promotion of creative thinking in the classroom. The following is a commentary about my vision for the cinemagraphs I created.

I think the beauty of cinemagraphs is that they defy the ordinary. Seeing one immediately evokes a kind of shock; a recognition that what you are seeing is wrong or incorrect in some way. They arouse our senses and summon thoughts and feelings based on our experiences, our preconceived notions and our intuitions about the way things have been, are now and must be.

Throughout the chapters of Sparks of Genius, by Robert and Michelle Root-Bernstein, they speak of the importance of a well-exercised mind. A mind that is practiced in seeing images and situations in many ways, real or imagined, in person or in our mind, with all of our senses attuned. Root-Bernstein and Root-Bernstein make the point that it is easy to see (or sense) what is in front of us, but it is much harder to see what is not there or missing from a situation and that the ability to perform such a task is what makes a successful innovator.

As teachers, a crucial part of our jobs must be to create environments that promote this kind of innovative thinking. We must push ourselves and our students to think creatively about how we deliver and receive information and use it to solve problems.

One of the concepts that I teach to my fourth-grade students each year is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but can be transferred in various ways between objects. In many instances, this concept can be hard for students to grasp. Initially, they may recognize that the bulbs in their simple circuits do not light from nothing. They know that there is energy flowing to them through the wire, from the battery. However, from there, they will often lose sight of the fact that the battery is not magically creating energy; that it is composed of chemically stored energy that has been derived from yet another energy source.

By presenting these cinemagraphs to my students, I hope to provoke innate, instinctive reactions much like those I spoke of earlier. My thoughts are to present these images to my students at the beginning of the unit as a previewing activity and ask them to observe what is happening and reflect on what they see, what they don’t see and how the image feels to them. My prediction is that my students will recognize that the movements or motions of these images don’t make sense to them. I will encourage them to explore and expand upon that notion and challenge them to put into words why they feel the way they do. I imagine this tying nicely into discussions about examples of energy transfer that are easily observed and others that may be hidden or harder to see. In this vision, my students continue to learn with all of their senses and intuitions and grow as observers of the present, with much more consideration for the “unpresent.”