Hacking Morocco: Sahara Labs brings the very first hackerspace to Morocco
Enter the doors of the airmail museum in Tarfaya, Morocco on a certain Friday this past February, and you would have seen something far from airmail — Moroccans of all ages working together on DIY engineering projects — or, as it was also known as — the first meeting of Sahara Labs: Tarfaya’s first hackerspace.
Still in its infancy, Sahara Labs has already been named one of the 8 hackerspaces changing the Arab world by Wamda.
“Sahara Labs — Tarfaya Hackerspace — is for everyone,” they say on their Facebook page, “and everyone is invited to all of our events and meetings.
[We provide] hacking tools such as 3D printer[s], Arduino, electronics, and other awesome things…
Anyone can become a member of Sahara Labs - Tarfaya Hackerspace and start making their own workshops, use our tools or do whatever they want to do. The sky is the limit.”
Sahara Labs was founded by TEDxTarfaya organizer El Wali El Alaoui Mohamed El Mostapha. “In Tarfaya,” he said, “there is only one school, one high school, and no other place to get knowledge. People here are creative — especially kids, youth and women — so this is why we built our space.” Sahara Labs is like TEDx, he said, because “TEDxTarfaya shares the ideas worth spreading and Sahara Labs makes and builds ideas worth spreading.”
What did the folks at Sahara Lab build for their inaugural meeting, you may ask? littleBits! And what are littleBits? The design of TED Fellow Ayah Bdeir, littleBits are tiny circuit boards that snap together with magnets to allow even the smallest kid to create projects complete with motors, lights, sounds, buttons, and sensors.
A littleBits racecar (Photo: littleBits)
At TED2012, Ayah explained the educational potential behind littleBits:
“Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures,” she said in her talk. “The nicest thing is how [kids] start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don’t learn at schools,” For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch.”
At Sahara Labs’s first meeting, El Wali and his partner, Bilal Ghalib, invited kids from ages 6-16 to experiment with littleBits and make their own projects. Adults worked to help kids on their way. Ayah’s talk was projected onto the wall and kids and adults fiddled with their circuits.
“Everyone got the opportunity to understand the fundamentals of electronics and create their personalized circuits,” El Wali said, “…achieving their goals by themselves.”
“By the end of the event, he said, “happiness was present on each face of participants, both in trainees and trainers. Kids and teenagers asked to take LittleBits kits back home. [We] distributed half of kits among them and kept another half for future events.
“It was just great. No better way to start a project based on shared values.”
You can’t teach sports unless you have a gym. And it’s the same idea for the 21st-century skills we want to teach kids: innovation, creativity, critical thinking, deep understanding of science and technology. If you don’t have a place to teach these skills, you can’t really do a good job.
You can’t teach those skills in a classroom with 40 chairs and a blackboard. That’s just not how scientists work; that’s not how technologists work. It’s not a good way to teach those skills.
In the same way that we can’t assess these skills with a traditional paper and pencil test, you can’t test if someone can swim well by giving them a multiple choice test.
Photos: Kids experiment in FabLabs — spaces in schools designed for project-based STEM learning (via FabLab@School and TEDxManhattanBeach)
Paulo Blikstein is head of the FabLab@School program, an extension of Stanford University’s Transformative Learning Technologies Lab. FabLab@School aims to install “low-cost digital workshop[s] equipped with laser-cutters, routers, 3D scanners, 3D milling machines, and programming tools” specially-designed for children in schools across the world, so that children will be able to learn by doing, not just hearing.
At TEDxManhattanBeach, Paulo spoke about the project, and the importance of DIY in education. From his talk, “A school for makers”:
In a world where we are surrounded by technology — technology shapes the world around us — [most of our students] know nothing about how those things work.
We dissemble something — we don’t know what’s inside. We look around — we don’t know how things work. It’s all magical. And it’s amazing that school is not doing more to teach us about how to understand science, how to understand technology, how to understand what’s around us.
…You can’t teach sports unless you have a gym. And it’s the same idea for the 21st-century skills we want to teach kids: innovation, creativity, critical thinking, deep understanding of science and technology. If you don’t have a place to teach these skills, you can’t really do a good job.
[So we build labs with] 3D printers, laser cutters, robotics, science equipment, sensors, all sorts of construction and science materials for kids to build projects, build inventions…
[A student] spent six months [in one of our labs] building [an invention of her own design.] Here, I don’t want to talk much about the technological skills that she acquired, but how this changed the way she looked at the world — not looking at technology as something magical, but looking at technology and science as a tool to improve the lives of others.
For more information on FabLabs and STEM education, watch Paulo’s entire talk below:
Former textbook writer and TEDxBeaconStreet speaker Tyler DeWitt has ideas on how we should teach science — and they’re a lot different from how most do it now. During his first year teaching high school science, a moment came during a lesson on bacteria and viruses that made him realize that what he was asking his students to read wasn’t really teaching them science at all.
“The reading sucked,” said a student. “You know what, I don’t mean that it sucks. It means that I didn’t understand a word of it. It’s boring. Um, who cares, and it sucks.”
So — he taught his students the lesson in the way he’d like to be taught — as a story — and in his TEDxBeaconStreet talk, “Hey science teachers — make it fun,” Tyler breaks down how stories, images, and demonstrations can make science not only more accessible to kids, but more memorable for everyone.
From his talk:
The language in their textbook was truly incomprehensible. If we want to summarize [the story of viruses and how they attack], we could start by saying something like, “These viruses make copies of themselves by slipping their DNA into a bacterium.”
The way this showed up in the textbook, it looked like this: “Bacteriophage replication is initiated through the introduction of viral nucleic acid into a bacterium.” That’s great, perfect for 13 year olds…You know, I keep talking about this idea of telling a story, and it’s like science communication has taken on this idea of what I call the tyranny of precision, where you can’t just tell a story….Because good storytelling is all about emotional connection. We have to convince our audience that what we’re talking about matters…
I’m currently a Ph.D. student at MIT, and I absolutely understand the importance of detailed, specific scientific communication between experts, but not when we’re trying to teach 13 year olds. If a young learner thinks that all viruses have DNA, that’s not going to ruin their chances of success in science. But if a young learner can’t understand anything in science and learns to hate it because it all sounds like this, that will ruin their chances of success.
When he’s not teaching, Tyler makes YouTube explaining scientific concepts in a way that won’t put you to sleep.
To watch his videos, click here, and don’t miss his TEDxBeaconStreet talk, which you can watch in its entirety on TED.com.
(Photos: Tyler’s cartoon science lesson)
