It was Friday morning in the Akelarre Hostel, Bilbao. We were having breakfast waiting for the beginning of the Bilbao Maker Fair 2016. As the fair would start later in the afternoon, there was few of us at the hostel this morning. Yet, we were sitting at the table with another man (who turned out to be the artist Jose Manuel Gonzalez) and started chitchatting.
At some point, we asked what he was doing in Bilbao and he told us that he also came to the Maker Fair. We discovered he was a maker and an artist in his spare time outside of his work as an art teacher in a secondary school. While discussing his endeavours as a maker, we inevitably started an interesting conversation about the complexities behind having social innovation in traditional schools. Although he told that he uses Arduino for teaching programming languages for artistic purposes to his students, there were two main problems that made engaging with this new practice somehow complicated in this kind of space. First, there was not enough investment and interest from governments in applying innovative reforms in the educational system, which resulted in teachers not being interested in developing novel strategies to engage with students. At the same time, the bureaucratic regime that reigns in the traditional school seems to stall any particular effort on the part of those teachers to introduce such new practices and methods.
The second main issue was the social reality of each student that includes students at the age of 15 who already have children and have to find a way of supporting themselves, as well as students with varied cultural backgrounds that clash with their classmates because of issues like difference in language, religion, gender equality, among other problematic situations that delay engagement and learning.
We met him again during the fair on Saturday and Sunday. During the fair, he presented his project called Caleiduino
Caleiduino is an interactive digital kaleidoscope that transforms the user´s movements into the (programmed) visuals that the kaleidoscope came to be known for. While doing that it also produces sound made with Arduino. It comes as an educational kit, but can also be made in a do-it-yourself manner, by following the instructions on the webpage. For him, Calenduino is a way to bring fun at the moment of learning how to use an electronic tool and how to get in contact with a programming language in a different way than simply using robots. This is due to the fact that Caleiduino is done in a ludic, playful and creative way that show a direct output to whom want to try to build it.
On Sunday I managed to have a longer conversation with him during the fair. For him the makers and the whole ideology behind the do-it-yourself (DIY) movement could bring this novelty and improvement in education through their focus on interdisciplinarity and learning by doing, as students could see real input-output while making things in practice, e.g. programming in Arduinos for creating art but at the same time learning elements from other disciplines.
He was very excited to be able to participate in the Maker Fair as he could encounter more people with similar worries and common interests. However, when asked if the Maker fair would be the future of a change in the way kids get in contact with art and technology he was quite dubious because of the sporadic nature of such fairs. For him, Maker fairs are important spaces for networking, understanding what has been done and learning from it with others. But solely these gatherings are not enough for such substantial changes, especially when they concern kids engagement with art and technology. In order to keep the interest of young people alive, and to improve education through combination of art, technology and interdisciplinarity it would be necessary to have more often events like this one, and more interest from different social institutions such as schools, social centres, and the family in participating actively in these kind of process.
