“It’s not working!”
“I need help!”
Those are the two sounds I’m listening for amidst the chaos. It’s loud during my volunteer shifts at the STEAM LEGO robotics program, between the sounds of kids digging through their LEGO kits and the snapping together of bricks, shouts of glee or mild sibling spats, the beeping of the Bluetooth connections and the robot sound effects (the kids love to make their robots bark or meow, and the software kindly has it built-in).
As someone whose last classroom experience was with adults on a college campus, I had an idea in my head of what the “library as classroom” might look like. I was picturing a mixture of lectures from the librarian and build time, kids who would want to hear my explanations of why their code wasn’t working. Of course, anyone who works with kids in the library (or out of it) is probably laughing at me right now. Those kids were ready to start making messes as soon as the librarian let them open the lids of their kits, and they’ve had so much fun since then.
This module, I particularly resonated with Joshua Block’s article on Embracing Messy Learning. Even while those kids are going through the on-screen instructions and example code, they run into dead ends. They try to add crazy arms to their robots that get stuck, or code blocks that will make the robot do an extra dance. They run experiments with different motor speeds. Sometimes the Bluetooth just won’t connect, and they don’t want me to turn it off and turn it back on again to fix the problem. One kid might sit and pout while the other hogs the laptop.
Block talks about the “messy stage”–when “groups do not seem to be accomplishing very much, there seems to be very little engagement or commitment to the project, and groups are not effectively communicating.” And yet, the kids are still planning, thinking, and growing during those moments of frustration. I know from experience that learning to code really means learning how to problem-solve. Over the weeks, they’ve started to identify themselves as coders and builders. And then they get to play with a meowing line-following robot with an extra battering ram that they put together with their own hands.