We took our yearly pilgrimage to the Maker Faire on Sunday. Ever since we discovered this event’s magical properties, it’s been a regular on our calendar. Yes, there were disappointments. We searched in vain for our favorite place — the room full of overstocks, rejects, and just plain junk where you could put together whatever your imagination could come up with. That didn’t happen this year. We noticed that for the kids, there were a lot more booths with very closed-end, focused projects that didn’t seem as inspiring as the open play we remembered from previous years.
But despite the disappointments, I think we got what we were looking for: yet another example of children inspired… in two very different ways.
We pretty much immediately had to split up. Our children go at different paces, and are interested in completely different things. Our son, 11, likes to survey things from a distance. He was the kid marked “slow to warm” in preschool. He needs time to adjust and consider. Our daughter, 7, flits around a room and then dives in. She was the preschooler who couldn’t be torn from an activity once she found it.
At one point when I was with our son, we spent a long, slow time in the experimental music room, playing the instruments and talking to the creators. I got a text from my husband: “She is in needle arts heaven.” He had been stuck at a booth where they handed her beautiful yarn and free knitting needles and worked with her on her knitting skills.
Later, our son went off with a friend and I relieved my husband in the inspiration-watching job. Trying to shepherd her through the Expo Hall to see what I’d missed, she was attracted by a fabulous mess of materials on the table for U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Lab. She immediately grasped the concept of the activity — design a spaceship or satellite that can withstand the heat of the sun — and started to go. She took one of the plastic cups they provided as a base and started alternating electrical tape and foam. At one point I thought perhaps we were nearing the home stretch when she started to decorate the outside with gold foil. But she turned to me and said, “I bet you think that gold is decoration. It’s actually a special sort of insulation. You won’t be able to see it when I’m done.” And sure enough, she added two more layers on top of it. In the end, she did decorate her capsule with red diamond-shaped bits of electrical tape over the silver of the outside of the capsule, and it was time to test.
The whole time, the two people manning to the booth watched her with curiosity. In the time since she’d sat down, three other children had arrived, built, tested and left. She presented her capsule. “I’m ready to test,” she said. The man stuck a probe into the capsule with great difficulty — there was a lot of insulation on that thing! We got a chart where were were to record the temperature as he placed it under two hot lights. The changes were tiny.
“That’s very well-insulated,” he remarked.
This is a girl who was going to keep her astronauts safe!
Meanwhile, our son mostly looked. He enjoyed playing with a math program on one computer, and playing with the old Commodore system in the historical computers section. But it wasn’t until much later, when we were home and his sister was in bed, that his inspiration started to show. He started to talk and talk as we sat together and built a paper star structure from Wolfram Alpha. We didn’t talk about things specific to the Maker Faire, but he was spouting ideas and questions until well after his bedtime. It was one of those nights where time took a backseat to inspiration.
I think one important part of parenting is to watch to see what inspires your child, and then help set up that situation over and over until the child is ready to grab inspiration and make it into something. You never know what the inspiration will be, and whether there will be any obvious product. A child who loves to watch car races might grow up to be a racecar mechanic, but then again, might grow up to be a nuclear physicist who enjoys smashing atoms. The important part of parenting is not to determine the product, but to provide support for the inspiration. Since not all our kids can be TV producers and video game designers, we can help them see the possibilities when we turn off the screens and get them out into the world.
