User Generated Education

Toy take apart and hacking is a high engagement activity that works for kids of all ages, including adults who haven’t lost their sense of kid, and both genders. I have done it multiple times during my summer maker camp for elementary level kids, with my gifted elementary students, and at conferences as part of teacher professional development.

Here is a description of this activity from the tinkering studio at the Exploratorium:

Do you ever wonder what’s inside your toys? You’ll make some exciting and surprising discoveries about their inner parts when you don some safety goggles and get started dissecting your old stuffed animal, remote controlled car, or singing Santa. Use screwdrivers, seam rippers, scissors, and saws to remove your toy’s insides. Check out the mechanisms, circuit boards, computer chips, lights, and wires you find inside. Once you’ve fully dissected your toy, you can use the toy’s parts, your tools, and your imagination to create a new original plaything.  (https://tinkering.exploratorium.edu/toy-take-apart)

Standards Addressed

Toy take apart and hacking addresses a lot of cross curricular standards including:

• Ask questions, make observations, and gather information about a situation people want to change to define a simple problem that can be solved through the development of a new or improved object or tool. (NGSS)
• Develop a simple sketch, drawing, or physical model to illustrate how the shape of an object helps it function as needed to solve a given problem. (NGSS)
• Define a simple design problem reflecting a need or a want that includes specified criteria for success and constraints on materials, time, or cost. (NGSS)
  
• Report on a topic or text, tell a story, or recount an experience in an organized manner, using appropriate facts and relevant, descriptive details to support main ideas or themes; speak clearly at an understandable pace. (ELA CCSS)
• Write informative/explanatory texts to examine a topic and convey ideas and information clearly. (ELA CCSS)
• Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences. (ELA CCSS)
• Elaborate, refine, analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts. (21st Century Skills)
• Act on creative ideas to make a tangible and useful contribution to the field in which the innovation will occur. (21st Century Skills)
• Demonstrate originality and inventiveness in work and understand the real world limits to adopting new ideas. (21st Century Skills)
• View failure as an opportunity to learn; understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes. (21st Century Skills)
• Solve different kinds of non-familiar problems in both conventional and innovative ways. (21st Century Skills)

Frontloading and Framing the Experience

(For background information about this idea, see Don’t Leave Learning Up to Chance: Framing and Reflection)

To help frontload and frame this activity, participants are given the following scenario:

You have been hired to create the newest, most exciting handheld game to hit the market in years. You can decide the type of game, the population for whom you want to design it for – age range and gender, the goal of the game, the rules, any functions. The sky is the limit but there is one caveat – you need to recycle parts from old handheld games, ones made a decade or two ago, to create your prototype. Here are some questions to consider as you make your prototype –

• How will you decide what to make?
• What factors do you need to consider as you make your game?
• What actions can you take if you get stuck using the tools? Coming up with ideas?
• How can you ask for help as well as support others during the toy take apart and hacking?

How-To

I like to use the older handheld games as they contain lots of interesting parts and can be bought fairly cheaply in lots through ebay. First, the toys are passed around so participants can examine and learn about them.

Participants select the toy they want to take apart. Using the various screw drivers, scissors, wire cutters, and hammers that have been laid out on a work table, the toys are taken apart as much as they can be taken apart.

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After the participants fully take apart their toys, they are asked to create a new game out of their parts and parts discarded by the other participants. I use hot glue guns but soldering of parts can be done, too.

The criteria that I give to the participants for their game creation includes:

• The creation must be a new game – one that the participant hasn’t heard of nor played.
• The parts need to be used creatively – not the same way they were used in the original game.
• The specifications for the game need to be developed and written as a poster are –
  • Name of the Game
  • Age Level Recommendations
  • The Rules
  • How to Play

Participants then share their designs with the rest of the group.

Reflection

(For background information about this idea, see Don’t Leave Learning Up to Chance: Framing and Reflection)

After finishing their projects and sharing, participants can reflect on their experiences through:

Through a conversation with other participants; a presentation using Google Slides, Prezi, or Adobe Spark; or a blog post – your choice, address the following questions –

• Describe the game you made – why did you make that type of game?
• What changes did you make to your original design? Why?
• Did you get stuck at any point during the activity? Taking apart the toy? Coming up with a design? Using the tools? Making your game? If so, how did you get unstuck?
• What will you do the same/differently if you do a similar activity in the future?

Here are some of the reflective blogs 5th and 6th graders wrote about this activity:

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More Information

For more information on toy take apart and hacking,  visit http://www.makereducation.com/toy-take-apart.html.