It had been a long time since I had looked at the inner workings of anything electronic. What happened inside a cell phone, or inside a hairdryer were all about the same kind of mystery to me. It was something that was covered by the sleek exterior of the final product and all I had to do was push buttons. I hid behind the idea that these things just weren’t up my ally (I was an artist not an engineer) when in fact it was the not knowing how these things worked, or what was hidden, that repelled me. But my curiosity started getting the better of me and I had to figure out what was going on inside.

As often happened, I brought my middle school students along for the ride. I decided to do a deconstruction project alongside a contour drawing project. Students were asked to choose one of the broken objects I’d salvaged from friends or junkyards or a thrift store, and take it apart, screw by screw. Each part they took out, they were asked to practice drawing. The students put on safety glasses, wielded their hammers and screwdrivers and got to town. At the expense of a couple of shocked students I found out about capacitors, transistors, switches and resistors. And that was just the beginning to send me down the path of uncovering what makes things work. From there I took a soldering class, a plush circuitry class and a laser cutting class. I learning a tiny bit about circuitry from a colleague and began to understand the most basic principles of electronics. At that point, in a major life shift, I built a trailer with my husband and we moved out to Providence.

Fast forward to now, thrilled to find out that there would be a spot for me in Fab Academy. In graduate school, I learned a bit more about FabLabs, researching the benefits of the studio-lab to foster independence and advocacy in young people. I watched an impassioned video by Paulo Blikstein on makerspaces, hackerspaces and Fablabs which also helped me gain a sense of some of the bigger ideas at play in the Fablab pedagogy. It gave me the excuse I have been looking for to set aside the time to learn about fabrication, CNC machine operation, HTML, programming and coding. The DIY attitude rooted in me as a child and the desire to build what I need has only grown. I am hoping this class offers me the opportunity to think through designs more fully, pick the right tools, and think about how to do more with less.

In anticipation of this course, I spent the two weeks prior to the start date going through tutorials of html, css and terminal. Much of the terminology used in this class is totally foreign to me, and one thing I realize about myself as a learner is how little I retain when I don’t know the language being used. So I had to familiarize myself with what the shell does, what the kernel does, and funny words like chmod. >haha< It has been really interesting to learn about the slapstick sense of humor in coding names and passion of coders who have hardcore ideals about the use of their opensource programs. After messing around with Dreamweaver, I decided to build my website using basic HTML supplemented with css from Bootstrap. I really wanted to have a grid and Bootstrap offered a very easy system for setting that up. Dreaweaver has a great interface and allows for working back and forth between coding and live view.

I have so much to learn, which makes for a great beginning.