Solar Bot Workshops
Workshops in April & May
Since our last advisory board meeting in March, several Solar Bot workshops and alternative solar light workshops (for rainy days) have been conducted. Two workshops were conducted in April for a course called Use, Re-sue & Radical Re-use for the class of Professor Mary Babcock at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. This workshop engaged students from both the Art and Sustainability Departments. The students walked to my house from campus for the garage workshops. I conducted a third Solar Bot workshop in May as part of a futurist STEAM immersive learning experience series at the Stanford University O’Donohue Educational Farm. This was a multigenerational cohort and organized by Stanford graduate student Kelsey Chen and the Materials & Culture Research-Creation Workshop. These above April and May workshops served 58 participants.
Above: flyer for Stanford event created by PhD Candidtate Kelsey Chen In the Mānoa Valley garage workshops, materials were set up on a long table and along the wall edge facing the pond. They were also invited to pick lightweight plant materials in my yard and by the University of Hawai'i Energy House which was along their path to my house. We shared our knowledge of the plants and their names.
As an opening, we all shared who or what we brought with us to the workshops. Students shared living and non-living family members, friends, and pets. In this first workshop, after a discussion of the importance of solar power, place-based play and design, students were shown a few samples of solar bots and were invited to design their own. As additional support, to my hands on instructions, a few QR codes were posted on pillars that linked to an Instagram post of examples of solar bots moving and a step-by-step video post on how to create one.
There was a lot of discovery of how to engage with multiple materials and discovery of attachment techniques. I brought out a mini hole puncher as some wanted to experiment with hau fiber in the attachment of parts.
We had a midpoint walkarounds in which students took inspiration from what others were doing and then we continued in the making. Several cookie sheets and flat pieces of wood were set up on the end of the driveway for students to test out movement of their creations as they were powered by the sun. All students chose to continue iterating upon their designs after testing their creations in the sun and watching them skitter and move about in the direct sunlight. Here is a video example of students' creations moving in the sunlight.
Students were quiet at first, but then became animated and talkative as they started to play with the materials and settle into playful tinkering.
A LEI AS DATA
Before students began the workshop, I invited them to participate in an experimental pre-assessment survey using lei materials. They strung short lengths of leis using materials that represented how they saw themselves. This was designed to capture any change in self assessment as an inventor, engineer, artist, culture bearer, and scientist. The prompt was "I am a..." and they chose seeds, bits of bark, leaves, and flowers to symbolize the range of their responses before and after the workshop. The lei is an appropriate tool for a data collection framework as the Hawaiian lei can serve as an Indigenous survey tool. Pre-contact, leis composed of flowers and plant materials of a single ahupua'a (a land management division from mauka to makai) were offered to ali’i (chiefs) to represent a snapshot of the health of an ahupua'a from mauka to makai (ridge to reef). Kumo Kamuela Enos shared this knowledge with us in the 2022 Ka Maka ʻĪnana cohort of Purple Mai’a. Here below are images of students exploring this activity.
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And below is the data collected from this lei survey. There was no change in students' feelings as scientists, artists, or culture bearers, but there was a small increase in feelings of being inventors and engineers.
Findings:
Desire for support in learning attachment techniques: In a google survey a few participants highighted a desire for examples of attachment techniques to use with the natural hau fiber and twine i provided.
Desire to remove hot glue guns as these add plastic into the mix of the materials. A few highlighted that having hot glue guns available make the unmaking and composting of the elements more challenging. This was also brought up in the Stanford workshop feedback form. For my next workshop I will create a display board of traditional lashing and connection techniques and am considering including melted wax as an attachment method (with high school and older participants).
The Lei Mirror tool was not successful in driving engagement with lei survey pre and post assessment. I invited participants to use the mirror tools developed in collaboration with the Pono STEAM Kit Advisory Board. The engagement with these mirrors was not as high as I had hoped and I will continue testing with younger aged programming. Few took the devices with them or felt the need to play with them in conjunction with their leis. This mirror tool visually turns the short lei lengths into longer complete leis and it was developed in conversation with the Advisory Board who highlighted that having students walking away from workshop with a super short lei segment would not be ideal. Now I am thinking that perhaps it might be a better direction to invite the students to link all their segments together in a closing ceremony to create one collaborative large lei to display and later disperse in garden. Another thought is to provide fern and Job's Tears seeds so that students can later transform the lei lengths into kupe'e wrist or ankle leis. Perhaps the mirror reflecting tool could be used in a different activity and I am going to hold onto that thought.
4. Weather drives the need for a sister activity. Since I was attempting to conduct these workshops in the spring, we encountered rain and cloudy days. I may attach a seasonal notice to this particular Pono STEAM kit activity and indicate it is for summer and fall. I will also suggest this below activity since it is still a solar circuit activity, but it can function on cloudy days.
ADAPTING A WORKSHOP TO THE WEATHER
Since I live in Manoa Valley and it rains almost everyday for a short period of time, an alternative workshop for the Hawai'i Solar Bot project is important. The second Solar Bot workshop with UH was scheduled a week after the first one but the day became cloudy and rainy in the morning. I pivoted the activity to focus on creating solar lights that illuminated something about ourselves. While the solar panels will not power a vibrating pager motor on a cloudy day, they will still illuminate a 3V LED diode in cloudy weather. So we pivoted to this activity below.
The workshop materials included the same natural locally collected materials and the same 5V 30mA 53mmx30mm solar panels for the Solar Bot workshop. In addition to these materials, copper tape and 3V LED diodes and tagboard bases were used. This workshop was conducted both in the second UH workshop and at the heavily raining Stanford workshop. The prompt was "Create a light sculpture that illuminates something about yourself.' I will rephrase this prompt for younger students.
A few samples from the UH workshop work in progress can be seen at this instagram post and final designs can be seen at this Instagram post.
Materials at the Stanford workshop included plant materials from around the working farm’s grounds. I included some weeded roots into the mix of natural materials of place that included leaves, seeds, twigs, and moss. Participants were also invited to collect materials from the farm to use, but it was raining very hard at the time of the workshop, so most relied on what I had harvested.
This gathering in the farm included 20 + participants. I was so grateful that my father, mother, and sister were able to join. The deepest roots of my knowledge in place based making and storytelling are anchored in family, so it was very special to have them in attendance and participating. We introduced ourselves by who or what we brought with us to the event. We had a mid point walk around and a final sharing of the designs, just as in the UH Manoa workshops. More images can be seen at this Instagram link and the process photos also on Instagram.
Mahalo nui loa to all the workshop participants and advisors who shared feedback and brought these workshops to life with their sharing of stories, knowledge, and playful creativity with natural materials of place.
Next Steps
An additional multigenerational Solar Bot workshop will be conducted in September at the Mānoa Heritage Center. Next spring, I will be bringing the workshop to the Wilcox Elementary STEM Night on Kauai which engages families and upwards of 300 people. The next lab note for this experiment project will be on the progress of the millifluics activities.
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