🎉 Celebrate the learning process, not just the finished product.

Don't forget to celebrate the messy journey of creative learning with your participants. Try check-ins and share-outs to reflect on the learning process with your patrons. When patrons are stuck, ask them clarifying questions about their ideas or process, and give suggestions instead of directions.

⚒️  Don’t touch the tools!

Avoid grabbing the tools when a patron asks for help. Instead, ask questions or suggest possible next steps for the patron to implement themselves. If you do need to hold the tools to explain something, make sure to have the patron try that step again on their own.

🤖  Avoid technical jargon.

Offer technical terms to your patrons only when it is absolutely necessary. Instead, have relevant books and other resources readily available to curious participants who want to dive deeper.

Lydia Guterman of PLIX chats about some of the considerations seasoned facilitators put into running creative learning workshops with Tienya Smith, Community Library Manager of the Queens Public Library in New York. Listen in! (Time 20:00)

We developed this professional development activity so you get a chance (1) to practice facilitating an activity while not feeling like an expert and (2) to build empathy among facilitators for learners who may approach an activity differently than they would. (Read more about the original, live and in-person version here.)

Facilitating Fundamentals by Ricarose Roque and Saskia Leggett / Family Creative Learning initiative (2017, 1 page)

These were developed through reflection and discussion with facilitation teams across Ricarose Roque's Family Creative Learning workshops, page 19 of the Family Creative Learning Facilitator Guide

“Working with Kids” adapted from the original text by The Clubhouse Network pages 36–37 in the Maker Camp Affiliate Site Playbook (2015, 2 pages) The Clubhouse is a more youth-focused incubator for the MIT Media Lab's thinking about creative learning than the lab itself.

Facilitation Field Guide by The Tinkering Studio of the Exploratorium (2015, 1 page) Our guest in last week's Conversation Starter, Luigi Anzivino, was one of the researchers who contributed to this helpful guide. It gives concrete actions that any new facilitators can put into practice right away as they adopt our broader PLIX Facilitation Techniques.

“Getting Stuck”, pages 80–83 in Best of Both Worlds: Issues of Structure and Agency in Computational Creation, In and Out of School by Karen Brennan (2012, 4 pages) This includes a rarely seen passage from a letter Seymour Papert wrote plus Brennan's observations describing and illustrating hard fun.

Paper Circuits by the PLIX Team in collaboration with Jie Qi (2019, 6 pages) As you read through the activity, think about how you'd apply this week's facilitation techniques. How can you let patrons do the work and not touch the tools? How might you keep the language newbie-friendly and jargon-free? How would you navigate your patrons getting stuck, and celebrate their process, not just the finished project?

• Week 3 Community Gathering Slides For reference if you want to go back and see what we shared in the Zoom meeting.

LEDs

coin cell battery

copper tape If you cannot acquire copper tape in time, use aluminum foil

binder clips / metal paper clips