My art room has often been a refuge for strange and sometimes puzzling castoffs. I
think many art rooms are like this. Yarn that was left in grandma’s house, or baby food jars that you
could not bring yourself to throw out. The inner dialogue of, “someone could use this for something”
often ends in me having to find a place for it in the storage closet.
Then one day it all became a little more interesting with the addition of an entire desktop computer that
was deemed defective. This sparked an entirely new technology collection that was fueled by fellow
teachers and tech departments. Throughout the year, my classes harvested wires, grids, keys, and
gears from broken technology. This included everything from computers to keyboards, printers to
scanners, and even telephones, vending machines, and wall clocks. When students were finished with
their projects, they would beg to take these technological dinosaurs apart.
I believe that there is much to be gained from the disassembling process. Knowing how something was
put together often leads to us understanding the why and how of production and innovation. We began
calling this the “Un-makerspace.” With safety glasses and a box of tools, (pliers, wire cutters, hammers,
and screwdrivers) students began their dissection. You could hear a pin drop. The only noise came
from finding something new. “I didn’t know that was inside our computer!” “Wait, what does this do? Is
it a fan? What is it cooling?” “Can you imagine that someone planned this all out? Someone thought of
this! A person thought of all of this!” All of these statements were ones of investigative learning,
reflection, and exploration. Many students began looking up what the different parts did and what their
function was.
After we had an ample
collection of parts, or what we
liked to refer to as our
technology graveyard, we
began brainstorming what we
were going to do with these
odd and ends. It was not until
a student held a bundle of
wires to her head, imitating
hair, that I realized we could
use these to create another
form of life. We decided to
make Cyborg Masks!
First we had to wrap our brains
around what a cyborg really
was. Besides our vision of the
Terminator, could there be real
world applications to this?
Merriam-Webster defines a cyborg as “a person whose body contains mechanical or electrical devices
STEAMed Magazine
26
July 2016 Edition