![]() But who will spend that much on a pencil? Maybe 50 cents per pencil this week, and 75 cents every day thereafter. They would sell pencils, the children decided, but at what price? They debated strategies: If we sell 60 pencils at $2 per pencil we’ll reach our goal. Rather than solicit parents for money, Little turned the need for materials into an immersion in marketing and sales. The learning didn’t stop when supplies finally dwindled. Other students flocked to the sewing, 3-D pen and marble maker, including one child who cross-stitched the emblem of the San Francisco Giants as a gift for his grandmother. ![]() Kids with a more literary bent wrote a book and set music to it they rigged the MaKey MaKey device to play exciting music during adventurous passages and dirge music during sad ones. The electricity ran through every kid in the class to the last one, who could then “play” the lemon bongos. Intrigued by the bananas, one group worked with lemons, this time completing the circuit by holding hands. “They all opted for extra math,” Little said. Little then invited all her math students to attend the twice-weekly optional remediation classes where she’d first introduced the practical tools. ![]() “'We want to come to math support!’” she recalled the students saying. “They played a song for everyone, and everyone went wild,” Little said. But the students understood, and one day they brought the unorthodox instrument to the entire regular math class. Little gets fuzzy explaining exactly how the banana piano worked. Then, by trial and error, the 12-year-olds learned how to build a full circuit: They attached one set of wires from the circuit board to six bananas (borrowed from lunch), and another connector to the laptop. This meant they needed to program the computer - Little’s laptop - to the MaKey MaKey circuit board, which the students were able to do. Inspired by an online investigation, one group of students decided to build a banana piano. ![]() “I didn’t know how to do it, but I could teach them how to learn,” she said. But she imagined that she and the students could figure out together how to use the alien circuit board to interesting effect. “I’m afraid of maker-type technology,” she told me. Little herself was unaware of the MaKey MaKey instrument. They put themselves in their own groups based on personal interest, and worked together to grapple with these mysterious tools. To Little’s surprise, the students dove in. Instead, she took a gamble and brought some materials to school for her students to play with: a sewing kit, the 3Doodler she’d just been given, her son’s marble-run set and a MaKey MaKey device she knew nothing about, donated by a friend. But Little couldn’t bear to subject already disengaged students to yet another ho-hum class of multiplication tables and long division. Little teaches at Martin Luther King Jr Middle School in Berkeley, California, where classes like sewing, woodshop, and metal shop - what she calls “practical ways of learning math” - are no longer offered tight budgets and renewed emphasis on academic learning have eliminated them. But by the end of the school year, all her math students, not just those needing extra support, were clamoring for more math. Elizabeth Little, who teaches middle school math and science, doesn’t know exactly which of the hands-on projects she introduced to her remedial math class turned the class around. Or perhaps the bongos, made from lemons that students had plucked from the citrus tree at school.
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