“Snap-snap” has an automatic effect of satisfaction, when materials click together smoothly in a tidy fashion. That brief satisfaction of kit-boxed materials and instruction sheets often works well for prototyping things, neatly fitting together pre-designed constructs with specific parameters. Pre-fabricated, limited, constrained to an original form.
The world is messy! Working with common-found items allows us to observe the properties of materials that surround us. Ideas that are unclear and tangled, challenging and yet unformed, do not naturally click together. Instead, they produce a different sort of satisfactory, or even innovative, resolve, making real something yet in a formative state, something that allows us to move beyond here to a new platform of innovation.
We argue for the right of children to belong to a world of invention, to fill mental backpacks with ideas and experiences that become the resources needed along the path of the unknown. Imagination is their work and when youngsters are guided to enter doors that they do not yet know exist, we join them in the search!
Design technology is not a program; it is an approach embedded in a world of inquiry with multiple pathways, entrances, and exits. It honors questions and becomes a lifestyle. Our children don the mantles of designer, scientist, and engineer,
observing what is,
imagining what could be,
building with minds and hands, with materials and tools,
creating confidence and competence in their current world,
preparing for vigorous engagement in their future.