A handbook for starting and running a Community Science Workshop
3. A CSW’s Contents and Layout
4. CSW “Curriculum”: Projects, Activities, Exhiblets, Specimens
6. Leadership, Operation and Development of the CSW Organization
The stuff of a CSW and its arrangement are obviously critical elements to consider, but the ways it can be orchestrated successfully are myriad. All CSW spaces at their core consist of several workbenches with counters around the edge. These surfaces and the rest of the space are typically filled entirely with four categories of items:
A generous section of the counter and table space should be filled with a broad selection of plants, animals, fossils, rocks, crystals, bones, and hands-on exhibits (which we call “exhiblets” to distinguish them from polished professional ones that cost more and are harder to make). These items needn’t be polished or even necessarily categorized. The most important thing is that the kids have open, safe access, and that it’s possible to learn by simple observation and interaction.
This inviting melange creates the rich ambiance of a museum and acts as a sponge for participants who may not have the drive to build something just yet. This section of a CSW can be viewed as a more-concentrated-than-usual subsection of the universe, where participants can collect many authentic experiences straight from the physical and natural world, develop questions, and supercharge their wonder capacity. This area requires daily attention to maintain the life of the living specimens, order among the other specimens, and functionality of the exhiblets.
Microscopes are one key element in this section. Most CSWs have both digital and traditional microscopes set up. Many of us have noted today’s kids’ lack of patience to get something into focus under a microscope, but that is all the more reason to have it there tempting them. The most interesting things to see are alive: amphipods, insects, tadpoles, worms, etc. These also require the most maintenance.
Low-power widefield microscopes (around 40x), often called dissecting microscopes, are most useful at a CSW, but it is also good to have one on hand that can go up to 400x. The challenge with high-power microscopes is that you are looking at such a tiny area and depth that you may not be able to find your way around. Just as important as microscopes are hand lenses. From 4x to 20x, these can be passports into other worlds and just need to be held up in front of your eye.
The word exhiblets was coined at the Exploratorium to mean something in the realm between a professional, commercial exhibit and a kid-built project. Exhiblets are generally built for less than $100, sometimes less than $5, and often depend on repurposed, recycled materials and gizmos that produce a fascinating concept for the up close and personal experience of visitors.
An example is a Jacob’s ladder made from an old neon sign transformer. Most kids don’t get many chances to see and interact with plasma, the universe’s most common visible state of matter, but this simple arrangement with a crackling spark between two rods can make it happen. The same goes for the fog tornado, the hand battery, and the giant magnet surrounded by magnetic sand and iron bits. Playing with a cloud, an electrical current going through your body, and strong magnetic field are wonderful experiences to have and learn from, and are so easy and cheap to set up that there’s really no reason everyone can’t join in.
These sections of the CSW are always changing, always improving. Making and fixing exhiblets and caring for plants and animals is a great activity for the kid with nothing better to do or the volunteer who prefers not to work with kids. Several CSWs have people hired specifically to do this important work.
Signage and graphics for exhiblets, specimens, animals, and plants is a topic of much debate among CSW staff. Some prefer nothing whatsoever that may distract from the all-important experience. Others want just a title and some key words so kids can get a jump on making the connections to the concepts that may arise back in the classroom.
Many of us think it is useful to have a short description of some of the concepts involved in exhiblets for participants to read, but also for staff to study and get one step ahead of the participants. These could be posted at the exhiblets or hiding nearby. At the same time, staff need to be well-trained in how to initiate and extend discussions and explorations, not snubbing off curiosity with some pert “explanation.” Naturally, the world wide web waits with endless answers, some perhaps even correct, but a couple of paragraphs with vetted info specifically linked to an exhiblet will get people thinking in the right direction should they have questions beyond what they can answer with their hands. GACSW is creating a database with such information for common exhiblets. More discussion on graphics can be found in chapter 4, CSW “Curriculum”.
Most CSWs have several dozen project models on display, hanging or perched on narrow shelves. These are an inspiration for participants and also serve to reduce reliance on limited staff. If a kid can be set up to build a project following a model, they don’t need nearly as much help.
A few points about project models:
Though it is a constant labor, they should be maintained to remain functional at all times; it’s hard to be inspired by something not working. For this reason, it is best to keep the most sensitive ones out of reach of the smallest hands, hanging or resting up high.
They should be beautiful. Like it or not, most of us are led by our aesthetic sense.
They should be mostly composed of materials that are on hand. It’s a downer when you have finally decided what to build only to find out it’s not possible.
Suboptimal projects can be removed, like those without a lot of science or requiring too much detailed support to get working. Why not build something great?
Another necessity is a place for unfinished projects. These can also be inspirational, though many times they are abandoned. It is a good idea for kids to put their name and date on the project they’re storing, and masking tape together all pieces into one unit. Then periodic organizing efforts can determine if a given masterpiece in progress stands a reasonable chance of success. Ripping apart abandoned projects can be painful, but you can relax in the knowledge that skills were honed, lessons were learned, and the process is always more important than the product.
Using tools is a key part of being human; other animals do it, but none as well as us humanoids. Learning to use a tool increases brain activity and makes you part of thousands of years of human history. It is also well-known to be satisfying on a deep level.
To use a tool is a skill, and also an art and a craft. There is a huge difference between using one well and using one poorly. Some tool skills can be taught, but many can be picked up by the user on their own. Tools match closely to materials, in that the material’s characteristics determine what tools will work on it. The tool’s form, on the other hand, is determined in large part by the human hand and how it will guide the material and the tool together. An appreciation of these facts is built up with time using different tools to work on different things.
At the end of this chapter is a list of tools commonly found in CSWs. Basically, you will want whatever tool is necessary for the project at hand. Once again, the more the better. We want to expose kids to a wide range of tools, even strange specialty ones they may never see again, just for the sake of a broad perspective.
Another word on high-tech tools: 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC machines. Aside from being expensive, and and having a steep path to learning how to use, and taking the active tinkering away from the participants, most often they hide their inner functioning, so that it’s extremely difficult to observe or understand how they work. Essentially, they insert unwanted layers between the observer and the observed. We take a hammer and chisel as paragon of tools to learn from.
Tools have been known to hurt, even kill people. Regular staff safety trainings should be scheduled and tools should be maintained and stored in such a way as to minimize the chance of injury. As noted in this manual’s section on safety, different visitors will have different thresholds and norms around caution and safety. It is best to meet them where they are and listen to their concerns.
It is debatable whether safety placards and signage make any difference at all. Some of us will swear that our kids never read anything, even if they see it everyday. Still, a sign for safety glasses can be a reminder and collaborating info for the verbal order. Placards can also be useful in discussions, arguments, and legal action after an injury takes place: it’s good to be able to show that safety information was clearly available to the victim. Salinas CSW decided to post the bullet points from the safety protocol beside each power tool just for good measure, in addition to graphics imploring the use of safety glasses and hair ties at relevant tools.
It is worth telling some stories here of memorable accidents in CSWs. Most of us have seen many burns involving hot glue guns. A few CSW school programs have been paused or made to offer alternative bonding techniques after particularly bad glue gun burn incidents. The molten glue itself is usually the culprit, as it continues to damage while it sticks to flesh. Most of us have shifted to low-temperature guns, 10 watts or so, but it is still possible to get quite a burn from them. In addition to the signage, it is also good to make two points before turning a class of students loose: 1) the glue gun tip is the hottest part, so don’t put it on skin; and 2) if you do get hot glue stuck on you, the faster you take it off, the less it will hurt.
The lowly box cutter is another regular offender. It looks so harmless! But that blade can go right through thick cardboard into any soft tissue behind. It is also regularly used to cut something on the table right into waiting fingers. The cardboard cutter, a small dull saw on a plastic handle, is a good solution for box cutter dangers. It can also draw blood, but it takes much more effort to do so. Another simple cardboard cutter is a half a hacksaw blade, duct taped at the broken end to form a handle.
Several injuries have happened with students “helping” each other on the scroll saw. The scroll saw is one of the real gems of the CSW: it is learnable within a couple of minutes and then has a wide range of possibilities. It’s a huge step safer than any sort of rotary or band saw; it is even possible to touch the moving blade lightly without injury. But when two people are working together, one may not see when the fingers of the other are approaching the blade. One could be pushing enthusiastically when the other is desperately pulling away. Staff can be trained to help by always keeping the student in charge of pushing on the piece, and supporting them only by helping to guide the piece into the blade.
The many properties of materials are one of the fundamental things CSW participants learn without effort or any sort of coherent teaching. This is a topic rarely taught, in schools, yet is absolutely critical to the construction of the entire modern built world around us. It is also not at all difficult to learn on a rudimentary level. Using wood to make something requires gaining an understanding of its properties that no amount of theoretical learning could convey. Attempting and failing to build something from wood that in fact needs the properties of metal, plastic, or cardboard forces one to face the limits of a material’s abilities.
Since you don’t know what participants may want to build, it is key to have a plethora of materials on hand. Some materials will be huge—4×8’ plywood sheets and 8’ 2x4s are great for projects like dog houses and go karts—and others will work best if cut down to manageable bits to feed into the scroll saw. Rows of trays full of arbitrary items such as corks, buttons, marbles, beads, springs, clips, syringes, lids, plastic doohickies, and brass thingamajigs make for many creative options. Brace yourself for functional items like washers or pipe fittings to be used for strictly decorative purposes.
One more word on the use of scrap materials: yes, it will save you money, but perhaps all the more important is to instill in kids a deep understanding of the stuff all around them. If you do a crackerjack project out of a readymade kit, one of the subconscious things you learn is that the first step to doing science is to buy something off the shelf. That’s not at all true, and in fact can further insulate you from authentic learning directly from your environs. For this reason, we even try to make our exhiblets from scrap and thrift shop materials.
CSWs shoot for offering a vast array of fasteners, hardware, and adhesives to go with the multitudinous materials on hand. Showing a kid how to use pop rivets or molly bolts is opening doors for future projects. Cutting the same thing with side cutters, the scroll saw, a hacksaw, and a box cutter allows one to learn the benefits of each. This goes back to our pedagogy: while we may have an idea of a good way to do a certain part of a project, if a kid wants to do it a different way, we will support them all the way, even unto failure, retreat, and trying again with a new strategy. Learning is inevitable along the way.
CSWs all have different means of storing and making available these materials. Ideally all tools and materials are hanging or stored in full view, labeled (bilingually if possible), and fully organized. That almost never happens, but it is a vision to keep in mind. Certainly there should never be something removed from kid access without good reason, the two most common of which are cost (too expensive to have them take their fill) and safety. CSWs generally have a section or a storage area that is off limits, and periodically we go through that area and move as much as we can back out to the area where kids can have access to it. If the materials are not in front of kids’ eyes, they may not think to involve these materials in their latest creation.
The goal is to be able to access all the stuff you have at a moment’s notice in the service of a kid’s urgent new project plan. Under table and under counter storage is important, and the best ones are on wheels for easy cleaning. Parts trays have to be sized according to the part, and continually sorted—a great activity for volunteers. “Hell boxes,” where everything gets chucked that doesn’t seem to go into another bin, are inevitable but can also be an indication of the state of the Workshop: if there are more hell boxes than sorted ones, you are living on the edge.
CSWs embrace the A in STEAM, and stock many rudimentary art supplies. Art is a way to make science more attractive and palatable for kids just dipping their toes in. Nearly every kid has had a happy experience doing art in their early years, and will very often bring those positive emotions along to a science experience if it’s artsy. Pompoms make magnets even more irresistible. The promise of decorating an electric model car can be the motivation that takes you through the process of wiring it up.
CSWs can also shine a light on the fact that artists and scientists need a large number of similar skills: detailed observation, analysis, understanding materials’ characteristics, and understanding vision, light and color. At the same time, CSWs should be clear on their limitations: even if CSWs offer art supplies, materials, encouragement, if staff lack artistic expertise then they can’t really say they are teaching art, rather perhaps making a fertile bed for art. That said, there is no reason why CSW staff can’t learn and pass on a few serious art concepts.
Intensive stuff management is a necessity in such a stuff-intensive operation as a CSW. Some of us CSW directors have reached the level of Jedi Master at this skill. The fundamental action, one that happens in a CSW day after day and sometimes many times per day, is determining if a particular item (a miniature glass bottle, off-sized ornate hinges, bright orange hard plastic spacers from some long-forgotten industrial process, purple velvet patches, rusty brass rods of varying length) deserves to stay or be sent away.
Getting this decision right makes the difference between your CSW being a wasteland of useless trash or a wonderland of limitless material possibility. All staff from director to high school intern need to become adept at making the call fast and effectively. The following are a few questions to help decide what stays and what goes.
Here are a few notes on your CSW stuff:
The stuff in a CSW should represent as much of the universe as possible. A CSW is no place for a minimalist.
Containers should be well labeled and categorized. This is probably true even for solitary operations, but certainly as soon as more than one person is involved, the insanity of repeatedly peeking into unlabeled boxes becomes painfully apparent. See-through containers are nice, but often too flimsy to last long. Taping a specimen from inside the box onto the front of it works as well as a label.
All CSWs have enormous jumbles of boxes and other containers, but uniform storage containers work the best. Banker’s boxes are great, as are garlic crates, milk crates, paper boxes; basically any standard, covered container you can get a lot of.
The most efficient are shelves that are built for or able to adjust to fit the standard container. Plywood and 2×4” shelves can be built stronger and cheaper than nearly any commercial system, but that takes some time and effort—see below.
A multi-tiered system works well for often-used stuff:
In terms of storage, you will want more. Always more. All the civil and social norms followed in other parts of life can be put aside when it comes to staking out more space for the CSW; you are going to need plenty of places to put things when they arrive, so your mission is to take over as much territory as possible. This is an “ask forgiveness, not permission” situation.
Find out where other people store stuff and usurp their space or squeeze them into a corner. If you have a shed, begin pursuing another shed, this time bigger. I thought Greenfield CSW had plenty of space years ago, but now it has four more two-storey sheds, all chock full of great stuff. If you have a closet, make sure the shelves go all the way to the ceiling. Check if you can access the attic for additional space. Watsonville CSW received a huge donation of sleeping bags and found plenty of space to hang them in the attic of the community center until one day when the inspectors found them. They then leveraged that to attain another shed.
The inside of storage spaces should be maximized. Build shelves upon shelves and then makeshift racks between the shelves. See if you can fit any wood or metal pieces underneath the shed. Exploit the “imperceptible creep” technique with your stuff. Pile stuff that is not likely to get stolen against the outside wall, without asking permission, and see how big a pile you can get before anyone asks you to move it. It’s all easily justifiable when reckoning day with the authorities arrives: “It’s for the kids!” with eyes wide and arms in the Jesus Christ pose.
Early on in the CSW saga, we realized that we needed sturdy tables, counters, and shelves that didn’t break the budget. The design most of us decided on involves 2×4 structure under 3/4” plywood surface all screwed together with “screw nail” drywall screws 2.5” and 3”. Some of us use steel framing brackets, but others don’t think it helps. These tables need to be built to take abuse. Legs made of 4x4s are stronger. Many of us put triangle reinforcements at the corners. Varnish is nice but not necessary, and the ideal is to have kids involved in painting it with science-related imagery in bright colors. When the surface is getting too trashed to work with, another layer of thinner plywood right on top adds structural integrity and makes it look new.
Making shelves and racks is the least expensive, but sometimes you need storage now, and racks with wheels are very nice for tight spaces: stuff in front of stuff. Also racks with wire shelves don’t catch dust and are often not too expensive.
For safety’s sake, consider what will happen if things fall off tall shelves. But then build all the way to the ceiling, anchoring into the wall to be sure the whole shelf doesn’t fall over if a child begins to climb it. Put styrofoam and yarn on the highest shelves.
Nothing magic is involved in the stocking of CSW shelves, just nonstop searching. The goal is to have everything in the known universe available for CSW participants to explore and tinker with, without having to spend any money (or at least very little). It becomes an ironic and devilish decision sometimes, since the lowest-end supplies and tools are surely made in questionable labor conditions overseas, but you are purchasing them for use by low-income families here.
Many of us get much of our stuff online. Some of us try to avoid the big companies, but sometimes their hegemonic tendencies have already been so successful that there is little choice. Legacy science supply companies are rarely the economical place to source things, but sometimes similar looking supplies from another random source don’t turn out to be suitable. Certain things like color filters or magnifying glasses must have a certain level of quality to be effective.
The sources of cheap or free used and rejected materials in the US are plentiful. Often you can find good stuff sitting along the side of the street! Second-hand stores and flea markets are an obvious source for tools, electrical items, cloth, and kitchen chemistry stuff. Put out a call to CSW friends to save bottles, cans, lids, containers and the like. It only takes a couple people doing this consistently to keep your storage bins full.
What is the lowest quality acceptable? It depends on the item. Tools, for example, have to work. There are plenty of cheap tools online and at discount joints that don’t actually work: side cutters that smash instead of cut with their dull jaws, hammers that break dangerously with a slightly over-exuberant swing, clamps that break when twisted to snug. But with other items, even the rock bottom quality range is acceptable: box cutters, screwdrivers, files, zip ties, tape, etc. It is a great day when you find something used and high quality—you’ll be smiling for years to come.
Relationships are key. Any store you frequent should soon know what you’re all about, and be firmly pressured to support your kids. We have had great results over the years from proprietors of businesses like these:
It is worth telling the tales here of the riches garnered from some of our best relationships over the years. Fresno CSW used to have local shops competing on how much they’d given. Manuel, the Fresno CSW Director, would casually mention to one shop that another had donated a batch of switches and wire—and before long, he’d have a full set of wire connectors and tools. For years, Fresno CSW also picked up half-used batteries from the local hospital on a weekly basis. Watsonville CSW had an arrangement with a cabinet maker that would slowly fill a huge trailer with scrap wood then use the trailer’s hydraulic lift to dump it all on their doorstep. Greenfield CSW got in line to take all bikes arriving at the landfill in any kind of reasonable shape. They used the resulting pile of steel and rubber to leverage more space at the city yard. San Francisco CSW has a board member at San Francisco State University in the science building who keeps a close eye on the reject bin out near the dumpster, and much obsolete yet fascinating technical gear has been salvaged from that font over the years.
Sourcing parts for exhiblets is a particular art. Often very specific but sometimes also very commonplace, you have to have a clear vision of what is needed. Examples include:
As participants rip apart old electronics, often parts can be gleaned including switches, speakers, lights, transformers and motors.
It goes without saying that you should be connected to your local schools and institutions of higher learning. Reject lab materials are often perfect for CSWs, and schools change curricula like snakes shed skins, tossing the old “manipulatives” to the wind. Again relationships are key—having a mole who knows what good junk looks like is invaluable.
Sourcing specimens is a grand adventure. Dan Sudran was an avid collector of anything interesting. He learned the rules, got the licenses, and made contacts in the institutes in charge of such things. He pushed such institutions to pass on their seconds to his CSW for the benefit of kids who may never make it into their musty halls. Dan had systems always at the ready for picking up roadkill or toting bones, rocks, or fossils back from a long walk. Several times CSWs have salvaged dead sea mammals (whales, porpoises, dolphins) off the California beaches and, through a sometimes arduous and always educational process, turned them into exquisite specimens for their CSW. Manuel of Fresno CSW got in good with Cat Haven, a refuge for big cats near his CSW, and acquired several of the skeletons they end up with after butchering large farm animals for cat food.
Attrition of tools and materials is a fact that must be faced. From one perspective it’s great: some kid was enthused enough with your side cutters that they walked off with a pair, and will now be able to tinker on their own terms and timeline. We could even put labels on them: “Steal these side cutters!” But of course if it happens too often it is not sustainable. Some of us use some common strategies like painting or engraving the CSW name onto tools, or having all tools put back on the rack before letting kids go, but the effect of those actions is debatable.
Two realities are important to note on this topic. First, materials are a fairly low percentage of a CSW budget, usually between 10 and 20 percent. Thus, the incremental increase in buying a few more of any given thing is negligible. This is quite a paradox, as most of us are proud experts at getting by on the cheap. On the one hand, it is great for kids to be part of fixing, preserving, and saving things from the landfill. On the other hand, you can waste a lot of valuable staff time trying to, say, salvage some piece-of-crap tool that really needs to be replaced, or sorting a whole mess of donated junk only to arrive at a small box of good stuff.
Second, when working in low-income communities, it is nice to create an atmosphere of plenty: plenty of side cutters, plenty of wood, plenty of cloth, plenty of magnets. Want to add a few more to your project? Go for it! From that perspective, it is counterproductive to be counting and guarding all the time. Going back to the first reality, it is usually best to raise a few more dollars and put them towards having a few more of the items in question available.
Some of us even have a habit of giving away tools from time to time. Tools or tool kits make great prizes for competitions and even incentives for volunteer time. After all, more tools in the world is always a good thing.
Below is a partial working list of tools and materials that could/should be in a CSW. It may be easier to make a list of things we would not want to see in a CSW. All the universe is welcome! Safety is first, of course, and the space is limited, but beyond that, we will take anything real that can be explored or tinkered with, or that can be used to build something!
Electric Tools for Staff (in nearly all cases)
Gardening Tools
Hand Tools
Lenses, etc.
Specialty Tools
There are three main categories for materials:
Art supplies and decorations
Cardboard
Cord
Electrical
Fasteners
Gardening and Growing Stuff
Glue
Junk and Take-Apart Objects
Kitchen and Household Stuff
Kitchen Chemistry Stuff
Magnets
Metal
Office Stuff
Plastic
Sewing and Needlework
Small Structural Elements
Structural Wire
Wheels
Wood
Note: Much modern wood consists of saw dust held together with toxic glues, and the chemicals within these come out with a telltale stink when drilled or sawed. Plywood is much better than these other compressed fiber boards, and real pieces of soft-wood trees like pine or fir are usually best of all, if you can get them.
And anything else interesting you find that’s not particularly dangerous!
You may notice the lack of books or computers on the list above. We are not opposed to either, but as most of our spaces are limited, we tend to reserve what space there is for real stuff with which to explore, build, and tinker. Books are available in libraries, computers in schools. Several CSWs have strict limitations on screens: only to be used for project related purposes for example. One CSW even felt the need to put a large sign urging all adults to refrain from the screen for their time at the Workshop, noting the deleterious effect of losing oneself in a screen experience when such a fabulous conglomeration of the universe has with great effort been erected in the CSW space they are now inside.