Build It Better: Tinkering in Feminist Maker Pedagogy

It is the first day of a new semester. I am perched on a couch in the reception area of the LaGuardia Co-Op, one of New York University’s shiny cooperative technology centers, trying not to pace. My students are all in the classroom at the other end of the building. I am generally veteran enough as a teacher to know how to hide my first-day jitters, but this is not just any first class meeting. “How will we know if they did it?” the young man behind the front desk asks. “We’ll know,” I say. As if on cue, we hear the pinging tones of an 8-bit arrangement of the Mario Brothers theme, and, after somewhat of a confused pause, a loud cheer. “Sounds like they did it,” I say, and head down the hallway to my classroom. There I find the members of my seminar-plus-lab course Tinkering in Feminist Technoscience huddled around an Arduino. The room bears the evidence of a frantic hour—chairs askew, backpacks open on the floor—as they have just completed their first day of lab by solving an interactive computer game. It began as a text adventure (a format with which none of my students are very familiar), and progressed, quite without warning, into a scavenger hunt, a pictographic puzzle, and then this final phase of electrical engineering. That day served as their crash course not only in how a textbased game works, but also in how to cooperatively explore the permeable boundary between simulation and reality, between text and material. This first-day exercise models, in a fun and engaging way, a theme I repeat to my students often: our course is experimental in more ways than one. It is a standard twice-weekly humanities seminar attached to a coding and physical computing lab, and so, while I am asking the students to experiment (formally) with building, coding, and technology, and (informally) with the definitions of “maker,” “crafter,” and “engineer,” we are also all, together, experimenting with structures of pedagogy. Specifically, we are asking if it is possible to break down the boundaries between a classroom space, a maker space, and a laboratory space. This course— its proposal, evolution, and reception—forms the cornerstone of what I have come to call feminist maker pedagogy.