19 November 2024
I’ve been in education for almost eight years but only on a few occasions have I seen students attack work with such enthusiastic abandon as they have in our Ambassador Program these last three weeks, and it’s an after-school program mind you!
While Tech Schools are typically known for their cutting-edge digital technologies, rapid manufacturing machinery, and virtual reality – which are all astonishingly brilliant – our ambassadors have shown that the power of nature as well as older, slower technologies like screwdrivers, pliers and hammers, are just as captivating, perhaps even more so.
Session 1
My colleague and I wanted to see our students get their hands in the dirt and comfy with hand tools and various materials. The project we decided on: wicking pots. And we grew some tomatoes too. To begin our 4-week journey, we used scissors to cut 2lt milk cartons into pots, opened a bag of potting mix, cut up a few tomatoes and haphazardly placed tomato slices under the soil and placed a row of them on the windowsill for later. They were to become seedlings for our wicking beds and to exemplify that abundance is all around us, if we just knew how to harness it.
Next, everyone had to get their drill licenses. To make wicking pots, drills are (almost) necessary. If filling small containers with soil wasn’t entertaining enough, drilling holes through timber took the atmosphere in the room to another level. Kids love to drill. They’d bought in.
The requirement was 10 holes including appropriate safety measures and stable handling under supervision. Some students drilled upwards of 60 holes just for the hypnotizing fun of it.
Session 2
Week two was intense. Between about 4:15 and 5:30pm, after the students savagely woofed down afternoon tea like lions on prey, garden pipe was cut to size and attached to elbows, pot holes were plugged with silicon guns and new holes were drilled for reservoir overflows. Rocks were poured and geofabric was measured, cut and installed. These students were on a mission. Even pack-up was executed with fierce determination. But it didn’t prepare us for week three.
Session 3
With the wicking beds effectively complete, we needed a second project. And we figured, why not step things up a notch: let’s repurpose some used shipping pallets and build raised garden beds. But the students had to do everything themselves which included breaking the pallets down, removing all nails and separating usable from non-usable pieces of timber.
Once the wicking beds received their final touches, the students did something teachers rarely see. The students self-organised.
They created a production line with two major groups. Those that broke the pallets down and those that carefully removed and collected the nails. There were also a few students with the role of stacking the usable slats in an orderly fashion. It was beautiful to watch. And it was this activity, a concoction of hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, brute strength and imagination, that presented us with the enthusiastic abandon mentioned above. The soft skills in leadership, discussion, problem solving and examination were not lost on us either. Once again…beautiful!
Session 4
This week the students will put their efforts to reinventing the perfectly ordered slab of pallet slats into functional raised garden beds that, hopefully, they’ll finish in time to take home. They will probably have to work harder and faster than they’ve already demonstrated so far, but from what we’ve seen, I wouldn’t put it past them.
