The previous post was about my decision to work mainly in ICT now rather than Technology Education and how the landscape has changed.  This one is about what and where Technology Education is heading.

Technology education is in danger of disappearing into the 'black box syndrome'. We carry, interact and experience amazingly well designed tech.  Reviews are mostly quibbles about how slow or tricky a feature is but generally we are satisfied with our technology.  Same for cars, TV's, buildings etc.

But these are to most people opaque black boxes.  We have no real idea of how they work or are made, we only touch the switches.

Design in schools is necessarily limited by students ability, time and equipment available and though we see some great stuff promoted, most projects are nothing like the items we buy in shops.  This is accelerating with every year bringing in goods that are wonderful but to most of society, unfathomable.  We have already passed Arthur C Clarke's 'Magic' definition when we interact with a monolithic metal and glass slab to see what the weather is like in Mongolia right now.

Schools will never win this arms race.  The solution is to develop thinking skills allied with practical abilities. Lego Robots and construction kits, solving small scale problems. Reducing the difficulty of making and focussing on interacting.  Programming already has this issue.  The tools and projects companies work on are so far above what is affordable and possible in schools that a coding club will always be limited in what it can achieve, so instead innovate.

Imagine a watering system for a plant.  Up till now we would have preferred a computer controlled or electronic timer version which students built and put in a box.  Innovation was the big thing but now Arduino and other platforms allow you to buy the sensors ready made and just plug it together, and the core Arduino boards are so complex, you couldn't solder a reasonable one in schools if you wanted to.  PIC systems work well but need expensive sensors and gizmo's to work and the final solution is a black box with often crudely trailing wires.  It's a proof of skill, not a product or desirable outcome.

Now imagine the project WITHOUT electronics. Imagine a student version of those watering spikes that reuse a coke bottle as a reservoir.  Students can redesign the pipes and fittings for specific uses, experiment with different spike designs, make them nestable using 3D graphics and create them with 2D and low cost 3D tools.  The focus shifts from learning about the electronics  to learning broad tools that can be applied to a variety of uses quickly.  Those tools can be combined with electronics or other systems later when students choose that career path.  These are not stupid dumbed down projects, but intelligent useful outcomes applicable to a wide range of learning scenarios.  The outcomes are usable and understandable by wider society rather than black boxes.

We probably have to shift the high tech upstream a bit, ensure our students understand how to use a restricted but effective set of tools that create real outcomes.  We did this in the past when the choice was limited to chisels planes and marking gauges, we need the modern equivalent now because otherwise, in trying to do everything, we have too little time to do much at all.