hello everybody adam savage here in my cave answering questions submitted by test and patrons
if you aren't one follow the links below to become one if you would like there are a lot of benefits
and multiple levels but that's not what i'm here to talk about i am answering questions submitted
by testing patrons today uh and this is a terrific and uh it's a good question nate p wants to know
what age do you think introducing a child to the artist making process will have the most impact on
that child i.e starting the fire of creativity and does how does this equate to maker spaces
um i'm going to start by saying i don't think there's such i don't think that there's any such
thing as a specific answer to your question um i don't think i i'm not a child psychologist i have
no training in this um and i haven't looked or read about studies about when kids are most ready
for their brains to receive information but i have some anecdotal information to share with you
in the in in the hopes that it is actually that it is useful and i'm assuming you're kind of asking
from a practical standpoint either you want to be a parent or you're actually really curious about
maybe you're making kits and you want to know what age you should direct them to
i don't think it's at all ever too early to introduce a kid to the idea of being creative
in fact so many early kids toys are what you call open uh uh uh what do you call it um open-ended
building right like early legos you know you bought a kit you can make a police car out of
but you could also make a spaceship that's that's ideal kid play to me uh color forms and uh and air
drying clay and fema and all of those things those are right there when you show your kid how to
make a bead or a small figure or whatever you're you're demonstrating to them the creative process
uh and they're getting a lot of that in school uh you know they're they're drawing stuff they're
putting stuff together i still have some of my kids early creations from from elementary school
and the ones i've kept are still surprisingly beautiful to me um kurt vonnegut has an essay and
i can't remember which book it's in but he talks about the fact that his his uh his seven-year-old
daughter kept coming home from school with unbelievable pieces of artwork like vonnegut uh
understood culture he knew what good abstract good art looked like and he was looking at these pieces
his daughter was bringing home and he was like this is like a an abstract masterpiece this is
like some cubist this is incredible how is this kid so he he he he had a conversation
with his kids art teacher and what she said was second graders at the age of around seven are
like so open and and one of my sons is is uh is a kind of a camp counselor to some remote
learning kids and one of the things he says is he totally agrees at seven years old they're like
just completely uh open to almost every possible experience and
the the crippling social dynamics of of grade school and middle school haven't
started to happen yet right like the boys and girls are they haven't started to become
the alien species they will eventually become and not know how to communicate to each other
so it's seven years old they're like these perfect art machines and vonnegut's daughter's teacher
said i just know when to take the art away from them and say that it's done which is brilliant um
you know i grew up watching my dad fix stuff in the house and build stuff in the house
i grew up watching my grandfather had a workshop had a carpentry workshop in his in his house um i
grew up around a lot of examples of people making things both to improve their lives to fix things
and make them better and also to to make something that they didn't have before uh and that might be
the most important thing you could do is show your kids that the world is not just obtained at stores
or online mail order that there's a whole portion of our lives we can build ourselves
and that may be that like you write your own music doesn't mean you have to do
home projects around the house so that's definitely what i grew up with
but that's only one avenue um if you play the guitar and your kid gets to see you
practicing playing the guitar gets to see you practice every day right there that's like a
really important life lesson about creativity and austerity and stick-to-itiveness and dedication
all of those things are really important for a kid to see so
the most to me the most important part about talking about creativity and the creative process
is allowing there to be a a judgment-free zone for a while so that the kid can really develop
or anyone every one of us learning a new skill needs a judgment-free zone in order to kind of
figure out the rough parameters and then once you start to make stuff with a there's like there's
definitely a level of sophistication past which you can start to take critique and criticism and
understand what you're doing but at the beginning it needs to be it needs to be all about the love
it needs to be all about the like letting your brain go where it wants to go that's that phrase
like i'm just spitballing here it's a great it's a great phrase right what you're saying is i'm not
presenting concepts i am saying the things off the top of my head and if they're useful let's talk
about them that's that's how to have a a creative meeting um how does this equate to maker spaces
well i mean having traveled around the country and visited hundreds of maker spaces at this point
my favorite makerspace ethos is a low threshold of entry which is exactly what i'm talking about
about parenting a low threshold to entry let them try this stuff out so when i visited think box
in cleveland um their goal is that you could walk in and be laser cutting in five minutes if that's
what you needed to do and there wasn't a line um the low threshold to entry for a makerspace
is completely mission critical to its idea of giving kids a space to try new stuff um
and iteration i think a makerspace
look we all watched our parents we all learned great lessons from them we all learned some
terrible lessons from them so while you're parenting and you're thinking what lesson can
i give my kid iteration is a really good one like i tried it and it didn't work and i tried it again
and it didn't work and i tried it again and it did work that is a tremendous little life lesson to
show someone that you can do that they can do and one of the things i feel when i visit
a lot of makers when i visit maker spaces is many of them are not nearly dirty enough
and they don't have enough crap on the walls obviously i like a lot of crap on the walls
that's me but i also think that if it took you five tries to get that um that christmas present
you were laser cutting for your wife to work i think you should hang up the four failed attempts
that's a really important thing to me when i look at four attempts at something and i
see a working one in the end i don't need to be told what's going on it is really clear
i'm looking at iteration one iteration two iteration three iteration for the success
that is such a great story because when you step into a maker space you
gotta be ready for the fact that you're gonna build something two or three times
it's never gonna work on the first try sure sometimes it's gonna work on the
first try but mostly you should not be planning for it to work on the first try
so how does yeah that's my basic answer at what age every age just start being creative
around your kid or bring them around creative stuff or show them things that are beautiful
or just look at what they're interested in and keep on putting it in front of them
and how does that equate to maker spaces low threshold entry lots of failed stuff up on the
walls like that story should be told repeatedly repeatedly repeatedly you're going to walk into
the space and you're going to go through a process you're not going to just make a thing
you're going to go through a process and that thing you made well you're only going to make that
thing once but the process by which you make it you're going to keep on using that process for the
rest of your natural life or your unnatural life whichever one you end up living uh nate thank you
for that great question thank you so much tested patrons and you keep submitting your questions and
i will continue as always to answer them and again as always i will see you all next time stay safe