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Welcome to EdTech Adventures. Join us as we explore the role of technology, STEM, and creative play in education. With expert guests, we’ll discover how learning is always an adventure.
EdTech Adventures: Professional Play with Matt Barinholtz
[00:00:00] Charlotte Cheng: Welcome to EdTech Adventures. Join us as we explore the role of technology, STEM, and creative play in education. With expert guests, we’ll discover how learning is always an adventure. For the past 20 years, Matt has sparked playful hands on learning in community and educational settings, serving employment readiness initiatives, and initiating groundbreaking juvenile justice work. In 2012, Matt founded FutureMakers to increase access to hands on learning in disinvested P-K classrooms in greater Washington, D.C. Matt is a Chicagoland native and longtime Baltimore resident and believes small hands with big ideas deserve real tools, opportunities to explore, and coaches who care in their neighborhoods and schools. Thanks so much for being on our podcast, Matt.
Matt Barinholtz: You got it. That's that's really cool to hear someone else say those words and yeah, it's, it's really wanting to play. Um, and coaching and and materials and all that other stuff is, is really essential to it.
Charlotte Cheng: I totally agree. Now, with our chat, let's start at the beginning of your journey. Could you describe a memorable education experience that you've had as a student?
Matt Barinholtz: Let's list some names and we'll start with gratitude, because that's really the most memorable. If you look at me. It's been a minute since I was in grade school, but Mr. Cox, Mr. Paws, Miss Oliva, Mr. Ritter, Mr. Stahlberg, all art and music teachers, and these are people from Skokie, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, from the 70s into the 80s and the very early 90s.
Ron Lex. Uh, people who in my undergraduate experience were just so, so important to be the coach, the inspirer, the guide, what we made stuff with. I mean, I remember toilet paper tubes and lots of plaster bandages and, but also etching and, you know, these are public schools shop class. Music class things that, you know, playing recorder, all of those really tangible, creative experiences are what I remember the most.
I really don't remember the book report. I really, really don't remember the quizzes and tests. I remember what we made and I remember. The feeling of, and the excitement that came from becoming an expert at making things.
Charlotte Cheng: Yeah, I do miss I…shop class. I did not have shop class at my school and I just would hear people talk about this amazing class and I think now that you know they have makerspaces that sort of replaced shop class, but I think it's still slightly different, right?
Matt Barinholtz: Yeah, I, so we go from industrial arts or shop class to tech ed. To makerspace, um, and we watch that go from being a designated educator to a specials area that might cover a couple of different classrooms. To a person who really does a special thing but actually they're the librarian. And I, and I think that this is something that's really, really important to know that the, that the, the designation of shop class was also really built to prepare young people to go do the work, not just have the exposure.
And now I think that we're in a really, really critical point, um, where, making the cutting board or figuring out how to get the light to turn on. Um, those kinds of very practical skills, um, require a lot of focus and concentration and problem solving and agency and you can't AI your way through that.
So, as we're thinking about you know, where's, where's the real shop class shop class now it's in every single classroom that believes in project-based learning. And for every single educator, that's trying new things and building new things, what's the experiential, not just talking, not just sharing how we feel about it, but what's the thing we're making and what are we learning through the making? And so again, just jumped on the soapbox right away. I can step back down if you need me to…
Charlotte Cheng: No, that's fine. Well, I think this leads into my next question is how did you become interested in STEM education and I'm already seeing a glimmer of what really drives you in STEM education. Do you mind sharing how that all started?
Matt Barinholtz: So I guess I was interested in STEM education before we formally had folks at Rhode Island School of Design calling it STEM. Um, I was interested in engineering solutions to design challenges when I was in middle school. Because shop class or tech ed or the maker space had shut down in middle school. I was sort of put in a spot where, um, art class was the place I could go.
So it was Mr. Ritter. It was Sharon Halford. It was people in the high school who, you know, Miss, Miss Oliva, who really knew that they had the keys to the kingdom that kept me engaged. And then the processes that I was learning, drawing, painting, sort of 2D stuff, but then over in the corner, there's this Apple computer with a camera on it. What?
And then looking at David Hockney and David Hockney this artist that is an incredibly accomplished painter, but also did this beautiful series of work in the 80s that was Polaroid photographs taken of a person for many, many, many different perspectives over the course of many minutes. And how could you capture a portrait of a person in time?
So, time and space and technology and all of a sudden art didn't become just a thing that you make that's cool or pretty or tells a big feeling story. But, there's people that create tools that allow expressive outcomes to happen. And that's when I really understood that there's this intersection between the engineering and the creative possibilities.
This is the early days of when MIT was really looking at art and design and technology being integrated. And I didn't really have the confidence to end up at MIT. But I did have the confidence that if I could figure out a way to play with these weird new toys and integrate them into the kinds of things would create, you know, really exciting things. So it was really in high school, in the 90s, in the late, well, actually in the 80s and going into the 90s in college. I hope that sort of sounds like an answer to a question. It's, it was a very long time ago.
Charlotte Cheng: No, I just, I'm very inspired that it started at such an early age. Uh, we have an, we had an intern here who reached out to me in high school because he'd started his own CS education program for rural schools. And he was just emailing me questions that were so thoughtful for a young student where it's just like, how do I make sure my content is approachable for kids who have dyslexia?
I was just like, wow, wow. Like, you know, and so starting at an early age, thinking about that, I have a similar experience where, um, I didn't, I didn't know how to define it. I also had the thing where Learning Design wasn't a term at all in college, and it took a lot of searching to define why I was so fascinated about this intersection piece, the interdisciplinary piece.
Um, and I think that's where STEM education, when they made the term allows for that interdisciplinary opportunity, especially if you use the term STEAM where they throw in art as well, right? Because it's science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics, correct?
Matt Barinholtz: Exactly. That and that's, that's that Rhode Island School of Design idea of, you know, here's this place where it all intersects, but also its fully integrated. And understanding the difference between an intersection. There's a lot of intersection in everything once that world becomes apparent to all of us.
But then integration, how do we solve a learning challenge through a practice? So how do we solve a computer science challenge through a sculpture activity? How do we build things that move because certain inputs, not, uh, not necessarily a, a digital or electrical input. How do we make things come to life using logic and using sort of a sequence in order to make things mechanically work? Uh, that's, that's the exciting part. That's the part where I think we're, that, that's the human part of it.
Charlotte Cheng: Yes, agreed. Now what inspired you to found FutureMakers?
Matt Barinholtz: Very big feelings first, and the big feelings started because I was fortunate enough to have spent a lot of time after leaving school learning that I wasn't really a visual artist that had a studio practice. I, I had a lot of fun being a visual artist for the studio practice but ended up falling into settings during that time where I was doing a lot of community work.
And the community work turned into helping organizations start projects that engaged adults and young people through getting involved with an organization that serves homeless teenagers and creating job pathways then falling into an amazing role in a school within a juvenile detention center for young men from Washington, D.C.
The thing I learned from the young men that I was coaching, was all of them were brilliant and their brilliance became much more apparent when their heads and their hands and their hearts were fully connected. And I know that's a pretty abstract idea, but when we're doing things, we're thinking about where's the state that it's going to be in the future.
We're figuring out how do we stick with it if it's making us frustrated. We're getting feedback from other people. It's real visual. It's visible. So FutureMakers really came from, um, hearing from so many other educators outside of the programs that I had been part of saying, “Hey, Matt, you know, that stuff that you're doing with those people? Can you do this with our students? How do I start a woodshop in my classroom? How do I bring in that weird CNC laser stuff that you're doing into my after-school program?”
And I couldn't really answer that. I didn't, I didn't have the ability to take the young men that I was working with out of a secure facility into the community and sort of replicate what we were doing. So, FutureMakers started as a, a break. It started as a sabbatical, the, the gift that I got from the leaders of the school that I was working with. And, uh, shortly thereafter, the bug was so, so strong, um, that I, I asked for what I needed, which was I needed to be able to go and do that on my own and, uh, that's where it started at about 13 years ago, and it's, but it's changed a whole lot in a very, you know, short period of time from what it was 13 years ago to now.
Charlotte Cheng: I agree, time flies with EdTech. It just, it goes so quickly. Now, today we're talking about play, the importance of, and we, I'm titling it “Professional Play” because play is important, not just for students, but for educators as well. So in your experience, why do you think it's so important to allow for play, both with students and educators.
Matt Barinholtz: Play is our default as humans. And I'm not talking around goofing around and, and giggly play. That's a, that's an output. Play is how we learn. I've never had someone ever say, but you know, I've never had a school leader say to me, you know, there's just too many educators playing around.
There's two, they're just goofing around all the time. Right? How do I get them to just get more serious? We learn best when we play. And play is…the brain science shows us that it's our default mode. Performance is more analytical, uh, more reflective, more process based. And performing, when we're educators in a classroom or we're helping build, you know, solutions to other people's problems, that's not necessarily play time.
That's sort of show and tell time. Playtime is for everybody a little bit different, but in order to start to build confidence and to really understand what we're sharing, we need to start with the playful place.
Charlotte Cheng: Right. But educators have so much on their plate these days, even more so than even a year or two ago. Um, and it makes them very agenda focused. Like you said, the Show And Tell piece. So how do you get them out of that agenda, Show And Tell mindset so that they can focus more on the play in a STEM space or at their classroom or school?
Matt Barinholtz: I think that folks that are already thinking about teaching through technology, the STEM specialists, the people who've not necessarily been “volun-told”, “Hey, go do this CS thing with these students.” The people that have opted in, they're already believing in the power of curiosity and the, the, the, the real, unconditional pursuit that the learners that they're supporting are really, they're going to take the lead.
Those learners are going to take the lead. So, the playfulness there is finding the ability to let go and observe and be there and support that takes a lot of seasoning, a lot of practice and a lot of, a lot of sort of risk in letting things happen and letting them demonstrate what they're enjoying. And then you can ease yourself into their play.
You don't have to get down on the ground and play. But I'll use, I will use an analogy. I'm not a sports person. However, I've never seen a coach…basketball, football. So I've never seen any of them when the, in the most important play of the game, get or throw it or, or, or make the touchdown happen. That, that'd be ridiculous, right? Well, a lot of times, because we were hesitant to sort of let the learners lead. We need them to solve the problem that we've put in front of them. We actually scored the goal, and they're just providing the assist.
And real play, in a concrete way, is you allowing up front them to accept that it's not going to work right the first time. The bot that we're building, the program that we're coding. The circuit that we're testing, the wiggly thing that draws. Is not going to look like the instructions the first time. So I think educators, the first, most important thing is to figure out where you are most comfortable. In being a coconspirator. Working alongside your learners towards the objective, instead of leading from the front, you're really sort of trying to get to the back. Of the of the pack and go with them. And, and, you know, it's long, long winded way of saying you can't play if, if you insist that the, the lead coach must be the one who makes the winning play.
Charlotte Cheng: I agree. We call it flipped classroom, right? You're flipping the focus and the drive to the student. It almost sounds like teachers need improv class, because it really thinks like you're reacting to the student and sort of, allowing them to lead the way and in some ways. Um, but that also leads into my next question about professional learning.
We've talked about how important it is to insert play into even professional development programming. Um, what else do you think is required to build effective professional learning for educators?
Matt Barinholtz: Really authentic professional learning comes from other educators. If you've ever been in a PD where you're really asking yourself the question. How am I? Why am I here? This is this is this wasting my time and you're spending time talking with your peers in the back of the room.
Sometimes the conversation you're having with your peers who are sitting next to you while the PD is happening is way more salient, but the only way that you can do that peer led stuff is by starting with trust.
Charlotte Cheng: I agree. I mean, we've talked about the importance of cohort and community building as part of professional learning, right? Like learning to learn from your peers. Um, how do you make space for that if you're the person coming in?
Matt Barinholtz: You, you set the constraints, you create your availability based on the availability of other peers in their, in their cohort. You really insist that instead of going in as the expert, you're going in as a facilitator that's been already in conversation with people on their team. You build into what you do a relationship.
So you start with, and this may be impossible, but it's only impossible until you ask for what you need and what you ask for when you're making that planning conversation happen. When you're bringing what your solution is into this place, this library, this school system, this after-school program. You say, before we're with everybody, who are the 2 people that you really feel are excited. And would be really the best leaders when I'm not there it's just one extra conversation, but that one extra conversation means as soon as you get there, you have two experts that you can just turn to.
They don't necessarily need to run the show, but you can just get it kicked off and then they can take two pods and you can take a third and circulate. It's just a strategy that works.
Charlotte Cheng: I love that. Um, here we, we talk about, hey, if I'm taking a trip or a vacation, which we all need to do sometimes, who's going to be operating when I'm not there? And if you can't think of someone, then something needs to get fixed and upgraded because you can't be the only person. So I like that idea of saying, okay, identify the advocates who can push forward when you're not there, because chances are, you're not going to be there most of the time. Right?
Matt Barinholtz: Yeah. Plan on not being there. If, if what you're creating, whether it's, uh, a substitute lesson plan, or you're a founder and you're bringing a totally new solution into a place that you're trying to introduce, you know, that if you're that teacher, you remember. You wrote that little note on your lesson plan for the Substitute, if you have any questions, talk to Jaime, and talk to Qinli.
They know where my things are, and they will know how to deal with, Gloria, who sometimes gets frustrated. Remember that. You know how to do this with second graders. Do the same thing with your peers. And it's not about treating them like second graders. You respect them, but you see your resources, your people that are closest to you and they become the extension of you, so you can get out of your own way. As a Founder, the best advice that I got early on happened to be from my dad, which is, you know, Matt, you got a lot of really big ideas and I'm a little concerned. You're not going to be able to get out of your own way. Who are you asking for help?
How are you getting the help you need? How are you going to do this when it's not you? You don't scale. Classrooms don't scale when the educator believes they are the only one. Schools don't scale understanding when they think that those educators are solely responsible for instruction.
They scale when peers are part of you asking for what you need and sometimes the real hint of play is letting other people know how to play. What's our objective? How do you know when you've won? What can you, you know, do you get extra chances? How many people do I need to play with? Like these things are really, really fundamental. So I do this through making things. You know, I do this through designing experiences that happen to be STEM projects, but they're all about the communication and collaboration and confidence and, and, and just delight and joy that educators need in order for those learners to feel really good and engaged and believing in the learning. So, I focus on joy for educators. I don't focus on outcomes for learners that have to be facilitated by educators.
Charlotte Cheng: I love the focus on joy. That's, you know, we, we all need a little more joy in our lives.
Matt Barinholtz: Heck. Yeah. Heck. Yeah.
Charlotte Cheng: Now, I love that advice that your dad gave you. I'm going to also take that to heart. Um, what are some other key things you've learned through your experience founding and growing FutureMakers starting from day one?
Matt Barinholtz: Um, when you tell yourself you'll never ever do something, you're lying to yourself. 10 years ago, if you would have said to me, “Hey, Matt, guess what? In 10 years, you're going to be manufacturing learning kits.” I would say, “Are you out of your mind?” That's the least authentic, you know, has the least amount of choices, least open-ended. It's not making, that's not, that's not, that's not what we're trying to solve.
And then fast forward all this time. No, what we, what we're trying to solve is joy for educators, make it really easy for them to spark joy and understanding and curiosity and confidence and collaboration communication in their classrooms through inventing a machine that wiggles and draws.
That's when I understood, when you say you'll never pay real close attention look at where that's coming from what is it that you're afraid of? What is it that you're avoiding when you say, I'm never going to do, uh, a, a digital lesson plan for other people?
I'm always just going to need to be the person who presents it. No one else can pull off what I do. No, you must, and you can scale yourself. Don't be afraid. Pay attention when you say, I never will.
Charlotte Cheng: Oh, I can totally connect with that. Uh, to me, it's a signal of rigidity in thinking when you say never in any sentence. I work with children's books. I am an author. So I love print. I love print. And when I was working at Wonder Workshop, all of our curriculum was pretty much in print because I'm just like, obviously everything needs to be in print.
Why would you ever put all of your curriculum digitally? Uh, like that's never going to work. And now I'm at CodeCombat all over our curriculum is digital because I watched educators turning our lesson plans into Google Slides themselves, spending hours on this. And I went, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I should be doing that work for you.
And then you can make a copy of the slides I make and just tweak as you need. And it took me watching another educator doing it and seeing how much time she put in it for me to like, switch that mindset and go, okay, I'm just being rigid cause I like physical print products and not because of what the educator actually needs.
Matt Barinholtz: Well, yeah, and you're talking about a thing. You're talking about a what, which is a print product versus a digital product. But the solution was when you were empathizing and listening to and observing how other people had to change their behavior in order to accommodate what you were offering them.
Holy crap. So the gift is the conversations and the observations. So, if you're an educator who's thinking like, hey, I really found this problem and I, and I think I've got a solution. When you start communicating your solution to other people, having the conversations and these are the vulnerable conversations.
These are the, why am, why am I doing this conversations? Um, that's what's going to get you to understand, we're not making STEM kits for kids. We're creating joyful time for educators to effortlessly bring these very clearly aligned structured hands-on project based experiences. It took a lot to move that focus and it was, it came through those conversations.
Charlotte Cheng: The active listening is so important and the joy piece, again, I'm going to come back to that because that's why we, built CodeCombat. Uh, it was trying to plus one the fun of coding through game-based learning and us having to listen to educators go, “Oh, wow, they're really getting bogged down by how dry coding curriculum can be.”
How can we plus one it? Um, and, 10 years later, we're still here. Um, let's move to the future. How could STEM education and makerspaces specifically make an impact on the future of EdTech? So looking forward in this land of AI and where it could be in 10 years, how could STEM and makerspaces make that positive impact?
Matt Barinholtz: What AI won't, and this is my big hairy opinion, AI, I use, I use AI tools every single day. They're phenomenal right now. This is the MS Paint or the early sort of, Apple Paint version of all the things that are, are going to become very, very real, very shortly. But MS Paint has never replaced the decision making of the painter.
Um, it is the critical thinking skills that hands-on, playful engineering and making, or the applied understanding in a robotics club, or just simple sort of, CS concepts in, in thinking through an order of operations…those are, that's the future. It's, it's focusing on how we're solving really personal critical thinking problems and helping our learners develop their own solution, not the creative solution, but the solution that really works and the solution that feels the most natural and most human.
You're going to have a lot of assists from technology, but we're going to be composing some finished product out of those assists. You know, we have a robot that loads and unloads a laser cutter all day long, but that robot doesn't design what's going on to those pieces of material that it's loading and unloading.
It allows us to have more time to celebrate the genius of the people on our team who are improving and building, um, materials that become joyful experiences for educators but we didn't design future makers, so we could have a robot. We didn't create CS, so schools could just get more Chromebooks.
That happened…great. And now, how are we applying our brilliance and our genius and our joy? Make the experience happen, make it tangible, make a project based. They will always remember it. You're going to be the person that allows them to explore and tinker and play and they'll remember you, and they'll first, most importantly, remember their joy.
Charlotte Cheng: I love that. And I like your note on AI where it's, it should just be a tangential thing because I just treat it as another tool in an additive toolbox and it's not a replacement, which I think a lot of people are concerned about that. It's not a replacement. It's an accelerator and an additive like tool to hopefully like use like you said with your robots and things like that. Right?
Matt Barinholtz: Yeah. Yeah, it just won't take the place of critical thinking.
Charlotte Cheng: Right! No. And we, like you and I have been in this space for a long time. We've always known what critical thinking is and how important it is. I think it's all the more important in this new future that we're seeing. All right, let's end with one more question. What advice would you give to someone who is interested in fostering more play amongst students and educators? Someone who's just starting, what's an important first step to, to start that process going?
Matt Barinholtz: Do it yourself. If you're curious and you don't feel like you have the confidence, the biggest risk you can take is going and trying it along with other grownups and trying it yourself. Find the community tool library that offers the woodworking class. Find the cohort of friends that are, that are interested in, you know, playing Dungeons and Dragons or some role-playing game for the first time.
Go hang out with nieces and nephews that are, you know, shooting stuff on Tik Tock. I know I sound like Grandpa Matt, but the first place you start is you play. Your play will not be as authentic as the play that your students or users or beneficiaries are going to experience. But in order for you to really get inspired and confidence, you have to play first. So taking that time, not through professional learning, not necessarily even a structured cohort during your day. Find that opportunity to play on your own in your own way first.
Charlotte Cheng: Oh man, I love it. Have faith, have trust in the power of play. And I just keep going back to it. I…I agree as well. Matt, this has been such a joy having a conversation with you. Thanks so much again for being on our podcast.
Matt Barinholtz: I appreciate it. I, I hope everybody gets a chance to, to spend more time thinking about why am I doing this in the first place? And what's the joy and where's the play that got me involved?
Charlotte Cheng: Thanks for listening to EdTech Adventures. Please subscribe to catch more of our episodes and leave a review to support the show. For more resources and info, visit us at codecombat.com/podcast. I'm your host, Charlotte Cheng. We'll see you on our next learning adventure.