White House National #WeekofMaking Connections

“Being interested and engaged in life is the single most important pathway to success.” -President Barack Obama

Let’s be honest: sometimes you simply just don’t want to do the things you probably should do. Such was the case for us when we learned about the White House National #WeekofMaking happening in June. Our reluctance to engage in this initiative may seem paradoxical given our obvious predisposition toward everything the event was about. But exactly because every week is a week of making for us, making a big deal out of one week just seemed…unnecessary. That, combined with the event’s scheduling conflict with Yesler’s Juneteenth celebrations, inspired little more than hesitation in us. However, the persistent dedication to the event shown by Andrew Coy and the rest of the Making team in OSTP finally compelled us to get over ourselves and get the job done.

In our experience there are two main methods for getting a job done. In one way, Willpower and Persistence are the primary mechanisms for accomplishing the goal, and you just suck it up and do what needs to be done to get through it. We call this “the box-checking method”. The other main way primarily requires Sense of Adventure and Creativity, and rather than simply powering through all the job’s attendant complexities and discordances to find the most direct path to the checked box, you embrace those complexities and discordances and zigzag between them until the box becomes something of actual interest to you. We call this “the fun way”.

(Obviously, jobs can involve both methods to different degrees at different times, but many influencing factors—the type of job, the amount of time and other resources you have to do it, the constraints involved, and your own interests and motivations—can make a huge difference in which method predominates.)

Big Brains generally spend a huge portion of their young lives checking boxes. Go to school; do your homework; read this book; etc. They have tons of experience in that particular method of getting the job done (and often failing to get the job done). Consequently, The BBSC is necessarily designed around doing things “the fun way”. It takes significantly longer and involves way more work, but we, like President Obama, find that learning to do life the fun way is the single most important pathway to success.

For us, doing National Week of Making the fun way involved exploring the unique history of Juneteenth and illustrating the connections between the events and people that eventually made it happen. And so we put together a bunch of materials we had lying around to make an electric circuit out of history:

This is the kind of project that, as one Big Brain succinctly put it, “makes nerdiness cool.” Nearly every Big Brain had a hand in its development and, therefore, had an investment in its outcome. And by viewing the National Week of Making through the Juneteenth historical lens, we not only came away with a more complex understanding of our history, we now have a new (for us) platform for storytelling that we’re already deploying in other contexts.

So, for being an instigator and determined supporter of making, Big-Brained Superheroes would like to earnestly say, “Thanks, Obama!”