The profound connections between perspective, process, and possibility were on display during our first ever mini BBSC trip to Seattle’s Mini Maker Faire this year, sponsored by Brown Paper Tickets.

Thanks (once again!) to BPT Maker Advocate, Tamara Clammer, several Big-Brained Superheroes got to do something totally new last weekend. Or, more accurately, we got to do something(s) totally new.

For instance, a few of our BBSes had never before ridden our city’s light rail:

Or ridden the Seattle Center monorail:

Or driven a remote-controlled submarine:

And that was merely the beginning of the boundless process of making our Big-Brained Superhero world just a bit bigger.

Soon, it became time to lay hands on and make.

Simple machines with Xbot:

And simple circuits with Curiosity Hacked:

While the taller BBSes then proceeded to see the world anew through the latest tech:

the shorties split to the Pacific Science Center to embiggen their brains in other ways:

Whew! After a very full day, we returned to Yesler Community Center with heads full of ever-expanding notions of what big brains can do with just a little help from our friends.

Hooray! Hooray! Digital Logic is on its way!

That’s right. Remember all that partying we did oh so many months ago? Of course you do. Well, we’re finally preparing to get our digital logic on and are furiously finalizing our workshop plans.

The Big-Brained Superheroes Club will be offering four series of four (4x4) very hands-on workshops open to anyone and everyone who wants to learn the basics of how computers “think”. Each series will comprise four mission-oriented workshops:

1. Mission 1: Have fun with Electric Circuits
2. Mission 2: Have fun with Logic Gates
3. Mission 3: Have even more fun with Logic Gates
4. Mission 4: Complete the Logic Gate Challenge!

Workshops will be on Mondays at 6pm at Yesler Community Center starting on these dates:

1. Series 1: April 28th
2. Series 2: June 2nd
3. Series 3: July 21st
4. Series 4: August 18th.

(More details, including sign-up information, to follow. To get it in your inbox, join our e-newsletter list in the sidebar over there!) –>

As always, big-brained superhero workshop participants will be working in a positive, rewarding, kinetically-rich environment. So, thanks to the City of Seattle and Somali Community Services of Seattle, we say unto you now: Hero! Prepare to do logic!

 Post by The Big-Brained Superheroes Club.

It’s no secret that without our superpowers The Big-Brained Superheroes Club would not exist today. Why does this matter? Because superpowers beget superpowers. For instance…

Yesterday, one of our beautiful Big-Brained Superheroes went from stagnation to meltdown when it came to getting her homework done. It was NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. And while we are officially on record as being homework-ambivalent ourselves, sometimes a superhero’s gotta do what a superhero’s gotta do. In steps a fellow young BBS with her healthy dose of Empathy, Leadership, and Teamwork—not to mention a small arsenal of peanut butter crackers. Less than an hour later: crisis averted, mission accomplished, Empowerment superpower activated. Go Team Big-Brained Superhero!

The BBSC recently rolled out a prototype field trip request form, which asks our young BBSes what they want to learn on their desired field trip. Our very first question comes from a 10 year-old BBS: “How does science work?”. The very second question from a 12 year-old BBS: “How do science and math work together?”.

This is what the kids these days are asking. And sadly, while the places we go may be equipped to effectively communicate some science facts, science processes are another matter entirely. Making our field trips yet another way in which we’re reminded that focusing on process (a true Big-Brained Superhero imperative and moving up our priority list almost daily) is still a fringe ideal. Hopefully, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmos reboot will help us out:

In the meantime, Hank Green can lay down some scientific method on us:

If Persistence is a Roller Coaster, Adaptability is definitely a helicopter—uniquely capable of getting us into and out of tight spots. This helicopter, started over the holidays, is a perfect example of how Big-Brained Superheroes can build cool stuff through a variety of challenges, including missing parts. And with our helicopter finally complete, we now get to take it back apart and build another machine–maybe this time an airplane or even a hovercraft. If we become experts at Adaptability, our choices are practically limitless.

We talk a lot about superpowers in The BBSC, and we recognize that our dictionary of superpowers isn’t the most conventional or widely adopted. But it seems reasonable to ask: Which superpower would you, in the long term, prefer to master: Flight or Adaptability?

As much as we love hanging out at Yesler Community Center creating cool stuff, there are just too many superpower-building opportunities available out in the world for us to stay cooped up for too long. And thanks to a thoughtful holiday gift from a member of our extended Big-Brained Superhero community, we were thrilled to exercise our Sense of Adventure, Teamwork, Kindness, and other superpowers on the ice rink ​at seattlecenter this Winterfest! (We even got in some brief discussions of the principles of inertia and ice formation in the process.) At one point in the festivities, a young BBS wanted to stop and “admire the talent” of one exceptional skater: 

So, we did stop and admire her talent. And then, we stopped her to ask about her experience and how much Persistence she puts into learning the skill of ice skating. It turns out that this exceptional skater began skating relatively late in life after she immigrated to the US from Okinawa in her twenties. Since then, she’s practiced as often as five times a week, depending on her scheduling priorities. Though our interaction with her was brief, this obliging ice skater provided more real-life supporting evidence for a few of our basic BBS assumptions:

1. “It all begins with a Sense of Adventure.” If we adhere to preconceived notions or rules for when and how we should learn new things, we are likely to fail at the goal of tapping into all of our hidden strengths.
2. “Persistence is a roller coaster.” Sometimes our Persistence is powered up, and sometimes it’s powered down. There are many potential explanations for this variability. The only constant here is the fact that we need our Persistence superpower in order to tap into all our hidden strengths.
3. “Empowerment is the one superpower that rules them all.” Tapping into your hidden strengths makes you a model—someone whose talent others will want to stop and admire. Taking the time yourself to stop and make those hidden strengths accessible to others makes you a big-brained superhero.

Around this time last year, our young BBSes spent some time developing Codecademy’s web holiday cards. How did it go? Well…it could have gone better. This year, we spent time with Code.org’s Hour of Code. How did it go? Well…aside from a lack of headphones for every BBS coder, it couldn’t have gone better. It went so well that several of our young Big-Brained Superheroes are choosing to go Beyond One Hour. Even without BBS sidekicks around to help them!

And now, for the breakdown. Our BBS population for this exercise was fairly similar to that of last year’s Codecademy exercise, so we’ll skip that explanation and go straight into the review.

The Good:

• Like last year’s Codecademy exercise, this year's Code.org Hour of Code is freely available to anyone with a computer and internet access.
• Unlike last year’s Codecademy project-based exercise, this year’s Hour of Code was game-based. This particular game-based approach provided much more method to the madness and enabled a leveling up process that was significantly more logical and predictable than Codecademy’s project-based approach. Coders were more motivated to think problems through, and they seemed to grasp much more programming logic as a result of Hour of Code’s game-based approach.
• The Angry Birds character set is a great example of how broadly inclusive design doesn’t have to be banal or vapid, and the use of Angry Birds in Hour of Code was an obvious draw for our young BBSes.
• The instructional videos were exceptional in that they were explanatory but didn’t give too much away. They were timed well, and the diversity of the instructors was inspiringly inclusive. Apparently, when Chris Bosh speaks, our Big-Brained Superheroes listen. (When they have the technical capability to do so, that is.) And the written instructions that were provided for those without sound capability eliminated a big obstacle for us.
• The completion certificate at the end of the game was a nice reward and motivator for some BBSes.
• Beyond One Hour provides us with a simple way to continue the learning!

The Less Good:

• Once our BBSes got the auditory reward for completing a level, they tended to skim through the text that told them they might have completed the level using fewer lines of code. Making that information more prominent (at least the first time around) would have given them stronger cues that there was more learning to get from the level they just completed.
• Also, it would help if the link to “Show Code” were more obvious or if the lines of code came up automatically in at least one level so coders wouldn’t unintentionally skip over it.

All in all, we are thrilled with how our coding exercise went this year, and we’re continuing to use Code.org in our BBSC meetings. For us, it was not just a method of learning some basic programming logic, but it also served as a welcoming, inclusive invitation to explore the world of computer programming. After completing their Hour of Code, several of our coders went on to build web pages using W3schools:

Or played with Tynker and other code-learning platforms directly available through the Code.org website:

In short, even though our coding exercise this year was not holiday-centric, Code.org’s Hour of Code provided us with some fine holiday (and beyond) fun!

DISCLAIMER: The BBSC is not affiliated with any of the code learning platforms or sites discussed in this post. However, one of our volunteer brain-hackers (Launchpad McD) does work for Facebook, which is somehow involved with Code.org (though we don’t know how, and we didn’t know this before we began exploring Code.org).

Our homework problem persists. But even our problems have hidden strengths…Teamhomework!

Thanks so much to Seattle Met Magazine for granting The Big-Brained Superheroes Club their Light a Fire “Purely for the Love” award!

The Willpowerometer lives! Thanks once again to the superpowers and Propeller prowess of BBS Volunteer Mr. Measurement Man, we now have a graphical representation (version 1.0) of how well we’re exercising our Willpower as it pertains to sound production. The closer that we—as a group—get to our desired decibel level, the more green the display and the higher the point count. The farther we get from our preferred decibel level, the more red the display and the lower the point count.

In this video, our Willpower goal was to reach a count of 50. SPOILER ALERT: We did it. And in the two weeks since the Willpowerometer was rolled out, we’ve come to love it tremendously.

Technology! Who knew?

Saturday may have been the rainiest day of the year so far, but that didn’t stop Yesler Terrace from engaging in its bi-annual neighborhood clean-up. From there, ten Big-Brained Superheroes braved even more rain on our walk to our favorite maker space—Jigsaw Renaissance—in Seattle’s International District.

This trip was a reward for a brave young BBS who received the first ever Big-Brained Harry Potter leadership award for defending others against bullying.

Here’s our exceptional BBS Harry Potter Leader working on an electronics project at Jigsaw Renaissance:

Other young Big-Brained Superheroes were fortunate enough to share in the adventure. Happily, Jigsaw Renaissance is more fun than Disneyland.

Here are a few of us working on a robotic arm and a salt water conductivity experiment:

A few young BBSes then expressed their appreciation for BBS Volunteer Mr. Measurement Man via whiteboard:

And also learned a bit of guitar and keyboard:

Much Persistence was exercised in the process of analyzing and deconstructing a broken cell phone:

World Pizza also made a delicious appearance.

Big-Brained Superheroes definitely know how to make the best out of a torrential downpour!

* Thanks to BBS Volunteer, Launchpad McD, for compiling this post! *

Apparently, big-brained superheroes can be found pretty much anywhere as we discovered during United Way of King County’s most recent Day of Caring (which we turned into a day of hacking/making). This particular set of big-brained superheroes came from a company called Blucora, located in Bellevue, WA. And not only did a team of 10+ people travel all the way to BBS HQ at Yesler Community Center to spend the day with a few BBS Volunteers, but they brought a broad array of valuable skills and superpowers—not to mention materials—with them.

The mission: to build prototype electronics kits for our young Big-Brained Superheroes to tinker with.

The result: great stuff!

What you see here are three prototype electronic/multidimensional greeting cards, two prototype phone chargers, one prototype dexterity tester, and one pure exercise of Creativity. Mission definitely accomplished!

Many thanks to Blucora and United Way of King County (not to mention BBS Volunteers: Launchpad, Mr. Measurement Man, and Engineer Zero) for an excellent day of caring/hacking/making!

Summer is over; homework is back; and with this evolution, a quotation suddenly comes to mind:

It was as if one had diverted some terrific electric current which should have been controlling a vast system of machinery, and turned it on to annihilate a black-beetle.

-Psmith in the City

Just like Psmith with a silent P, we revel a bit in the hyperbole of this sentiment. Nonetheless, aside from our general ambivalence regarding the effectiveness of homework, its abrupt reappearance in our lives presents us with some more prosaic problems:

1. For starters, nobody—not volunteers, not young BBSes—nobody is overly fond of homework. And unless we’re relentlessly focused on exercising our superpowers rather than on simply finishing our homework, it’s a short path to volunteers practically doing our young BBSes’ homework for them (an obvious, yet quite common, problem). Not helping.
2. Secondly, if some young BBSes don’t have homework and others do, what to do with those who don’t? Our traditional response is to present the otherwise unencumbered with equally unexciting extra worksheets. That is, if some of us can’t be engaged in interesting, hands-on projects, then none of us can be engaged in interesting, hands-on projects. Unfair.
3. Homework seriously taxes our resources (eg, our reward system and volunteer time). It’s difficult to convey how utterly unrewarding our young Big-Brained Superheroes seem to find the process of doing their homework. Consequently, their reward typically comes in one of two forms from the club: attention from volunteers and BBS Bucks. These complementary reward systems are intended to help activate the reward circuitry in young BBS brains, and without enough of them, our young BBSes are left to their own devices—often not the most healthy ones. Costly.
4. Finally, the process of doing homework rarely produces the feelings that we big-brained superheroes prefer to associate with learning. Feelings like these: 

   

   

Oh, homework!…we totally get you. But you present quite a problem for us.

The circuits. They are squishy. His sharing these materials with us is reason # 3,141,592 why we <3 Engineer Zero.

It may not seem like much, but this roller coaster has been several weeks in the making. Thanks to a K'Nex set on loan from Jigsaw Renaissance, we’ve been toying with building one of these for a while. The idea seemed interesting to our young BBSes, but the Persistence just wasn’t there. When faced with a huge pile of tiny pieces and no clear path to a finished product, giving the project a miss can quickly become the obvious choice for them. For everybody. So, BBS volunteers debated…

Given that there’s no clear path from K'Nex roller coaster to world domination, is this exercise even worth all of us exercising our superpowers on? Maybe we should give this project a miss and offer our young BBSes something with quicker, more direct results. And yet, we Persisted. Why? Because we have this zany idea that our Persistence and Empowerment superpowers are inextricably linked and that the more often we—as a group—create something tangibly complex, the more confident we’ll feel that we can create anything, no matter how messy the beginnings or how unclear the path.

So, how did we get it done? Leadership, Teamwork, all the biggies. We BBS volunteers decided we were going to make it happen and that, if our young BBSes would work with us, they would be appropriately rewarded (aka Big-Brain Bucks). And how did it turn out? Well, for starters, we got it done. And more importantly, we engaged in quite a bit of problem-solving and superpower exercise along the way. But most importantly, we found that our zany idea about the connection between Persistence and Empowerment seems to have some legs. We didn’t even have time enough to get decent photos of our creation before our young BBSes decided to tear it down and begin building a bigger, better one. Looks like we’ll have to start scrounging for even more tiny pieces…

From The Narrator:

We had just spent the weekend representing The Big-Brained Superheroes Club and Jigsaw Renaissance at Emerald City Comicon, and our first-ever grant application was due that day. I was battling a wicked cold (probably from the combined lack of sleep and abundance of human contact) while sitting at a computer in our Big-Brained Superheroes Club meeting struggling to finish the application.

All throughout, young Big-Brained Superheroes kept calling my name to come look at the Scratch programs they were working on. Sitting next to me was a young BBS creating his own math-art project. After several instances of responding to those calling my name, I blew my nose and reminded them what I was working on. I then jokingly asked if they wanted the club to be “poor forever”. In an instant, the young BBS next to me (9 years old at the time) piped up, “LEAVE HER ALONE!”. We all kind of laughed and continued about our business.

See. Funny story. Or maybe not. But at least we won that one!

On Wednesday afternoon, several Big-Brained Superheroes exercised their Sense of Adventure superpower by invading Seattle City Hall to profusely thank Seattle for our Technology Matching Fund grant award. Or as our young Big-Brained Superheroes would see it:

We came…

We saw…

We ate.

Oh and there might have been some other stuff in there too…

Thanks so much, as always, to all the hardworking folks at The City of Seattle, Asfaha Lemlem of Rectech at Yesler Community Center, Brown Paper Tickets’ Maker-Doer Advocate Tamara, Big-Brained Superheroes and their caretakers, and the entire amazing community of nerds with a purpose! Extra thanks to BBS volunteer and photographer Mr. Measurement Man (aka Michael).

A couple of other projects in the C.D. about which we’re super excited are: The Young Geniuses at UmojaFest P.E.A.C.E. Center (we had serious nerd-envy over some of their work!) and Hollow Earth Radio. Check them out and see what serious nerds can do!

One of the topics that comes up quite frequently with regard to The BBSC is our membership policy. As we explained many moons ago, The BBSC is an entirely voluntary, minimal barrier-to-entry after school/summer program open to pretty much anyone who happens to be around and wants to participate. No one is compelled to join and no one is prohibited from joining. Consequently, our 1-year BBSC roster is well over 115 Big-Brained Superheroes long while our meeting participation numbers can vary by as many as 35 young BBSes.

It’s easy to imagine the liabilities associated with this type of “structure”, and the reasons why it is so rarely embraced are innumerable. As we big-brained superheroes like to say, “If it were simple, everyone would be doing it.” But in spite of the many potentially rewarding aspects of applying The Filter, we have refrained for many reasons. For starters, those expunged by The Filter must invariably end up somewhere. And we deeply care where that is. Beyond this, where others may see a preponderance of liabilities in our program’s structure, we see assets:

1. Our BBS volunteers and young BBSes get A LOT of superpower exercise. Seriously. A lot. And for a program, such as ours, dedicated to the exercise of superpowers, this asset is a biggie. It’s amazing what shifting the focus from fundamental outcomes to fundamental processes can do for a superhero.
2. There’s tremendous power in diversity. Character and quirkiness are endemic to our Big-Brained Superheroes, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. Our young BBSes, in particular, come from so many different backgrounds and speak such a diversity of languages that they can’t help but be creative in their problem-solving (as well as in their troublemaking). And Creativity is a hugely important superpower to us.
3. Our potential is limitless as is our capacity for surprise. By focusing on the whole instead of the part, we BBS volunteers willfully avoid categorizing and pigeon-holing our young BBSes. Who they are one day may be completely different from who they are the next, and it’s everyone’s job to see and stretch the potential in each set of strengths our fellow club members exhibit. While this may be a seemingly impossible task, we are big-brained superheroes, and it’s what we do.

So, why enumerate our structural assets now? Well, our recent Tumblr reminder that this website/blog is 1 year old combined with our human tendency to mark and ritualize certain measures of time may have something to do with it. Second, it’s just a good reminder for all of us—young and less young—as to why we do this business at least twice a week.  Finally, we all know what they say…superheroes gotta superpower.

Yesterday, a few Big-Brained Superhero volunteers met over 70(!) unofficial big-brained superheroes at East African Community Services in New Holly. It was an amazing two hours in which we travelled to Mars…and Venus…and Mercury…and every other planet in our solar system via rocket ships of our imagination. In the process, not only did we exercise all of our superpowers, but we talked a bit about design and development, chemical reactions, forces and motion, and our solar system. (We even briefly discussed what “NASA” stands for and what its scientists and engineers learn from launch failures.)

So, how does all this happen? Well, if we were Carl Sagan, we would start by acknowledging the origins of the universe. But since we’re The Big-Brained Superheroes Club, we start by acknowledging our shared superpowers. And then, we recognize the hours and hours and hours of work done by BBS volunteers and EACS staff, volunteers, and community members. And then, we appreciate the wide variety of in-kind contributions from a whole host of big-brained superheroes present and past:

• We love Cappy’s Gym for rescuing over 40+ water bottles from their recycle bin to serve as our rocket ships!
• We love EACS and BBS volunteers for providing over 4 ½ gallons of vinegar for rocket fuel and 16 ounces of baking soda for rocket engines. Not to mention Julianna of SPACE for, so long ago, providing the paper towels we used for engine casings.
• We love Starbucks on Capitol Hill for handing over a handful of corks to BBS volunteer Mr. Measurement Man, who went door-to-door in search of serviceable containment methods for our rocket engines and fuel.
• We love EACS, BBS volunteers, and our old Gasworks Kite Shop for providing tape, markers, and streamers used to accessorize our rocket ships. Plus the sidewalk chalk and tin cans for the launchpads.

And finally, we love EACS staff, volunteers, and community members (Elizia, Connie, and everyone else) for giving us the privilege of meeting so many new big-brained superheroes! (And for letting us accidentally use the roof as a landing pad for so many unmanned recyclable vehicles…sorry about that, EACS.) You all really know how to party!