“With Mouse, we are involved in determining the problem to solve and designing the solution, which is what you really need in the real world.” 
-- A Mouse Design League Member, 2017

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“Solve for X.”  

But what if “X” is not the most relevant challenge confronting your community?

(Eyes glaze, minds wander).

And what if the “standard methods” for solving such challenges are not ones your community finds most effective or best attuned to the community’s needs?

(Ears close, more minds drift, for want of the outside cultivation they deserve).

Flip the question and many young people will run at the latest technologies, will create with passion and improvise with mastery.

“What is the X you want to solve?  Why that X and not some other?  How do you want to solve for that?”

Allow our young learners to design and build around what they themselves perceive as the most pressing challenges.  Do so, and they will usher in a new age of shared invention and prosperity.

Trust the young to create and master on their own terms, and they will produce technology with purpose.  They will end America’s “innovation starvation.”  They will “keep it real.”  They will keep humans at the center of the equation, as the end in and with ourselves, and not as the means to some end driven by technology or other forces. 

Technology with purpose is a potent antidote against disinformation, hype, the meretricious.  The robot you built to help pick up trash on the street either works or it didn’t, and everyone can see its performance.  The guidance device the team built to help the wheelchair-bound puts the human at the center.  The video-game you made to address issues of body image or bullying has a purpose beyond simple entertainment.  

In an age where cupidity colludes with incompetence to thwart equitable economic growth, the American genius nevertheless finds a way to flip the questions.  Told to color within the lines, we ignore the coloring-book altogether, choosing a blank piece of paper upon which to make our own designs.  Maybe we don’t draw at all, but use the paper for origami, or scissor and reassemble it as a collage.

The technology is new at Mouse, cutting edge in fact; we were among the first to bring computer-aided design and 3D printing to K-12 classrooms, and now we are play-testing virtual reality and soft circuitry / wearable tech for STEM lessons.  Yet nothing is new about our very American approach to learning.  We are syncopated with the ingenuity of the tinkerer, the inventor, the hacker.  Ben Franklin would have loved our maker space, Walt Whitman would have felt at home with Mouse learners, de Tocqueville would have included us among his examples of the uniquely American spirit.   

Learners at Mouse create in the space that includes the iconic garage of Silicon Valley and the equally iconic dorm room from which sprang Google, Dell, Facebook.  No one came to Hewlett & Packard, or Jobs & Wozniak, with pre-packaged challenges to solve, much less the specified methods and tools by which to solve them.  The paradigm-shifters define their own purpose, responding to deep, sometimes unspoken, community needs.

Widen the circle still further, yet make it even closer to home: we strive to emulate Grandmaster Flash, who as a young man built customized electronica and sound systems from scrap bits he found in vacant lots in the South Bronx, and DJ Marley Marl, who as a young man in Queensbridge brought his electronic music expertise to hip-hop.  Their signature innovations -- finding & maintaining the break using two turntables, and sampling from vinyl to the drum machine (and back) -- define American prowess in the early 21st century as powerfully as MS-DOS, Apple design and Google’s search algorithms.  Flash and DJ Marl chose their own challenges and responded very much on their own terms, always keeping community at the heart of the endeavor.

I could go on:  Madam C. J. Walker comes to mind, and Lady Ada, among many others.

What connects the learner at Mouse with these creators is the application of purpose to meet a shared challenge and to emancipate ourselves from the barriers thrown up by existing institutions.  

As another recent Mouse Design League member puts it, “You would think that technologies like this exist, but they do not. It is up to us young people to try to understand the problem and invent a way that could help -- this is what we do at Mouse.”

By Daniel Rabuzzi, Executive Director, Mouse