Update: We won five Maker’s Choice Education Awards!  Thanks for everyone who participated and offered their support!

We didn't even know that they had these. Not a bad surprise!

One of my officemates and I were accepted to host an interactive event at Maker Faire this year called Crowd-powered Bridge Design.  The event was targeted primarily at kids but was open to anyone interested in participating.  Our goal was to merge the joy of bridge building with the newfangled idea of crowdsourcing in a never-before-seen exhibition of creativity and talent.

Brainstorm, sketch, prototype, design, and build a massive bridge to experience the power and challenge of crowdsourcing!  Kids and adults are encouraged to contribute segments to a bridge that meets various real-world construction challenges.

Crowdsourcing is a process that’s had limited success in handling creative tasks (like bridge building, book writing, or art), but many people are interested in pushing the limits of what’s currently considered to be possible in this domain.  Personally, I couldn’t wait to see what people were able to come up with and was somewhat amazed at the quality of the result.

We decided to run with a bridge-per-day model and let all of the participants focus on a single design for the full eleven hour period.  The goal of Day 1 was to build a bridge that would allow a car that was approximately 12 inches wide to pass over it, a boat that was approximately three feet tall to pass under it in two places, and to ensure that the bridge was somewhat “earthquake-resistant.”   Hundreds of kids and their parents helped us build the bridges and they’d already exceeded my wildest expectations by lunchtime.  We actually added in the boat challenge because they mastered our other challenges so quickly!

After an outrageously successful day on Saturday we decided to crank up the difficulty meter a bit and create obstacles that would require a drawbridge design from our builders.  We created a barebones structure and waited, this time knowing a little better what to expect from our rabid participants.  It wasn’t long at all before we had people running string as cables, placing pilings underneath the road, and providing all kinds of mission-critical upgrades.  By the end of the day we had a sturdy and somewhat dependable drawbridge that could be raised and lowered from either end.  Bravo, builders!

My involvement with the bridge design activity and Maker Faire at large sold me even more on the unmistakeable levels of human ingenuity that can emerge under the proper conditions.  A number of teachers and summer camp counselors expressed an interest in integrating projects like the bridge design competition into their classrooms and I encourage them to contact me if they haven’t already.  From an educational perspective, this project was a huge success because it combined three important elements that make it useful for classrooms.

• It was directly educational and encouraged kids to apply when they knew about physics, engineering, and design.
• It was really, really cheap.  We bought three large roles of duct tape each day (an absolute necessity), but found everything else in dumpsters around campus.
• Kids had a lot of fun doing it.  One of our biggest regrets was not designing more for parents to do because they ended up having to pull their kids away from the activity to move along to other things.  Thirty minutes of solid participation from a child was not unusual, and several of them told us they’d be back (although I think their parents had their own opinions about that).