Community Supported Education!
Parts and Crafts, a Groundwork Somerville partner, has a new project! It’s called a CSE, short for Community Supported Education — our new experiment with R&D and kit development. Our goal is to raise $5000 (by February 28 at midnight) to support to creation of high-quality, imaginative science, art, and engineering project kits for kids. For details, go to http://kck.st/partsandcrafts, or visit our website at cse.partsandcrafts.org.
What’s a CSE?
It’s a box filled with projects! Riffing on the idea of Community Supported Agriculture, where you buy into a farm and receive a box of veggies every week, we’ll be sending out a monthly box of stuff to make and do. Materials, instructions, ideas, links to further research — a semi-curated snapshot of what we’re up to each month.
What might show up in your box?
Build your own lightsaber! (PVC, LEDs, and battery pack included) Introduction to lockpicking! How to juggle (and how to make your own juggling balls)! Turn your house into a marble run! A variety of exciting things to make and do and think about. Each month we will send out a major project and a couple of smaller projects and experiments, all developed month-by-month at Parts and Crafts, based on things we’ve worked on in our programs.
They’re project kits, with a little bit less polish and a little bit more immediacy — in addition to the usual instructions and materials, we’ll give you a set of “design documents” about why and how we made the choices we did to make it easier for you to extend and remix our work. And when we’re done we’ll post the whole thing on the internet.
Why CSE?
Community Supported Agriculture creates a really valuable and rare kind of relationship between the farmer and the consumer. The farmer comes to know who he or she is growing food for, and this known audience provides both a reason to grow food and the money and other resources that farming requires. For us, the CSE is similar — these boxes will push us to make our nascent ideas publically usable, get people building and making and crafting in their own homes, widen the set of people and the kinds of projects we get to work with and on, and create for us a community of support for our own ongoing research and development.
Any additional funds will go towards supporting the grand dream — a year-round hackerspace / makerspace / open workshop for kids, where kids, adults, and creative people can drop in to work on projects, acquire new tools and skills, and work together to make things, and make things happen.
How do I sign up?
To sign up for a share, go to http://kck.st/partsandcrafts, or visit cse.partsandcrafts.org to read more about the project. Shares are available in one, three, six, or twelve month increments, for pick-up or delivery. The first enrollment round ends February 29 — sign up today!