January 2020 STEAM Camp Overview of Learning Program

Overview of Learning Program

General

The STEAM Camp is a 9 day hands-on immersion that involves class time and build time. There are about 3 hours of class time per day, where we teach about collaborative design techniques, do design reviews, or other learning activities. There may be several invited presenters who will provide presentations from remote locations. Most of the time is spent with hands-on learning - whether using design and collaboration software tools - or doing hands-on builds. All learning takes place across multiple disciplines: science, technology, art, design, build, documentation, and most importantly - collaboration. The 9 days are divided into 4 days of collaborative design boot camp, and 5 Project Days. All of this is done collaborative, where in addition to the instructors doing their part in presenting material - we rely on participants teaching each other so that we create an immersion learning environment where everyone contributes.

The event is built around increasing participants' capacity to work collaboratively, by documenting and building upon each others' work. Moreover, this collaboration takes place globally. The January 2020 STEAM camp takes place in 3 locations - Belgium; Richmond,Virginia; and Texas. So when you join, you are joining a larger collaborative effort. This effort does not stop at these 3 physical locations, as we also have a Remote Participation option, as we broadcast our content between the 3 locations and between Remote Participants, who may be located anywhere that a video connection can be found. The remote participants have access to the Developer's Kit of tools and parts that everyone in the physical locations will be working with. As we broadcast the event live, Remote Participants have the chance do do all the builds alongside of us, and to participate hands-on in all the builds or experiments. Remote Participants can thus collaborate fully in uploading and downloading design, while engaging in rapid prototyping - to move the collaborative design effort forward in a significant way. Our goal is to leverage open design, fully open source toolchains, and open processes to involve as many people in our modular design. By breaking down projects into small parts or modules, we are able to involve a large team in effective, parallel development across the globe.

We are building continuity and community into the learning program as well. To prepare, students are encourage to download our software suite, OSE Linux, to become familiar with the tools before participating in the live event. The learning experience continues after the Camp, where we invite all participants - as well as participants from former STEAM Camps - to additional sessions, held on Saturdays - for 2-4 hour Design Sprints, where we follow up on design and documentation projects. We do all this while building a community of early adopters of the forthcoming open source economy, where a new paradigm of collaborative design replaces competitive waste.

All work aims at the release of marketable products that can meet real needs, with the special value proposition of lifetime design - where users can maintain or upgrade each product based on its open source design, easy-to-build design, and the use of common, off-the-shelf (COTS) parts in addition to digitally fabricated goods such as with the 3D printer.