SparkTruck hit the road over the summer with the goal
of giving kids the chance to play with new high-tech tools, such as robots.
Eugene Korsunskiy, a teaching assistant at Stanford University, helped create
the project as a way to present children with open-ended problems and let them
figure out the solution on their own.
At one stop, a teacher warned Korsunskiy that the
approach of giving the students space to come up with the answers instead of
providing the right response wouldn't work. SparkTruck staff did see students
get stuck on design problems they presented, and even become frustrated by the
process. But they also watched as the students ultimately figured out the
problems.
“After an interaction like that, you see a gear shift
in [a kid’s] head,” Korsunskiy said in an article in Wired. “Once you make it clear that you’re not there to provide the answer,
they completely rise to the challenge.”
