Sandwich Seminar: Toyhacking and Digital Storytelling, Old Main Colloquium, noon to 1 p.m.
Presenters: Casey Pennington, assistant professor of literacy, and Karen Dafoe, emerging technologies librarian
Details
Discover a dynamic learning environment at the library's newly renovated Makerspace, where experiential learning and collaboration empower users to become creators, not just consumers, of knowledge and stories. Students cultivate essential workforce skills while engaging in active learning with their peers. Explore the benefits of incorporating making into your instruction. One of the first users of the redesigned Makerspace, Dr. Casey Pennington, will discuss her toy hacking project. Students in her UT 372 class open the meaning of reading texts to include toys, media, and popular culture by addressing the ways Sid, from Toy Story (1995), was characterized in the Toy Story Universe as defiant and deviant-a real menace to toys. Instead, we read Sid as a maker, a player, and inventor. LIT 372 students brought a cheap toy to the newly redesigned makerspace to hack, like Sid. We first explored how the toys design prompts us to play in specific ways (i.e. a flexible Barbie indicates gymnastics play whereas an inflexible Barbie indicates stationary play), then students change the text of the toy using hacksaws, hot glue guns, feathers, fabric, toy-bits, and various materials to create a new text, or a new meaning of how to play with their toy. Then their new toy interacts with other hacked toys for digital filmmaking, or storytelling. The project requires students to engage with reading texts as meaning-makers, then designers, and eventually as writers or storytellers. This practice is pulled from Dr. Karen Wohlwend's work Literacy Playshop (2015) and her concept of "toyhacking" (2018). Dr. Casey Pennington brings this work to SUNY Cortland's EDUC-UT 372.