It’s a parent’s worst nightmare: coming home to find their set-top box, DVD player and remote controls in pieces on the floor, scattered in a circle, with their darling child in the centre, banging parts together, giant grin on their precious mug.
But before you punish your pride and joy, just think that destroying stuff may lead them to become the Steve Wozniaks or Sheryl Sandbergs of the future.
This is the thinking behind US-based start-up Take It Apart, the founders of which I met at the San Mateo Maker Faire – the Easter Show of geekery - during a trip to San Francisco earlier this month.
Co-founders Dan Justa and Chris Tomkins-Tinch wheeled barrows of tech, computer parts, old phones, type-writers, keyboards – I think I even saw a toaster – to the hall of Maker Faire, dumped it all in piles on the floor and encouraged the attendees – which were mostly, but not exclusively, children – to go nuts.
A Gameboy undergoes heart surgery (via TakeItApart.com)
“In contrast to some other companies and instructional websites, we aim to be more educational, with greater emphasis on education and the engineering and industrial design principles behind the items we use every day,” said Justa.
“That’s why we were at the Maker Faire: to give everyone, kids and adults, a chance to see that it is OK to turn screws, take thing apart, and peek behind the curtain. We want the black boxes we use to be more transparent.”
Technological transparency is a key goal of TakeItApart.com, an online disassembly library for the curious, which started off just as a hobby for co-founder Chris Tomkins-Tinch a self-confessed tinkerer.
“I enjoy taking things apart and wanted to share the experience, pictorially, with the world,” he said. ”I got started by photographing disassembles so that I would have a record of the steps I performed. How else to know how to put something back together?
“When I was finished I had sets of photos left over. I posted them online on the off chance that someone would be interested, and it turns out that many people were.
“The response has been phenomenal. We made a company, and website, to allow anyone to create disassembly guides and share them with the world.”
All of the guides on TakeItApart.com contain photo and video-guides, text descriptions, hover-over notes for components, and annotations that outline which tools are needed to take something apart. Creating a new guide is as easy as uploading a bulk selection of images, and clicking ‘continue’ a few times. Basic image editing like rotation and cropping can be done on the site, and it’s easy to include image annotations and tool lists.
Pulling apart a first-gen iPod (via TakeItApart.com)
The co-founders want their website to become “the canonical reference for disassembly information”. They hope by teaching the tech-savvy and introducing the curious to comprehensive, real-world engineering and industrial design concepts, it will become easier for people to learn how things work and therefore allow them to identify what internal components can be replaced or repaired and what parts could be salvaged for new projects.
“We want the website to become an excellent source of disassembly information, to educate the public about inner workings, and to encourage sustainable consumption by enabling repair,” Justa said.
“We’re hoping to help everyone hold on to gadgets longer, and maybe save a few from entering landfills.”
More importantly, the co-founders hope to radically change how technology is taught in schools in order to drive interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields early in life.
“I have always learned tactically,” Justa said. “This was good and bad growing up and going to school and public school in NY. With education cuts all over the country, schools are losing the hands on stuff like shop and art classes first.
“TakeItApart is a place that encourages hands on learning through DIY. I love that idea, and I love being a part of TakeItApart.”
Australian schools too could certainly benefit from syllabus based on or similar to TakeItApart.com, with most technology classes focusing either on word-processing and basic computer skills, rather than straight engineering or industrial design, let alone software engineering.
Tomkins-Tinch added that creativity in learning and problem solving is essential for creating value and novel solutions.
“If we don’t get kids interested in tech early, they will not have foundations solid enough to build knowledge bases that can push boundaries. Exploring what works and what doesn’t is essential for developing an effective intuition about tech,” he said.
Cracking the lid on an Xbox (via TakeItApart.com)
Most technology curriculums are taught with a linear structure, the co-founders say, while learning technical skills after graduation often involves pulling together random bits of knowledge in a haphazard fashion.
“Building a complete understanding of something requires some sleuthing and personal investigation,” Justa said. “There just isn’t time in the classroom or on homework assignments to fully explain topics, so students should be armed with the skills to learn on their own.
“Students are also often penalised when things don’t work, but in the real world failures often provide greater lessons. Students should be allowed to try, to fail, and to reflect on why something works or doesn’t.”
Justa said while all tech classes are beneficial, there’s something to be said for classes that let students build physical objects for fun to develop intuitive understanding of how things work.
“In my experience, a big part of system engineering is exploratory. It’s left as an exercise for the reader to figure out creative solutions to problems. We need classes where kids can take things apart, explore, and then build.”
The cofounders (who both still have day-jobs) are in the process of building an educational program that they are considering running as either a tech camp or after school activity (or both).
Opening up a controller (via TakeItApart.com)
“We’ve been inundated with requests for a kids educational tech camp based around disassembly, we think it is a great idea, and we are thinking about how to run such a program,” Justa said.
“We’d love to see it extended to component salvage and new projects—where kids can extract a speaker from an old clock radio and then build it into a robot that talks.”
While the company does not have any educational partnerships at the moment, the cofounders say they’d love to work with either established educators or up-and-coming educational organisations.
When asked what drove their interest in disassembly technology, the boys cited encouragement from their parents as a driving factor.
“I was a TakeItApart kid,” said Tomkins-Tinch. “My Dad, Bill Tinch, used to take me to garage sales every weekend when I was young, just to find old appliances, tools, and electronic items I could take apart, play with, and learn from.
“In cub scouts we had cake bake-offs, and ours were volcanos with liquid nitrogen, and computers with working electronic circuitry. I was fortunate to have that kind of early exposure to tech, and it certainly shaped my career path in tech and the sciences.
“Even though my Dad does not work in tech, he supported me and let me explore my interests.”
Justa said he was “very fortunate” to have a father who was interested in tech.
“He loved helping me with hands on projects, and loved showing me how things worked on the inside. He would encourage me to take apart old AV equipment and computers he would bring home from work.”
So the next time your child destroys your phone or alarm clock – before losing your mind – see if they can put it back together for you. You never know, your kids might just save you a trip to tech support.
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