Fixing in schools

How to repair in your community
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For a few years I’ve been preparing groups in a local school for the CyberFirst Girls’ Competition run by the National Cyber Security Centre. This year I’ve been going into an additional (girls’) school which I discovered has a very active focus on sustainability, led by one of the geography teachers.

I’ve made contact with her and she’s very interested in what we’re doing in St Albans District Fixers, and is keen to explore how we could get some of her girls into fixing. I’d love to do that, in order to get young people into fixing, and particularly girls.

Whereas I could easily go in and give a talk about our work and about repair in the context of sustainability, I’m far from clear on what I could do at a more practical level.

I’m aware of what Restart did a few years ago with Archer Academy and of the materials that were used (archived on the Restart website), and in fact, I assisted at one of the practical sessions. Whereas I could certainly make use of some of that material in preparing a talk, the scope of that engagement (10 weekly sessions fitted into the curriculam) is way beyond what I could entertain, perhaps with the help of a few of my fixers.

I could maybe arrange one of our repair fairs in the school, perhaps with 2 girls working with each of our fixers, but the impact in terms of the number of girls we could involve would be very limited, and the huge variety of type and fixability of items that might come in could present dificulties. Preparing known-fixable items would be quite a lot of work.

So has anyone attempted to take fixing into schools, and if so, what model did you use, and what did you learn from how it went?

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It puts me in mind of an initiative by Fixit Clinic (USA) to get schools and students to refurbish their “obsolete” Chromebooks. I can’t find the detailed guide document but this blog post gives an idea of the plan. If I find the guide I’ll link to it. I see that Google did/does a similar thing in schools.

Culture of Repair has collated a number of repair guides for schools for different age groups.

As for fixable devices, perhaps the teachers could ask the students to bring in the broken lamps they have stashed away in their homes?

I myself haven’t fixed in schools but have mentored a few senior students (mostly girls) on work experience outside of school, but only with laptop repair. The last one spent a day frankensteining 3 broken laptops into 1 working laptop which was extremely impressive for someone who had never taken a screwdriver to a laptop before! (And didn’t break any of her long, long sculpted gel nails, I was in awe!). I daresay you’ll not have 5-6 hours per session though.

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Hi Philip, nine years ago Hackney Fixers did some sessions in girls schools as part of a project where they were looking at designing products to reduce waste. As we only had one session fixing was a bit of a stretch.

We did a tear down activity to introduce the pupils to disassembly/reassembly, what products are made of and how they are put together, starting to think about what goes wrong with products, what impacts durability, how to design better / longer lasting products etc. These pupils were studying at GCSE level, and it amazed me that despite some of them studying design technology they had little knowledge of using tools, and were very enthusiastic at being given permission to open things.

It did give them plenty of food for thought about the importance of design (design to be easy to open, repairable, availability of parts etc), and they loved getting hands on.

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We recently ran a couple of workshops with university students that I think would also work well in a secondary school context - wiring a plug and using a sewing machine.

Personally I’d avoid sewing machines with a female only audience at least for the first few sessions as I think it’s important to challenge stereotypes.

Wiring a plug is a nice activity that fits well into an hour, it’s cheap and easy in materials (although you do need multiple sets of wire cutters and screwdrivers) and it’s quite fundamental. You get a chance to talk about circuits, current, fuses, tight cable connections and strain relief etc.

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Our Materials Matter resources could be useful? It provides an activity for teardown of a smartphone and supporting materials as to what goes into them and why keeping them going longer is important. I’ve used it at some public events for our Repair Cafe before. @james has run sessions with kids doing it. I wonder if if the material needs some updating now though? You need to source some old phones to do it, and I found that the Nexus 4 was getting harder to find.

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Here is my little treatise on Chromebook conversion and rescue: https://bit.ly/cbsave

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This is the one I was thinking of.

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I wasn’t aware that Chromebooks had a built-in obsolescence. 10 years is better than most, but if a device still working, why scrap it at all?

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The school does use Chromebooks (a nightmare for teaching cybersecurity as Google, in googlifying docs and pics can “tidy up” those hidden clues that I’m trying to teach the kids to find!).

I need to find out about the lifecycle policy. Inevitably they’d have a steady trickle of broken devices, but it may be that they are scrapped through a maintenance contract, and it might be that diverting them into a fixing activity would be easier said than done. But certainly worth investigating.

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I’ve used this material with Scout & Guide groups and taken apart phones (just a selection of ones that I got donated by the neighbourhood - which lead to some great conversations about the difference of how easy it is to get into some phones rather than others), but recently I have been wondering about the age of the Materials Matter data (although it gives a good idea of the global impact and range of minerals in phones). I know Bath Share & Repair also have a programme in schools @Lorna_Montgomery

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Depends on the definition of “working”. After 2-3 years of constant use, a device could certainly do with having the fan/ports cleaned, tested, and thermal paste refreshing. General maintenance. Ex-classroom Chromebooks often come up on eBay and wow are they in rough condition!

The corporate laptops that come in tend to be 3 to 4 years old. Often they are replaced just as the (usually 3yr) warranty runs out. Some of them are in very rough condition, running hot. The IT Dept isn’t going to undertake internal/external maintenance on 500 devices, or support hardware that is no longer under warranty.

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Hello Philip,

The Culture of Repair Project focal point for advancing repair is primary and secondary school settings and our approach is to provide various kinds of resources for people wanting to teach about repair. I hope we can offer you something that will help you along.

Thank you Monique for flagging The Culture of Repair Project resources. The link you noted in your reply is a small subset of the Educator Resource Library. This is the main page:

The Library is a searchable catalog with resources from around the world ranging from curriculum to videos to activity sheets, etc.

You can also check out Notes from the Field:

These are notes and essays written by educators and advocates involved in teaching primary and secondary school youth about repair. Several are about specifically repairing electronics in school settings, others are more general repair.

For repair in sustainability initiatives you might check out the Notes from Berkeley, Laguna Beach and Algalita.

We have two Notes coming online in a couple of weeks — one by the STEM Makerspace TSA for Berkeley Unified School District, the other by the Robotics Team at the BUSD High School (they’re participating as fixers at the district’s community repair events). Notice of those will come out in our February newsletter.

Past newsletters highlighting some of the resources and projects we’re involved with is here:

You should be sure to check out Team Repair as they are quite intentionally working to draw girls into the repair / engineering / design stream. They also have a Note in Notes from the Field:

Finally: We’re keen to add to both the Library and Notes from the Field, so I enthusiastically encourage you to send on resources you might come across.

I’m also interested to hear about what you do in educational settings and welcome hearing from you.

Bravo for working with our youth! We’ve found it is a fantastic space to work — they’re interested and engaged — great development of thinking skills, environmental literacy, opportunity for community service, self confidence and agency … it’s win win win and a real pleasure.

Best wishes,

Vita

2 Likes
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Hello Philip,

The Culture of Repair Project focal point for advancing repair is primary and secondary school settings and our approach is to provide various kinds of resources for people wanting to teach about repair. I hope we can offer you something that will help you along.

Thank you Monique for flagging The Culture of Repair Project resources. The link you noted in your reply is a small subset of the Educator Resource Library. This is the main page:

The Library is a searchable catalog with resources from around the world ranging from curriculum to videos to activity sheets, etc.

You can also check out Notes from the Field:

These are notes and essays written by educators and advocates involved in teaching primary and secondary school youth about repair. Several are about specifically repairing electronics in school settings, others are more general repair.

For repair in sustainability initiatives you might check out the Notes from Berkeley, Laguna Beach and Algalita.

We have two Notes coming online in a couple of weeks — one by the STEM Makerspace TSA for Berkeley Unified School District, the other by the Robotics Team at the BUSD High School (they’re participating as fixers at the district’s community repair events). Notice of those will come out in our February newsletter.

Past newsletters highlighting some of the resources and projects we’re involved with is here:

You should be sure to check out Team Repair as they are quite intentionally working to draw girls into the repair / engineering / design stream. They also have a Note in Notes from the Field:

Finally: We’re keen to add to both the Library and Notes from the Field, so I enthusiastically encourage you to send on resources you might come across.

I’m also interested to hear about what you do in educational settings and welcome hearing from you.

Bravo for working with our youth! We’ve found it is a fantastic space to work — they’re interested and engaged — great development of thinking skills, environmental literacy, opportunity for community service, self confidence and agency … it’s win win win and a real pleasure.

Best wishes,

Vita