What the Hack?

Confession:  I hate the use of the word "hack" in educational context--Hack Jam, Toy Hack, what have you. It just feels gimmicky.  But I love, repeat love, the concept of hacking (ugh. I feel dirty writing it).  So I've opted to use the words tinker, remix, reimagine, redefine in its place.

I thought about my toy remix the entire drive home from RIC.  I even forced my husband to help me brainstorm some ideas.  The best we could come up with was to melt down some of Malcolm's toy soliders and recreate them into something innocuous like a bunny.  I nixed this concept because I felt like a true remix should leave some trace of the original toy.  If we'd melted down the soldiers, at some point they would cease being soldiers and just revert to liquidified plastic.  While I'm sure there's some fancy way to explain that transformation--Who are we really? Are we all just liquidified plastic at the core waiting for society to mold us into being?--I didn't want to go there.  I was more interested in the notion of relooking at something whose purpose/function you have taken for granted and trying to figure out what else it could be.

This is what I love about the concept of tinkering.  It forces you to not only think outside the box but to reimagine the box althogether.  (It's not a box, dammit!  It's a portal to the Xeres quadrant in the Flotsum galaxy!)  Just because Toy R Us says this thing is a sandtoy doesn't mean that it's the only thing it can be.  It gives you the creator control, puts you in the driver seat.

Little kids are good at this kind of thinking.  That's not a bucket, it's a hat.

That's shovel?  See that shovel there?  Yes, the one as big as my head.  That'd make an awesome spoon. Hand it over.

But as the opportunities to tinker, discover, and create are slowly replaced by more passive forms of learning, our ability to see possibilities atrophies.  And so we begin to accept the version of the world that is presented to us.  It is, what it is.

There is a danger to this kind of thinking.  It breeds cynicism and hopelessness; it makes you feel powerless. Tinkering helps to remind us of the complexity of things and empowers us by giving us license to explore, to fail, to try again in pursuit of a it self-determined objective.

And on that hefty note, let me present to a quick overview of my toy remix.  After abandoing the toy soldier idea, I decided to turn an old sand toy into a post-apocalyptic survival garden.  I chose the sand toy because I liked how the sand made the wheels move.  I thought it would be neat to water plants this way so I cut off the strainer at the bottom of the toy and replaced it with a plastic frying pan to make a container garden.    

In the end, my creation was only a partial success.  For while the garden actually came out quite lovely, the water stream is a bit too forceful (not to mention messy) to be a great watering mechanism.  I'm still thinking of  ways to modify my creation to make it truly functional.  Even though it's kind of jacked up, I'm ridiculously proud of it.  So much so, that I created a backstory to explain the concept behind the toy.