 Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Welcome to Nerd Night East Bay. Yeah! We have a really exciting lineup tonight. We've got some comic books and food science, some makers making, and it's interactive. There's arts and crafts. It's going to be a good time. So speaking of food science and making, today I learned about 3D printed food. Exclamation mark. Isn't that cool? Kind of combines the topics of our first two talks. So there's many people working on this problem. One of the areas of innovation is the Cornell Creative Machines Lab. Yeah, so you kind of think like, okay, 3D printing food, it seems to me kind of like intuitively obvious that that should be doable. But when you think about it in more depth, different food ingredients have different consistencies. They require different temperatures. It's really actually very difficult to use a 3D printer to construct desirable and edible food. So here's some of the cool stuff they've made, including a cheese space shuttle. One of their early attempts. These cool cookies with the sea inside. I love this octopus. It's made of dough. I don't know if it's raw or baked. But my favorite is the cube of turkey with the cube of celery inside it. It does sound disgusting, right? But I just really like the idea of a future where all our food is in cubed form. So if we can get closer to that, I'm all for it. Another group of people who are doing really cool stuff is the Sugar Lab, who got acquired by 3D systems. And they're marketing this machine. They call it the Chef Jet. You can also get the Chef Jet Pro, which is in color. And it's basically an inkjet printer head that prints in water on a sheet of dried sugar. And then it spreads another sheet of dried sugar and prints the next layer in water. And, you know, the water crystallizes the sugar and it creates these awesome shapes and forms. And apparently they taste great. They come in different flavors. They have chocolate and vanilla and watermelon and mint. And they call it the world's first kitchen-ready 3D food printer. So start saving up. They're a little pricey. They're designed for professionals to use. If you are a nerd, and I think some of you would self-identify as such, and you happen to be getting married and you don't have a 3D printed cake topper, I just wonder what you're doing. What's going on with you? Gotta ask. Alright, our next speaker is going to talk about food science. She's going to tell us all about our nuts, which I'm very excited to learn about. So here she is, the lovely Ms. Megan Fisk Clements. Mrs. Doctor. I'm an ad-libbing now. Which button? Probably should have done this before him. You get to see behind the curtain. I always wondered. So, my name is Megan Fisk Clements, and I am a food scientist. I got my PhD in food science from UC Davis, and I've been working making food more sustainable ever since. I did a bachelor's degree in biology. Do we have any biologists? Any biological scientists? Okay, a couple. We'll go basic here. I did some internships in several different kinds of cellular biology, like natural science and engineering, but you don't want to... Right? So that's why I'm in food science. I want to find the most applied biological science I can that you guys interact with several times a day and care deeply about, no matter what your background is, science or otherwise. So today I want to take you behind the curtain of food science, and for just 15, 20 minutes, we're going to really think like food scientists. So I'm going to bring you with me on this. There are several laws and the patterns that happen in food, and it really lets you understand what's happening deep down, which I think is really awesome. I'm hoping to share that with you today. So for example, I bake a lot of bread at home. These are a couple of loaves I've made. But instead of using a recipe with cups and teaspoons, I'm actually going to weigh out my ingredients when I'm baking like a food scientist, and I'm going to look at the ratios between the salt in the flour and the flour, and the basic principles here are hydration percent, for example, is how much water to flour you have, actually is a strong determiner, if that's a word, of how high your loaf will rise and how much air can be within it based on the steam created by the water. So everything that you do with food actually has these great science behind it. My colleague here is exploring Pam baking spray as an ingredient. Now you may think he's crazy, but I think he's getting to know the mouthfeel, the smell, any off flavors or odors so that he can scientifically use this ingredient in a much better way. Another example is this birthday cake from several years ago where I decided to swap out the butter for avocado because avocado has lots of fat in it, right? Turns out, not so hot. Now I know that avocado doesn't have as much fat in it as butter, so if anyone is going to take up further studies, further investigations on this topic, I recommend putting in more avocado than butter and fat balancing it. That's what I would do. I'll give you some equations if you need that. Another thing food scientists do a lot is taste things. So in this example I'm tasting nine cantaloupe samples and I'm carefully rating each characteristic about them that I possibly can because humans are actually better at tasting than machines are even with all our fancy gadgets, right? So you're thinking, oh, this looks good I could do that. Could you do it with mayonnaise? This is eight different mayonnaise samples. You don't put it on the cracker. You use the cracker to wipe the oil off your mouth afterward inside your mouth. It's not all about tomatoes so this is like all the salsas on the market. This is all the pizza sauces on the market. It's about getting to know your ingredients. It doesn't matter if you like it because we're not here to know if you like it. We're here to get the science. How are these different from another? What are the solids contents? How much separation are you getting? Oops. All right. The swag though at conferences is awesome. I don't know if you're used to Hershey's kisses or Tootsie Rawls but I get snack products that are coming out on the market in maybe six months. You haven't even heard of them yet. They're so cool. I knew about tomatoes so long ago. The tortilla chips that are made with beans instead of with corn. Very cool. Very cool. Also, if you're a food scientist in a grad school that has an agging group, an agricultural group, sometimes they plant a field of broccoli and they don't make plans for what happens afterwards. Jubilee. Broccoli jubilee. Best, best week ever. I'm sorry to my husband it was rough but I love that. The downside to being a food scientist is you see little errors, little deficiencies places because you can see the rules that are going on underneath. So you might look and say, hmm, chocolate or cookie dough. I look and I see my emulsion is breaking. The oil is coming out of the aqueous phase of my cookie dough. This is terrible. Something went horribly wrong. Grad school no matter what you're going in is full of constructive criticism and rigorous mentorship, right? So we've all seen these but it's definitely worth it. Definitely worth it. So what is food science? This is what some people think food science is. You know, I mean if it were true it would probably be food science but it's not. I've never met anyone who does that. I don't think that's food science. I'm going to give you some real examples of food science tonight. Food science is between the living creatures that you probably wouldn't eat just the way they were. And then you as a living creature. So this is food science right here. This would be plant breeding or plant genetics. This would be animal studies. This over here is nutrition and I'm everything in between. So between harvest and absorption. Food scientists help food last longer. They help it hold on to its nutrition longer and they help it be tastier. We get ourselves and you into trouble with that but you know we're in it together. Y'all don't not buy it, right? So I'm going to give you an example that is my graduate research. I researched almonds in graduate school and just so we're all on the same page they're a really big deal. They're worth a lot of money. A lot of money and they are a major contributor to the economy here in California. Now the price that almonds bring per pound to the farmer or the processor is in part determined by the grade. Have you seen eggs or apples greeted as USDA fancy or extra fancy? So every commodity that the USDA tracks gets graded this way. So any defect in their almonds will grade it down and it will get a lower price. One of the defects I looked at is chip and scratch. So these up here got gouged by a huller-sheller machine probably in the processing of the almonds. A little chunk was taken out. But then chip and scratch is where you can see the nut meat underneath the skin. So this is a rare kind of chip and scratch called skin slip. The skin just slips off. It's very rare. It only happens once every couple of decades. Nobody knows why. So I came on board after this had happened recently and looked into skin. So tonight we're going to talk about what the skin is made of, how it holds on in the first place, why it comes off, where it comes off, under what conditions we're going to get nerdy on it. Almond skin under a scanning electron microscope. What you're seeing here is one or several layers of cells that are still pretty robust. And then these layers of cells or cellular organelles or whatever they are that are mostly crushed down. They're all hollow and just fluffy right? And then they're coming off the white nut meat underneath. So using an analogy of an egg because an almond is a seed, it is the baby, right? So an egg comes out of a chicken and has to have everything in it to make the chick. But an almond has the benefit of being attached to the mother during the entire development. So this is in two week segments, right? Here is an analog of the embryo. But you also have the analog of the egg yolk right here, this grayed out, and then the egg white here. And as it grows, just like a baby chick grows inside an egg, the egg yolk and the egg white are absorbed and are displaced. And then they're just that gunk on the outside of the chick, right? You don't see a real yolk when you open up or when a chick opens up an egg. I don't know what you guys do with them. So, when you see an almond this is a light micrograph of an almond. What you have here is you have the underlying almond tissue which is like the baby almond. This is what's left of the yolk analog greased the egg metaphor for you all non biologists here. This is the egg white analog up here. It's not even one cell wide. And then this is the maternal tissue. So if you crack an egg and you get those weird membranes holding the shell together and you're like, look at those. That's what that is. That's like the very top of the skin of an almond. So, I want to measure how much of this surface area is missing in order to understand exactly what's going on when the skin slips off. So, how do you measure the surface area of an almond? Right? I go to the literature and they're estimating it as a sphere. Here I've taken a physics class and estimated a cow as a sphere. Right? I mean you've got to make some short cuts for calculations, but if that were true, then the height of the almond, how far off the table it comes, if you throw it on the table the width of its little hips right here and then the length, its longest diameter. If it's a sphere like object, they should all scale together, right? They should all get bigger at the same rate. But what I found when I actually measured it, for example, thickness to length, there's no linear correlation here. As the thickness gets bigger, the length does not get bigger. There's nothing going this direction in here. So they cluster, though. Did you know that almonds have varieties? Just like an apple has a Fuji and a Gala and a Golden Delicious. Almonds actually have varieties. So here are three very common varieties that you've probably seen. And they're clustering by a variety, even though there's no linear correlation here. How cool is that? There are no objective standards for almonds. If I give you an almond, there's no way you can make a couple of measurements and tell me what type it is. You have to know who its mother was, its mother tree and the tree's mother before that. You have to go by lineage. So this is a tantalizing hint at objective varietal standards that have yet to be developed. However, what we do know is that a sphere is not a good way of approximating the surface area of an almond. So, however, if you soak them, you can peel them like a banana. Nobody ever published that before, huh? So if you stick them to packing tape and you use Image J software to count the pixels, you can actually get a surface area a millimeter squared for each of these little almond pelts. How cool is that? And then the other thing is if you want to count how much is gone, how do you measure something that's missing, right? Well, if you take the total minus the remaining, it should give you the missing, right? You with me? You with me? Right? So, what you can do, oh, I don't want to distract you guys. Let's concentrate on this. If you can measure how much surface area is an intact almonds, and you can measure, for example, 37 different aspects of each kernel, not that anybody here has done that. And then you can make an equation to estimate how much surface area there is. So if you do like a thousand almonds and you're like, this is definitely how much surface area there is. How could I have predicted that? You can make a predictive equation I made a predictive equation for it. So then, if I take each of those almond pelts we saw before and I rip it in two, this can pretend it's the remaining part, right? We'll pretend this is the missing part. We'll pretend as the but we have it. We know how much there was so then you can actually test my equation and you get the predicted missing and the measured removed. Bam! Any time you want to know how much of the skin is missing for your almond, talk to me. That's what you like to see, alright? Alright. What can you do with this? Well, if you dip almonds into water, hot water, the skins fall off, right? This is called blanching. If I when I did it incrementally, I could measure the rate at which the skins came off at different temperatures of water. Now, how awesome is this, right? So at 100 degrees C, boiling temperature, it goes really fast. The skin comes off in like 40 seconds or less, right? At 90 C, bring it down 10 degrees. Basically the same rate but what you're seeing is that at 80 C you still don't want to put your hand in that, right? But the skin comes off slower and then at 70 C it comes off even slower but they're following a pattern. Have you seen this curve before? This is called exponential growth. Bacterial growth follows this if you ferment anything like yogurt or beer or pathological illnesses. Ponzi schemes follow this. Heat transfer uses this equation. Nuclear reactions to use this equation and almond skins use this equation. That was what I discovered in grad school. Very proud. Alright. This is what my lab looked like if you wanted to sneak into my lab late at night and say that was a really pretty graph, how did you make it? It's this mess right here, okay? You dip your almonds in some boiling water I decided that you could use a garlic peeler to lift off the loose skin. It does not remove the adhered skin, only the loose skin and then you got to keep track of each of your little almonds because you have to measure them with calipers to get their little width, their hip width, right? And then this is taking a volumetric displacement. How do you know the volume of an almond? You submerge it and measure how much water is displaced but they soak up water so you have to do it with oil and then wash the oil off of them for later measurements. It's very intense, very deep science here. These are the almonds that we peeled. My team of tireless undergraduates and I peeled over a thousand almonds, probably more like two thousand. Late at night you start peeling them funny. You start to make sea turtles or dead cats or whatever they come out to be you don't even care. One of my undergraduates did a wonderful collection of like mice and whales and little critters. So if you want to learn more about almonds and their surface area and how to measure the surface area and how they come off and all that good stuff here is my dissertation. I open sourced it for you all. Thank you, that was not cheap, but it's okay. It's worth it for you. So now we're going to play a little game. I love to play called, are you going to eat that? Alright, so let's look at Twinkies. Who here eats Twinkies? You love them, you love to hate them. You love Twinkies, right? When I look at Twinkies as a food scientist I flip that puppy over, I see the ingredient label here, I see the nutrition panel here, I'm going to take you through this. Is this overwhelming? Are we ever like what do I do with all those letters and numbers, right? I got you, I am with you. We are going through this tonight. When I look at this I see, okay, two cakes but if you only have one cake if you're being really restrained or if you share it with a friend, one cake is about 40 grams, a little under 40 grams so I'm summing up the dry ingredients. I add up the fat, the carbohydrates and the proteins and I know that 30 of these 38 grams are solids which means there's 23% water in it, you can have the sugar content which is about 50% but if you go based only on the dries it's about 60% sugar by weight. I mean I like sugar, who doesn't like sugar? And then we have the ingredient label so if you divide an ingredient label up at the 2% or less line right here, you get main ingredients that you're probably familiar with including four different kinds of sugar right here, right? We saw already that sugar is 61% of dry weight so we know there's a lot of sugar in it but it's interesting to note that the first ingredient is flour because there are five different kinds of sugar and there's smaller amounts of each of those sugars than there are with flour. If you break this down a little more hiding in the 2% or less are actually the salt and one more kind of sugar and then there's a whole bunch of emulsifiers and some flavors and some colors these are the ones I had to look up everything else I'd seen before let's make it right home you don't need to buy Twinkies you could bake Twinkies, I got this recipe off the internet, I got this Twinkie pan off Amazon metaphorically I do not actually own this there's this great website called recipepal.com you type in your recipe and it prints out an nutrition label for you for a small monthly fee you have the control over all of your nutrition labels for your home cooked meals how cool is that? I love this site here I make you an nutrition label for your home cooked Twinkies so let's look at it, one cake is 75 grams that's the same as your little bank but that's okay, they're good the dry ingredients sum up 5 grams, so we have half water in our Twinkies at home so you wouldn't want to sit this on the shelf for more than a couple of days if that because that much water is going to draw a lot of attention from other organisms which is good because there's a competition for nutrients it's a nutrients label that's how the world works sugar content in ours is about 30-31% if you count the west whoa, we have more sugar than the hostess cupcakes you guys are crazy what do you do? let's compare these side by side so we have more water we have less fat than they do because if you want a moist mouth feel then you need to have either water or fat and so they have to take the water out for shelf stability I'm guessing so they put a little fat in so it still feels moist we're using water instead your recipe off the internet for hostess Twinkies fat sources except for the eggs you guys are very clever and then we also had a little less salt because they probably have a little more salt in to make the flavor really pop even though it was big four months ago if I was going to be eating four months after I was baked I would want a little salt too, it didn't make any sense I hope that all of your work days can be pajama days especially on cookie dough days and I want to really thank you for your attention I could go on for hours but there are other fabulous presenters here tonight but I'm going to leave you with this picture one of my other friends I have a question time so if you have any questions let me know tell me your question sir can you say a little bit about the varietals of almonds yes there are oh thank you there are varietals of almonds there are several dozen but only about ten are in intensive cultivation non-pareils are the ones you're used to probably those are the ones you see most often the padre buttes is a mix, there's padre and buttes but they're often pooled there are these cute little stubby ones if you can find some at your farmers market or wherever you go I highly recommend it the non-pareils fetch the most money at market and those are the ones you see whole a lot of the other varieties are the sliced or the ground and a question yes when it comes to dry versus roasted almonds is one healthier than other or how does that affect the nutritional so here we get into a very interesting concept because what does healthy mean there is no scientific definition for healthy so it depends on what you mean by that if you mean less fat then adding fat to oil roasted process will make it less healthy to you if you mean enzymes, any almond that has been cooked has had most of their enzymes deactivated that's what cooking does right so if you're salt roasting or things like that then the enzymes are broken down but what do enzymes do are they probably denatured in your stomach is there any difference that the enzymes are actually doing there's so much about food that is spiritual and there's so much about food that is scientific and we use the words interchangeably like enzyme or acidifying foods and things like that and spiritual feelings about food are very important that's culture culture is really important right but it's not science and so we have to make sure we're keeping those separate when we talk about it but it's really important to talk about it so I'm glad you brought that up what's your next project oh my goodness I'm in a stealth start up so all I can tell you is that it's awesome laughter and maybe in like 6 or 8 months ping me I'll send you some samples then do you have any questions yes remember that great slide where we have the tomato plant and the pig over here yeah those are great slides for the almond growers I don't know about their practices that'd be a great question for some people I know though down below in the back no I don't think any dissertation has ever solved the question that's set out to understand but I've written over 100 pages about how all the great things I did discover will make it easier to find the answer to the mystery up top almond milk is made by taking an almond probably cooking it a little bit grinding it up maybe soaking or maybe not depending on the process so it's basically like a silt of almond debris whereas cow milk is the exudate of the mammary glands of the cow so you gotta pick your poison right haha interestingly almond milk has less protein than almonds a lot of the time because the protein settles to the bottom and with the debris that doesn't get suspended so there might be less protein in the almond milk than you expect unless they're putting in an approtonaceous agent more questions anybody in the middle? I know I've done the sides back right over here there you are go for it nutritional content of the skin versus like the nut itself without the skin yes so almond skin nutritional content they have a lot of antioxidants there's a lot of very nice oils there's a lot of things we don't even know what they do but they're bioactive and they're probably really exciting right now when you have almond products that are blanched a lot of the skins are going to cattle feed so it's gotta be good or we wouldn't feed it to cattle right a lot of the nutritious parts of food that are stripped out are sent to cattle feed so you'll eat it eventually the nutrient cycle the nutrient cycle yes sir have you had a chance to try chirps the chips made from chromatocritics no I haven't I don't know if that's vegetarian that might be a feelings question about food right there last question sir almonds are an important product so what makes it important I don't know about trading on the commodities market for almonds although I bet they are there's 1.7 billion pounds of almonds harvested every year and 80% of them are here in California which is a $2.7 billion industry so it's a very big deal when the almonds come into bloom they pull bees from all over the country and even from other countries to come pollinate the almonds that's how important they are thank you so much for your time first of all Sharon from the Oakland Public Library is right on that table right there you can get badass buttons that are customized with whatever garbage that you all leave in your library books if you're not leaving garbage in your library it's perhaps because you don't have a library card and you could get one of those too you could sign up to give a talk here theater 2 is also quite exciting we'll have a Q&A with Megan that's sort of off mic so you could ask even more detailed questions we have lots of volunteers from the Lighthouse Community Charter School that will help you make things including paper electronics and scribble bots so yeah enjoy the next 15 maybe even 20 minutes of that we'll be back that was awesome so we have several volunteers from the Lighthouse Community Charter School here and that's great and they came to me like 3 or 4 minutes after our break started and said no one's making anything I don't know what's going on and then like a mob apparently everyone was making an LED something or other so making stuff is cool I'm really happy with this talk because this talk was actually motivated due to an audience request that we have a talk about education which I think is a great topic how are we training the next generation of nerds this is a plug for our social media because I like smart comments like making stuff is obviously a great maker for us coming up I hope that many of you can go I'm the maker I hope that all of you who tried the demos sort of felt like a tiny sense of ownership and could like show off what you did and I especially like this talk because the way that we're training kids to make stuff is much better than the things that we are making to train kids so we have this this is an actual patent application for a fetal educator strap anyone who wants to fact check me it's patent number 6840 so it's a 5 yeah clean the track boards empty the classes no more schooling for the masses all you really need to know you'll pick up in utero and once the kids out you could perhaps use this in invention this is a technique for diagnosing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder so in addition to just great patent art perhaps this will bleed into the last talk on comics I suppose I don't know if it's the way she's gripping the chair or the creepy smile but I'm guessing that this girl would be yes yes well okay I'm going to get slightly personal but mostly to embarrass my own family members which is much easier than embarrassing myself so I'm going to sort of shoot low I'm the oldest of three brothers and it's awesome to be the oldest because you get you never have to have a hand me down in fact they have to take your hand me and when you are fatherhood has to suck I mean kids pee everywhere and I remember very clearly that my parents had this annoying device that they would put into our diapers that when you peed it would create an electrical circuit rendering this loud buzz that said hey everyone I just pissed myself I'm really glad that that did not get handed down to me it did get handed down to each of my two brothers the company the company who released that product took a second thought about their lifetime product warranty after my parents sent that back apparently we're not the only ones who want to solve this issue this is patent number 692 9819 a process for manufacturing a toilet training article containing an effervescent agent so you pee and you get lovely bubbles that say oh my god I just peed myself let's not do that again it's like pop rocks in your pants this is also a lovely toilet training activity I don't know why you would want to have your children pee into the bear not only that after a parent assessed quantity of urine enters through 46 the bear will dispense cookies for the child through units 36 and 38 I had thought that washing your hands was supposed to be like alright with that here is someone who is teaching kids useful stuff Aaron Van der Wer where is the on a good thing to be able to do when you're teaching making so my name is Aaron Van der Wer if I work here in Oakland down by the airport at lighthouse community charter school or a small school that's K to 12 serving about 750 students creativity left and I want us to just start today by thinking about a time when you learn something very deeply and you felt like you really understood that I don't mean memorize something so that you could tell someone back you know I learned these 20 facts but I mean something that you really learned think of something because we're going to kind of keep coming back to that so 20 years ago talked about the fact that we when we're learning something we need to learn something from the heart the mind and the hands and if we don't learn it from all three spaces then we're not really going to be engaged in learning and I think a lot of what we do today focuses a lot on the mind but not on the other two I'm guessing loss great so I'm going to show some images from the fair and I want us to think about how each of these things engages the heart mind and hands many of the images are made by children many of the images are made by adults but I also want us to think about how diverse the different projects are so a lot of folks think about making down the patent line and here we see folks making crafts we see folks woodworking we see community and people sharing things together and this is the meaning of making that we use at lighthouse so we really want people making things together we want people crafting as well as integrating technology and coming up with really crazy stuff so here are some of our students and you see that they are doing woodworking and crafting and tinkering using junk to make stuff some of us made some of those things next door recently I'm going to just tell you about one of my students Katya Katya is the student here who's making a device and she in order to make this it took her a really long time she started in September and finished in May it might not be a really long time in the corporate world although I think in some companies it is a really long time for a student something that lasts the entire school year is pretty rare and that's something about making that can really help our kids is that they can really focus on learning for a whole year or longer on something that they're passionate about and she did do this from the heart because she saw a neighbor of hers walking into the street and they were not able to see and there was a car coming and she grabbed the person and pulled them back to the curb and she thought is there something that I could make to help this person so she decided to make this device which can see something in front of it and then it can tell the person who's wearing it that there's an object there and so obviously in order to do that she's doing that from the heart which was what motivated her and her mind she had to learn how to program an Arduino which is a microprocessor and she did that on her own essentially just asking what's the next step and we would talk through it and then she'd go off and figure something out and come back to the questions she learned how to use sensors she learned how to hook up an electronic circuit and she learned how to design something in CAD and 3D print so all these things she figured out on her own because she was excited to help this person and I thought it was particularly interesting that this quote is from about 100 years ago so we often think this is a new problem we have such a short attention span back before people used to do things for a long period of time but this was an educator in New York City so Dewey Dewey is well known to educators he's really a big progressive educator back over 100 years ago he talked about the fact that we have kind of the spectrum of teachers or of education we have educators who and this was the predominant thing at the time who think of the student as a bank where you can deposit information and we're gonna just put information in someone's head how many people feel like they learn that way great and then he said there's the other extreme and the other end of the spectrum is folks who are like hey we're just gonna let the kids figure it out and what he said was we gotta be in the middle so as a teacher we're a guide and I think that this quote really talks about the fact that teachers can be guides and facilitators we need to listen to the children and think about what the children are excited about and also think about the greater society and what's good for the whole society and thinking about what children need to know and that's the kind of guide part of things I think this is really the beginning of what a maker educator needs to be so Piaget it's our little history lesson here Piaget big name in education and really Piaget came to the next step in this process which was you know we can't dump stuff in people's heads but actually what's happening is each of us has to come up with our own understanding so we're constructing meaning and making really helps us to construct that meaning deeply so if you think back to that that you thought of that you learned deeply some time in your life some of those experiences may have been because you were creating something and at Lighthouse we include creation of writing and creation of physical objects anything where you're doing something creative and so that's us constructing our own so I'm going to share this video and I want you to see I want you to see where you feel like they're creating something found it is that where it starts yellow yellow gray gray I get my red I carry it I can make this big pass we can spill stuff you don't have to start over it is too good keep your hands right here so anybody feel like they know where the kids were constructing meaning feel like there were a couple places right so where was one the singing what were they constructing meaning about when they were singing were singing. Yeah, helping to keep moving through things and persist. So this was back to the heart piece. They're learning, they're learning character traits, right? And we're still, we construct that. A lot of times we think about construction of knowledge as knowledge, right? But here the kids are learning to be persistent. What else? So they're collaborating and they're learning about how to collaborate. And I think we also all saw when they got really excited. Now, this is a pretty directed activity, right? They're following directions from a book of Legos. But were they still constructing their own knowledge? Yeah. And what these kids are, these are actually programming kids. So they put together a little, a little, you know, model. And then they plug it into the computer and they can program it. And the same thing happened. So they actually built these from the instructions. And then we said, break, go build your own thing. And that's when the real learning happened. Because when they did this, following the instructions, they didn't even get that the motor was the thing that made it move, even though we talked about it, right? But they went back later and they're building their thing and were like, hey, how are you going to make that airplane spin? And they're like, I don't know. We're like, what's the part in there that makes this whole the motor? And then they'd have to rebuild the whole thing. So Pappert is kind of like the guy people go to when they think about making an education. And Pappert really, you know, was kind of on a mission to, to help rid the world of anti mathematical people. And the fact that people can't do math, right? So he thought, everybody can do math. You just have to give us the right thing to do. And that's, that's what he's saying here. So I'm going to do a quick activity with us. Are we ready? Can we participate? Great. Lecturing for a making thing. It's a little weird, right? Anybody recognize? Nope, not there. Sideways. Anybody recognize that a little bit? Yes. Anybody, you know, go to school in the 80s. Apple to ease. Right. So this is logo, a new version. So I'm going to ask us, can I have a volunteer? Come on down right here. My volunteer is going to walk. We need to make a triangle. And this is exactly how we would say this to the kids. We need to make a triangle. Guess what? We're going to start with this clean thing. Because it cleans things every, it cleans your board every time. But other than that, I'm just going to ask us, what do we need to do next? Great. Let's go forward. You might want to turn that way. Forward. This is kind of awkward. Okay, there we go. Thank you. And the turtle does the same thing. Now if you were going to make a triangle, what's your name? If Erica, if you were going to make a triangle, what would you do next? And so which way is there? Turn? Let's look at the language up here. Are you turning right or left? Turning right. Okay, so we're going to grab that. We're going to try this again. And our turtle turns right. And then what are you going to do? Well, we don't have that, but we can try forward again. So what would we change? It's good enough. Great. So what would you do next? So walk that way. And then. Okay, so which of these commands would you use? Forward, right, back, or left? Right. Okay, we're going to grab right. And then after right, what would you do? Well, we're going to get to that. Would you walk forward, right, left, or backwards after you turn to the right? But the kids don't know that, do they? They don't know anything about that yet. But what we can say is what would you do now? Would you be turning or walking forward? Great. Now, the kids are going to see right away that this doesn't look like a triangle, right? And they're going to know they're going to do exactly what you said, which is I, I want to walk there. But we can ask them now what could you change in this set of instructions to make it back differently? And I heard some people saying we need to change some of the numbers. And do you think kids could figure out which numbers to change? Yeah, do you think they're going to figure out what 90 means pretty quickly? I think they're going to know that 90 degrees means we make a square. They don't know what's degrees, they don't know what an angle is. Okay, so I think that they would learn pretty deeply with their minds because they did something with their hands, whether they walked it out or not. When they get stuck, they can always get up and be like, okay, I'm gonna walk forward. Okay, and so they can get into some pretty complicated math just playing around with this. And so what's one number I could change to get closer? Great, let's change that. I'm not going to finish all this, but 60 great. This is from someone who knows math, but ready? So you have to think about how far you're going to turn, right? And the number that was there was 90. So you actually have to go further. If you want to know, you can play. Great, so what do teachers think? Well, we do professional development at Lighthouse. And I posed them this idea of hand, minds and heart by using modern language. So we use character traits, skills and content. And in five minutes, limited by my writing, this is what we came up with. So it seems like teachers think this is pretty good for helping kids to build these things. At Lighthouse, just some some quick, you know, examples, we have three different ways that we do making at school. One is open ended student projects. And we have Katya over there, she came up with this project. We have students who have taken a truck and converted it from gasoline to electric, which is the most ambitious project we've taken on. It's gone on, sorry, for a second year now. And then all the students take their projects to the Maker Faire. And to the title of the show, LED tutus. So we have our friends, Bricia and Natalie, who decided they wanted to make a tutu that did something. So they went online and figured out how to make a tutu. Step one, then they decided, hey, we should make it light up. So they added some LEDs and figured out how to wire it up. And then they thought, wouldn't it be cool if it changed when you move? So they added an Arduino again, which is a micro controller, and a little sensor called an accelerometer so that when you move around, the lights will blink. We also integrate projects into existing curriculum. And so I'm going to take the example down the bottom right. These students are building circuits using circuit blocks. Each block has a component of a circuit on it. It's completely open ended. You can break things, but it's kind of hard. And so you give them some wires and some blocks, and they just start putting things together. And they can use this in the beginning of a unit before they know anything. And this is getting their hands on the materials. It's getting their minds engaged and helps them to really learn this deeply, because they're figuring it out for themselves. And then later in the unit, you can pull black out back out again, and you start asking them questions. Wait, we talked about current. Where is that in this circuit? And the great thing about these materials is they're so good, you can use them in third grade. You can use them in ninth grade. You can use them in 12th grade. And that's what we've been doing. Now, we didn't come up with these. These are from the Tinkering Studio Exploratorium. And these are great materials because everybody can engage with this at their own level and come to their own understanding of different parts of electricity. And then we have teachers who are interested in doing making focused curriculum. So we have our Lego programming and, of course, Kindergarten Danger Day. So Kindergarten Danger Day happened because my colleague, Robbie, came into the creativity lab with his kids on a rainy day. We had all these saws out. We had glue guns out. And he started with, all right, kids, today's Danger Day. I didn't really say anything about this, but on paper, it said, hard fun. When you trust kids with the fact that they're going to learn something hard, or you trust kids with the fact that they're going to do something dangerous, they take it seriously. And so they did a really great job. And they learned persistence here, too, because they're standing their sign for 30 minutes. How many of you want to solve for 30 minutes? But they want to. They enjoy it. So where does this happen? Well, it happens pretty much anywhere. This is in Berkeley. This is the East Bay School for boys. And the idea lab at Castileja and a mobile classroom, Sam Academy in Central Valley. And this is our creativity lab at Lighthouse. And it can happen in a cart. So you can make it happen any. This is our woodworking cart. But my favorite place for it to happen is in a regular classroom. So the kids start to understand that what they're doing with making can happen anywhere. And once you bring this to your school, what starts to happen is kids want to make all the time. So they come in at lunch. These are a few kids who just brought in, brought themselves into the space, actually, and said, can we make something? And so I'll finish just with this. If you're trying to design a curriculum, what's really important? Well, we can go back to the heart, the mind and the hands. And you know, the question here is, are children creating something? So are they using their hands? Do they have some independence? So are they up? Do they have some passion for what they're doing? Are they able to use their heart? And then finally, does it result in deep learning? So are they using their minds? Thanks. Yes. Yes. So I saw on your list of things about you that you wanted to create. Could you talk a little bit about how you encourage failure? Making mistakes can be very embarrassing, especially, you know, if you're a middle school adolescent, you want your peers to think highly of you. So failing in front of others, could you talk about how you try to encourage your students to make mistakes without being bummed out about it? So I think that the question is how do we allow for failure, given that it can be very embarrassing for students? And I think you just make it part of the culture. And since in many of these activities, they're they're designed so that we all fail, and we all fail together and we all figure out that that's okay. The other part is, and this is part of being a maker teacher is you have to just watch this happen. Right? And so that's really hard as a teacher to be like, Hey, I know they're going to fail. But when they do, they learn it in such a deeper way, because they figured out why they failed. And then you have to have kids reflect. Like what happened there? And why? You know, why did you end up going down that path? And what would you do now? Yes? Yes. So how difficult is it to work it into a curriculum? And how much time do you need? So what we're doing at Lighthouse is that I'm helping teachers. So I'm a maker coach. And I work with teachers to develop areas of their curriculum and and kind of figure out how to do the making in that part. And so generally, that can happen anywhere from months ahead to a few weeks ahead. It does take more time. But I believe, you know, by building a scale model of an Egyptian city, which is one of the projects we actually talked about, the kids will really get familiar with the Egyptian city. And they'll also get really familiar with ratios. And I think that they'll understand life of ancient Egyptians in a much, much deeper way. Having done that, then just, you know, doing a research project or something like that. Okay, one and then up there next. Yes? I don't know too much about Montessori education. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. But then there's this aspect of like, focus on I mean, my understanding of focus on skills, and we and less of the kind of imaginative piece of things. And so I would say, I think they integrate that about, you know, upper elementary level. And I think that that's an important part to us. Yeah, up in the balcony. So in one of the pictures in the in the group, the group that was integrated in the curriculum included a soap project that we do through a technique called whole class inquiry, where the group actually the teacher leaves for a few days. And the class has to come up with something. And so we did the soap project where they had to make soap. And I was gone for actually two weeks, which is a long time. I was I was there and other pretend rules, but you dress up funny and stuff like that. And then you sit there and you watch this failure thing happen, because they all they don't really know how to organize themselves. But it's much more like real life. And they have to figure out how to collaborate together. And they have to figure out how to organize themselves in terms of like, who's going to do which tasks? And how are we going to actually make the soap? And how are we going to pull our classmates on what they like in soap? And, you know, I make sure that it's safe because actually making soap isn't terribly safe. But pretty much aside from that, they get to figure it out. And then the crazy thing is a couple weeks later, they're supposed to present and bring this product. And we had somebody come out from Clorox and they came with their soap and they were able to present and they talked about how they would scale this up if they made a factory. Because if you let the kids take on something that's hard and fun, they'll do it. And they did. We also do, you know, competitions, robotics competitions. We do mousetrap car competitions. They usually work in groups on those. But I think the whole class inquiry is really like the pinnacle of collaboration in my own practice anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So in the high school class, we, which is the high school elective is where we started the whole program and where we started the open-ended piece of things. And we found out the first year that we should do some skill builders. So they build a chair and they sew a pillow and they do some soldering and they do some Arduino programming and some electronics and stuff like that. And then we use those to help tip off like what might you be interested in doing. And so we have a group this year building a bench, right? So they're doing some woodworking. We have a lot of groups that do electronics because I think kids think that that is what you're supposed to do with making. Which is kind of funny. But we also go through a whole process over about a month period of time where they bring in projects that they see and they think about what they're excited about and they share them with each other and we try to get them to talk to people they don't normally talk with because, hey, you both said you were interested in knitting. What if you guys think of a project together? And so it's a whole like kind of long brainstorming process. And last question. How do you make the connections to other classes? You have the example with us with the degrees and the angles. So how does they connect back to math? Like do you explain them or just 360? And so the and this is what we're working on right now is we take something like turtle art and we bring it into third grade. And we have the kids play with it and this is the tricky part is we don't tell them what to do. We have them play with it. And then once they've figured some things out that's when we start talking about oh you know that thing it has a name it's called an angle. Or what now that we know angle what angle do squares have, right? And so we let them try to solidify the deeper understanding first and and get it kind of at a gut level, right? And then we give it the the language that we use normally. And the hope is that's not in a maker class that's actually just in class. And so that's part of my job is supporting the core teachers to integrate some of these things into their regular classes. Thanks. Thanks Aaron. There is still lots of things on your tables and in the other room that you can make stuff with. You should also say hi to your local librarian. I asked her for what the strangest button was that she had over there and she showed me one that was a rejection to a sperm donor who had apparently a very low count. So that one's probably gone it was like right on top but like there's still other good ones there I'm sure so go say hi. Aaron's gonna be in theater too answering questions for about 10 minutes. One of those cool buttons from the librarians. Mine has some kind of unicorn creature on it. I don't know it's not a unicorn but it has a horn. It's cool. Yes one obviously I said uni. I wouldn't have to use it. Okay so tonight's talks really are speaking to my personal interests. Eating definitely one of them. Education I'm an educator and our third one definitely speaks to my interests. I'm a big-time comic book nerd. I also am really interested in gender and race and representation across particularly gender. I have a webcomic that is a feminist superhero parody webcomic so yeah obviously it's an interest of mine. So superheros of color they are they're pretty rare and they're so rare that like the number of white superheroes is enormous and there's so many white superheroes that they basically have run out of ideas for superpowers and if you look there are some terrible terrible superheroes throughout the history of comic books. I thought it'd be fun to look at some of them. The first is Madder Eater Lad. Yeah it sounds like it's facetious and maybe like a joke or a play on superhero names but no he's completely serious. Madder Eater Lad was one of the legion of superheroes from DC Comics. He appeared in the early 60s. Yes his power is just what his name would suggest. He can eat any form of matter and digest it. He's from the planet Bismol. That is true. The problem with Madder Eater Lad was that writers had trouble figuring out how he could be useful in a fight so they tended to write him out of fights. He would get drafted to go political service on his home planet so he couldn't be there for a fight because his main use is escaping. He can't trap Madder Eater Lad, right? He'll find his way out. He'll eat his way out. Another great one, Squirrel Girl, her personal favorite. She's exactly what she sounds like. She was born with a big fluffy squirrel tail. She can communicate and control, communicate with and control squirrels and has other squirrel powers like Cheryl T and stuff. Oh, her sidekick, like her best friend Squirrel, that's always by her side, is called Monkey Joe. I don't know, but apparently she's kind of a badass apparently. Like she actually brought down Dr. Doom with her army of squirrels at one point. So she does alright. She's a member of the Great Lake Avengers. Yes, thanks for the Great Lakes Avengers. One of the underappreciated Avengers teams. Okay, so you may feel like an army of squirrels seems ineffectual, but that is nothing compared to an earlier character, the red bee. Yeah, this guy premiered in 1940 from DC Comics. His powers army has a little gun called his Stinger gun and he fights criminals with trained bees. He has it on special occasions, so Michael is his treasure bee. Okay, so you think that other terrible superheroes that I don't have time for just a quick overview, okay? Dazzler, she turns disco music into disco lights. The Evian is a dude that dresses up like an old lady to fight crime. Rainbow Girl, yes, can draw on the emotional spectrum. Her superpower is mood swings. World War II era guy, raised by condors, natch, and Skate Man. Skate Man had one issue of his like self-titled comic in about, I think it was 1983. He's a Vietnam vet who skated around and fought crime. Amazingly, it wasn't a hit. We have to talk about comic books, is Grace Gibson. Like they really had some great powers there. Yes, today we're going to talk about comics of color and you know looking at race and gender and so I give a little short story how I even got into comics. So my grandmother used to give me the funny papers on sunday that came with the news ads and be like here read this so we can read the newspaper together. I went okay cool so I would read them and it was like oh this is good this is fun and so I used to ask her but there's nobody in the comics that looks like me you know we're those those comics and so she's like well this is all we have right now so this is what you kind of have to work with. So I'm like okay make do what we do and so probably within middle school, high school I begin actually learning more about comics and engaging more and I would be introduced to storm from x-men and she would kind of be my gateway into comics and ultimately be one of my favorite like kind of book heroes even including superheroes and just kind of book characters just in general and so a lot of people actually call me a quiet storm you know kind of a riff off of her as far as like a superhero night to deal with that. So then I was like okay this is good this is fun I get to read comics I get to enjoy them I get to use this as a gateway escape into this fantasy type land and that was my way of you know stepping outside of my getting outside of my worries and going into a new land and new world so to speak. And so as I got to college then I was like ooh these things that I really liked are somewhat problematic you know the way that they dress the the names that they gave them some of the powers that they have I was like know about that or maybe I did and I just didn't really think about it and so my master's thesis chair did a documentary on black masculinity in comics and I was like well what about the women you know can we talk about them and so he's like well maybe that's what you should do your thesis on and that's what I did so that would be my thesis project and from there I kind of got a chance to look a little bit deeper into like how pop culture influence the way that college students perceived the black female superhero and then when I realized that I could write them off on my taxes that purchasing comics I was really excited because my mother would be like why are you buying all these things like Amazon and midtown comics I would be getting loads and loads of them and she's like my mom I get to write this off in the end like this is an investment here it works out in the end so we'll start here so why study comics so most people are like comic books are frivolous material it's just a little magazine nobody wants to read them you know only you know only white guys read them nobody else is looking at them and I'm like no but there's a lot of people who do and they're worthy of scholarly study and there's a lot of political commentary and there's you know they can they have this art form that is very eye-catching and has an artistic message that goes along with it and so feminist Sherri Ines would say that comic books have been and continue to be one of the most marginalized art forms and so oftentimes people will look at comics and kind of see them as more just as leisure and not per se something that can educate or even change the minds of young and old so also and yes and so comics are at the cutting edge cutting edge of exploring new definitions of gender due to its marginalization and so it's a revolutionary medium and I mean we can go back to the 30s when early on when comic books kind of like first begin to exist and the stories and the narratives that they tell anywhere from the western to the archie to the jungle to the black exploitation to civil rights the comics have a way of introducing literature and introducing a story that maybe others may not be privy to if they were to look at it in a traditional educational setting so the portrayal of characters of color in comics so when you think of comic book characters particularly of color these are the main three things that I typically would see especially particularly in my research racial stereotypes constant subjects of controversy identification with characters and so I go back to the thought of well what about the characters that look like me and so I remember one of the questions that I would pose in my study was what if I learned what if what I saw in comic books was what I learned about black women and what what I saw as far as on the pages and how they're perceived and how they're portrayed that'd be that's not a great picture you know for or an inspiring picture per se for someone growing up looking at that now maybe inspiring if you're into physical fitness and you want to you know have this great body yes absolutely but um more often than none I'm not really looking at the body per se I'm looking at kind of like what are they talking about who are they and what is their you know the power and all that that they deliver and so within being constant subjects of controversy you have so you have a character here green lantern john steward um I'm reminded of the abysmal movie that came out some years ago green lantern and how I remember when it came out I was taking a pop culture class and a lot of students were like that's that's not the green lantern meaning that how Jordan that was the one that was being portrayed I was like well actually you know he is but it was interesting how most people when they thought of green lantern the first person they thought of was john steward and so how I remember Dwayne McDuffie rest of soul who was one of the big writers in DC comics and also the creator of milestone comics he was talking about how they had a big big opportunity to use um john steward as related to hollywood and in the film an opportunity to bring him to the screen as far as the person of color and so they kind of didn't seize on that moment by not doing so and um then you also have uh characters like uh power man or Luke cage and um wearing kind of like this silk yellow type top and the chain like belt and so we'll get into more of him and how he kind of like alters and gives these different ideas of like black masculinity and um maybe even defining or redefining what that is and so we have controlling images and stereotypes so we have all of these different characters from the falcon with Captain America being seen more so as a sidekick not per se as kind of like a standalone hero and what i can say is after seeing the movie they kind of did um not so much make him look like a sidekick but actually he kind of had his own voice and you know in so many words so that was something a little bit of a nod there to hollywood on that but as relates into the comic book um the falcon he was known as like a thief and basically someone who like Captain America was like let me you know put you under my wing saying you know build you into somebody who i want you to be um and kind of like my little buddy here and then um you have nubia who um it's kind of like the response to a a lot of people saying okay you got wonder woman who's out here where is you know the black woman and you know how can we rectify that and so um the creators kind of like this thing of you know what we're going to give you a black sister here you have here's nubia and so that's wonder woman's black sister that way we can not only give you some more gender but we can also give you some color as well so that was kind of like their way to shut up in a way and um you know maybe add a little spice of life i guess you can say and then you have um amanda waller here who kind of looks like the the mammy the asexual you know um kind of worker here and with the kind of the colors are not as is some appealing on her and the shoes and everything just about her just is not attractive at all and so for her to be someone that's supposed to be this superhero you know it's kind of like what is she fighting and what kind of power does she actually have and then on the corner here we have um frank millers martha washington out of um dark horse who is actually one of my another one of my favorite characters and that if anybody knows frank miller and his work most of the time the treatment that he does for women is not the greatest and um so martha washington actually is probably one of the better suited characters that he has as far as in his graphic novels and in comics and as far as being clothed and not sexualized and um she actually kind of has a role a leadership role in the military and so um the one thing also about martha washington is that she brings kind of like this real life experience to the comic book pages she actually is from cabrini green which is a former projects in chicago so she actually has this like real life story versus someone who is not you know kind of like a made-up creative fantasy and so when we look particularly at black masculinity in comics i'm going to direct your attention over here to this guy and how one of the first things that comes to mind um when you think about black masculinity is is the body the black male body and how it's pretty much being put on display and so in the case here um you have this is ty rock and so one of ty rocks powers is singing that's his superpower right so i'm trying to cage how is singing help fight yeah so um you have that and then the outfit or lack thereof that he's wearing and um the yellow boots once again the tiara around his head and it's almost the only masculine part that we see in him is more of the anger and the muscle and the strength outside of that a lot of him is is feminized as far as the outfit that he's wearing the very low v cut um of the of his pretty much a bodysuit it's not even a shirt on top it's not a suit and um so you know all of those are very troubling and problematic you know to go along with the fact that his superpower is is it's the same now to kind of contrast that we have over here static shock who would be created by dwayne mcduffey and he this is a character that he would want to bring to kind of introduce young um black boys into comics and let them know that there is another picture of what the black male looks like versus what we see here and so static shock is a the cartoon actually used to come on on tv um and so he's a guy you know like this high school kid you know miss school high school kid who was like the typical high school kid that we would see normally and so this gives an idea for younger kids to be like wow okay i can be like him and he has the the macomex hat so that you know we see kind of like a nod to um one of the um the uh leaders in civil rights and black power and so for the movement and then even though there's still some troubliness with his outfit that it's very um skin tight and kind of fitting towards his form there's still the idea that it gives another degree of masculinity that is a little more encouraging versus um tie rock tie rocks character and then also here um brother man um who is also known as antonio baller so uh is created by name of dowood agib wele who has a series called brother man dictator of discipline and so this would be a comic that he would create on his own and he kind of comes from a city called big city which comes out or based off of philadelphia pennsylvania and so he also fights crime he also has his two twin buddies that roll with him as well and so looking here he kind of exhibits this idea of this cool pose which um scholar richard majors who comes up with that and how he looks at masculinity in a way to fight off what it means to be to be a man also fight off what it means to be strong and kind of you know give this idea of strength and power and so he does it in a way that uh kind of a street mentality since so to speak and then here we have um who is also another superman another superman character or one of the ripped off the superman character so now we get a chance to see super i'm sorry not superman spider man um in a way of color because the original spider man is um is white and so here we have a latino black character kind of like changing up the role so now we kind of get a chance to see um masculinity in a and another role in a new color and so what my work primarily deals with hyper sexuality and super visibility or even in some cases invisibility and so when dealing with the female character particularly those of color there's not a lot of research that you're going to find typically on the black um woman within comics and this would be one of my um struggles but at the same time will be something that's a highlight because i kind of get a chance to begin that work that other people will be able to pick up on after um after what i will be continuing to do or what will be i will be doing and so we can see various things that are problematic from we have the basically cat suit this is um to shock of basically um black panther's sister or um sherry also known as sherry as well she would be kind of take over the black panther role and so here we don't even see her face so we don't even know what she looks like under that um her breasts are very large in comparison to what maybe you know an average typical person has um she has a very slim waist um and waistline and then um somewhat of a what we can assume to maybe a large kind and um so one of the things that i would kind of point out in my research is that a lot of the characters particularly the black characters would pretty much be um white women painted in brown and so they basically had bodies of white females but they just painted them brown so that they could look like they were of color and um so then even sometimes your villains like this one here you would see so once again we have the exposed breast and the lower neckline we even have her in a hot pink so we can really see everything and everything is on full blast as one might say and even my favorite character good old storm she has her problems of dresses well too and um and this one this is probably one of the more chamber ones of her but um but then she also has times where she has um during the 80s when she went through her punk rock storm days which actually is one of my favorites actually and um then we have here so the genes which appeared to be too big and um what appears to be wearing a thong and then we have the whole toe top and so it's kind of like basically six six and more sex and look at my body and look how good it looks and it almost you begin to question like what are they really trying to do with these characters are they really trying to show that they have some type of power is there empowerment in the way that they look is it also or maybe dimming them down or is it over over sexually oversexing them to maybe appear a certain way these are all questions that i begin to wonder because some might think oh well she has a wonderful body why not show it off why not put it out there for people to see but then at the same time it may be seen as also overexposure to a degree so then we have the characters and how they can possibly potentially humanize the superhero experience and so i mentioned another character this character earlier Martha Washington and in this picture alone we see emotion and oftentimes many of comic characters that you see you don't really see emotion there is no crime you know you're saving the day that's what you do you get over it and you're tough about it but in the case here we see that she actually has to go through something there is actually a sad moment there's actually a moment of trial there's actually a moment of suffering and so that's kind of like what brings that humanist quality to the superhero so they begin to be more than just fantastical figures but people that actually and although they're not really existing people they're actually someone who we can maybe even relate to or relate to their story and so one thing i definitely wanted to make sure to do with the presentation was introduce the fact that there are other labels outside the big wigs of marvel and dc and so here equoc which is a a conference that takes place in philadelphia every may and they particularly look at comics of color they have a conference every year where those come to talk about whatever creations that they may have independent artists and it's an opportunity for those who may want to get into the comic book industry can do so without having to try to go through such with corporations as dc and marvel and what i i like to point out image and dark horse because those are although subsidiaries of the bigger ones they still kind of give that the edge to what we may not see in marvel or what we may not see in dc i like to think that they walk on the dark side one might say with their particular narratives and storylines and so here also the black age movement which is was a movement that kind of took off from marvel and dc a group of comic book artists got together and say you know what we're tired of having to give our stuff improve ourselves to to marvel and dc why not do make our own and create our own and so that's kind of how the black age movement would come into this day they're still existing as a matter of fact they just had their conference in chicago on this past weekend so it's living and thriving and other people are fighting other outlets to become take part into the comic book world and so the impact on popular cultures of rights feminist movements black exploitation era film and television well we obviously know that we see the movies we see marvel we see dc batman x-men or that's where we can see the the impact of how it plays onto popular culture um in particular the most recent captain america which included um the falcon character we also have um misty night who would essentially basically be a rift off of pan greer from the black exploitation period and so um they would automatically say look we want her to kind of look like pan greer we want her storyline to be very similar to that and so that is kind of how her create um character would come about and then you also have um vixen who would come out of dc and would kind of give this whole feminist type of or black feminist more so um idea of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a leader um overseas because her character would be um placed in africa and then you have um black panther and storm who at one period were married and now that marriage is done um it was a note about when they made four or five months ago and so they're no longer together but that i i personally think it was something that was somewhat forced so it was kind of one of those things where we have two high um ranking characters black panther and we have storm who's the leader of x-men let's put them together and let's marry them and so it's kind of one of those two obvious maybe we shouldn't have done it um but in a sense it i kind of gave this whole black power couple as one might think and say and so as i close with you all today um i just the work that i'm wanting to do is kind of like look at implications that um we look at the politics of kind of book superheroes particularly those of color and how popular culture they in within popular culture they can shape our perceptions and conceptions of race gender and identity and that they're more than just texts that we just pick up and maybe put into a container and store and you know collect money on them but they're actually worthy of being used in the classroom um worthy of just even looking at how reading these texts can give us a new idea on on life or maybe inspires to be somebody else like said the one thing that i really enjoyed about comics is that i get to step out of my reality for a period of time when i read them and um there's nothing like not being in reality for a few moments of your life and just enjoying the time that it is so i leave you with a quote from the late steward hall uh life imitates art especially within popular culture and so what we see oftentimes in the comics is often what we see within life and within our daily living yes and i love it yes yes um she asked about the new miss marvel and i love it i love it um for all those that know um the new miss marvel came out this uh january and so she is now pakistanian and she's also a teenager and so um what i really enjoy about it is that it kind of reaches a younger crowd in the younger generation and so you had those who are familiar with the original miss marvel but now it's like introducing a whole other collective of young girls and and you know even potentially young boys into her character in her story um i even sometimes i'm beginning to wonder if they will begin to touch upon some of the current events that are taking place you know over in pakistan and in the middle east and how that may impact her narrative they may not but um i'd be curious to see if they do that and but yeah i'm definitely very excited and looking forward to the next issues that come with it yes who's your favorite comic book writer right who's my favorite comic book writer i don't know i did that's um that's a hard one i'm actually have to go with one of my my independent friends um his name is uh john jennings and so um he's actually the creator of this shirt here that i'm wearing um which is a play off of hui newton and so um black panther so it's black panther um to charla but in the body of hui newton and so um he actually has a little pub out for this book called black curvy um which is doing a riff off a lot of jack curvy's um characters and so definitely a good book if you're definitely a comic book nerd to add to your collection so i would have to probably say john jennings would be my favorite right now yes um superhero comic books especially the early ones i mean they are fantasies they're never you know exaggerated um ideas of power do you see coming out that um especially you know i i'm not going to say new but um i think use the word recycle but for like a better words um especially like with the new 52 and then kind of bringing back people like lou cage and um captain marvel monica rando or or also known as full time so they're kind of using characters that have already been used but kind of giving them a new slate so to speak or a new identity so i mean i guess that's a start but um i think that there could be more and i'm just curious to see is if there is a fear in creating a new identity especially of those in color but um as mentioned with miss marvel i think that's kind of like the beginnings that start so i think it will slowly take place but um as of right now they're beginning to kind of like recycle old characters and kind of give them a new face so to speak so they try to so he was asking about um the the characters that are you talking about like black characters that are playing white characters or vice versa or it's unique in the sense that like it'll updated to like 2014 or 2013 so whatever hot right now that's what they're going to use for the origin story so what like for example lou cage um and being a hero for hire they're not going to really use that storyline now um as far as that him being a mercenary that's not something that they're going to because not too many people are really going to want to be interested in that so they're going to try to find something that's going to grab an audience so they typically tend to recreate what is hot as far as in pop culture so to speak yes so what are the most positive um gender and race um characters that are being created that's your question okay you know that's you're going to have me think it for a while because there's not really i mean to be honest um yeah no uh it's you know and i think that's something to maybe even you know dig in i mean a lot of people may look at the boondocks but that's more like a comic strip so but um i mean if you want to kind of put them all together um i had to i guess go back to also miss marvel and although um she's not african america but she's still a person of color so um that probably would be the first one that kind of stands out that is definitely a positive one um also with the green lanterns because they typically come out with multiple green lanterns now they're actually um giving them much more of a different sexual orientation so not only are they heterosexual now you you'll typically not find ones that are gay or homosexual basically or a lesbian and so that's something that is also um enlightening and no in empowering so now we're looking at sexuality in addition to gender as well so those will probably be the main ones that kind of stand out as far as um positive i mean villains i think are probably right up there with with the superheroes but and that's another thing that not a lot of the tension is also placed on on villains as well um it's one thing that i have definitely thought about but you know as a grad student you're like you can only do so much but um i think they get just as bad of a rap but because um there's not much attention being placed on them there's not too many people really looking at them but from what i can of the information that i've seen in the literature that i've researched um some of their powers uh there was this one guy piranha guy who basically had on this like you know pimped out zootsuit and um his you know face was that of a piranha and so he's like ugly beastly looking thing and so not that a villain should look dainty and and pretty but you know have some kind of decency you know to be i mean look at you know dr doom he was a villain he looked you know pretty dapper so i think they get just as bad of a rap as um you know the superheroes as well too thank you so grace will be in the lobby answering any more questions it was a great night i'd like to thank all three speakers as well as the oakland public library and many volunteers uh from lighthouse who came out and made this great like thank citizen zane uh yeah it's fantastic uh you definitely want to check out that library table before you leave uh the reading list this month is particularly fantastic there are a few events coming up including the maker fair uh you might want to check out uh another shout out to odds lawn which is a biweekly event uh similar to this uh i i believe that one of my friends called it writers with wikipedia so it's extremely well written stuff um it's a lot of fun um i go to a lot of nerdy events and actually one of the coolest nerdy events i went to was just last night at tuna room which is hackerspace in oakland it was uh supposed to be like a 40 minute talk by one of the collaborators on the bicep 2 project bicep 2 proved uh well is starting to provide evidence for cosmic inflation uh by looking at the cosmic microwave background radiation uh so they had one of the stanford collaborators come up and he basically just spoke for an hour and a half and it was fantastic because it had both lay public and like detailed physicists asking all range of questions and they're going to have another one on uh genetic engineering there's a kickstart project to make a plant that glows so uh yeah check that out and of course all of our nerdy stuff including at the smithsonian i get to give a talk at the f***ing smithsonian uh that is awesome and uh nerdy bicep alum mitch angsty is also going to revive his talk he's going to make a lot of stuff glow if you have friends out there they want to check it out next month show is awesome as well um Nathan ilton has a talk on the limit that is not burn sites so that will help you answer life's burning questions such as if you had say 96 buckets of paint you wanted to paint a cube how many different ways can you do that uh we have a talk on uh harnessing photosynthesis for actual commercial applications we have a talk on emergency management especially the 911 system so uh hope to see you there uh also there's a sign up list in the back so on your way out when you grab the reading list which is again fantastic this month you might want to sign up for email and volunteer to give a talk thanks bye