The Community Area Map Project (CAMP)

Ok, let’s try this blog post thing again. Hi, my name is Jeff Solin and I teach Computer Science and Making at Lane Tech College Prep HS in Chicago, IL. I designed and built (with the help of many others) an innovation lab at the school called the LTMaker Lab and wrote curriculum for a course called Innovation and Creation Lab that focuses on the space. My first blog piece was about the Chicago Flag Mosaic Project and some people read it (yay!). Interest in that project was much stronger than I expected, and the wonderful work of my students was on display at Navy Pier for 8 months, and has been on display at the Museum of Science and Industry since.

Pressure. I felt a lot of it, mainly to come up with something that was as well-received as the Flag. This next project was formed through the wonderful work of the amazing Gabrielle “Gabe” Lyon, her brilliant team that worked on No Small Plans, and some downtime staring out at Glen Lake in Glen Arbor, MI.

There were a few things that were important to me with respect to the students’ experience when coming up with a follow-up to the Flag Mosaic Project.

• Civic Engagement
• Collaboration
• Chicago
• Students learning about people outside of their communities
• A shared vision
• Creative input
• Student agency
• Applied digital design and fabrication skills

I was sitting by the lake with a Rubik’s cube reading No Small Plans. When I got to the page with all of the kids laying out plans for the city on tables, the plan for this next project was born.

Step 0: The Idea

My overall plan was to somehow collaboratively build a model of the city, possibly using neighborhoods and possibly connecting students with other students in areas they were unfamiliar with where those other students would serve as representatives of their community. Through some follow up research and help from Gabe, we learned that there are roughly 200 neighborhoods in Chicago, and none of them or their boundaries are official. Some are long-standing, some are created by the real estate industry to sell more property, and often there is disagreement on what the actual boundaries are…since…ya know…there aren’t any official boundaries. What does officially exist are 77 community areas of Chicago. According to the Illinois Early Childhood Asset Map with references from The Encyclopedia of Chicago:

Chicago community areas (CCAs) are 77 areas (originally 75) that were defined by the University of Chicago’s Social Science Research Committee in the 1920s. The purpose of the CCAs is to allow the comparison across time (especially across decennial censuses) of demographic characteristics in areas with stable boundaries. Other small areas, such as wards (with politically changing boundaries) and neighborhoods (with popularly shifting boundaries), do not serve this purpose. There have been only two changes in CCA boundaries since the 1920s: the addition of the O’Hare CCA in the 1950s and the separation of the Edgewater CCA from the Uptown CCA in 1980.

Since these were officially designated, still relevant and it would still be possible to integrate the context of neighborhoods within those CCAs, the Chicago 77 became the foundation for how to assign areas to the students.

I started jotting down notes about how this might happen. Warning: I can barely read my own handwriting, but for authenticity, I wanted to share my actual page of notes.

Step 1: Vote With Your Feet

We started with a Vote With Your Feet activity that Gabe shared with me to get students thinking about and discussing their city, their communities, their civic identity, and more. We put slides up on the projector with a question, then students moved to the side of the room with their answer. Some of the questions generated quite a lot of discussion after the activity. Here are some examples:

Step 2: Read No Small Plans and the Chicago 77

You can’t read a book if you don’t have a book to read, so we needed to procure a classroom set of the books to make this happen. Thanks to the incredible generosity of Gabe and her team and a very successful Kickstarter campaign, classroom sets of the book were donated to many Chicago Public School teachers. We were a couple of the lucky teachers to receive this donation, along with a handful of Social Science and English teachers at my school who have been working with the book in their curricula.

My colleague and friend Amy Wozniak has been teaching sections of this course with me for the past few years, so all large projects are done with all of our classes together. The students read the book and we used a number of resources from the Reader’s Toolkit available for free to help with follow-up discussions. This was really fun and something that isn’t frequently done in CS classes. It made us think more about what is standard to read in CS classes, and how we can change that for the better.

Once we were done reading and discussing the book, with the help of some random number generation magic, We assigned each student or pair of students one of the 77 community areas in Chicago.

There was some risk involved, especially since there is potential for negativity or negative life experiences by a student with respect to another area of the city, and their experiences are theirs, not mine. I let the students know that they could talk to me privately if they had issues with the CCA they were assigned. Some students did note that they were having trouble finding information about a community area aside from some intense displays of racism and we had to navigate that, but it did not deter them from continuing their work on the project. Teaching often involves difficult discussions, and that’s part of learning and having a growth mindset. It was an opportunity for students to challenge what they think they know or have heard about areas of the city with respect to demographics, violence, community, activism, compassion, care, culture and more. It opened the doors for meaningful discussion and the kids handled things with compassion, empathy and respect. We were hoping they would at least pull from this project a sense that every single area of Chicago has people that love, care and support each other. We wanted them to know that there are amazing stories that have helped define those areas and the communities within them, often outside of the narrative they may be used to hearing. Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country. Maybe a project like this could knock down one little pebble from the walls that separate us. If not, we felt confident that it wouldn’t add more pebbles to those walls.

Step 2: Assign “Main” Tools and Distribute the Vectors

In order to give some variety to the look of the completed project, students were assigned a “main tool” that would be used to create their piece. They were allowed to incorporate any other tools in the lab as they saw fit, as long as the assigned tool was featured. In this context, the three main tools were laser cutter, 3D carver (CNC mill), and 3D printer.

We purchased a set of vector files from Vector Stock to use as the defining boundaries for each piece. We worked with the files in Illustrator so that the entire project would scale to the proper overall size and would fit appropriately on an 8' x 6' backing. This allowed each student to isolate the vectors of their CCA. Amy and I talk about this a lot in our classes, but in the world of digital fabrication, size very much matters.

As with each project in the lab, we have a Project Details Document where students can reference all aspects of the project, requirements, constraints, ordering materials, etc.

Step 3: Sketch, Design, Prototype, Build, Iterate

Every project that students work on in the lab starts with sketching and prototyping. Once ideas were forming, we had each student laser etch and laser cut a base piece of their CCA in 3mm Baltic birch plywood. This type of wood is used quite a bit in the lab. We showed them a trick to etch the Google map of the area on top of the piece so they could use it as a reference when placing their pieces. Some of the students used the map as a part of their piece and others built everything on top just to have it serve as a base that would link together well with the other pieces.

Some of the pieces started really taking shape!

Once we had enough pieces reaching completion, we were able to start putting them all together and see what this beast was going to turn into.

Here, we are almost done with the main pieces! Started thinking about what kinds of finishing touches we could add to tie everything together.

It was then time to paint the base and start gluing each piece down. By this time, students were out for the summer so I worked on the getting the final project assembled. I have a “Pro Team” of students that meet with me weekly to work on advanced projects in our lab and they help me with all of the final steps.

Step 4: Make it Presentable

The idea here was to make it look cohesive, clean, and recognizable as something uniquely Chicago. One of coolest things about these types of collaborative projects is the ability for it to be a collective expression from afar, then 77 different expressions up close. The closer you get, the more alive it becomes.

The Pro Team and I decided to use the vinyl cutters to make all of the students names out of light blue vinyl stickers that we would stick on lasercut large white stripes of acrylic. This would create the light blue stripes of the flag. We lasercut large red acrylic stars and did the math to make sure proportions for the elements of the Chicago flag were correct. Each student also wrote a “one-pager” about their work. One lingering idea is to take the one-pagers and photographs of each CCA, and make a coffee table book of the project to sell, then put all of the profits back into our program. Every student would be an contributing author of the book. Each turn of a page would reveal a picture on the left page, and the writeup on the right page. We’ll see :)

Additional photos from the project can be seen here. Thanks for reading this!

Free Talk via the ACM on February 17 at 6pm CDT

If you’re like to hear more about this project, I’ll be giving a talk about it through the ACM on Tuesday 2/17 at 6pm CDT. Registration is free and the event is open to the public. Click here to register or find out more.