Slate ran an intriguing article today in which a young professional dives into the kid-addicted world of Rainbow Loom, the set of pegs onto which small, colorful rubber bands are attached until a woven bracelet emerges. Katy Waldman, in “Rainbow Loon: What happens when a 26-year-old woman tries out the biggest tween fad of the year?“, writes about her weeklong experiment.
Along the way, she quotes lots of other folks who talk about the calming powers of repetitive crafting, the constructivist nature, and more (the article is worth reading if only to jump onto these links and see where they take you).
Then she discovers that Rainbow Loom is more than just rubber bands and plastic pegs. It’s a community. She writes:
[O]nce you complete your first Rainbow Loom bracelet, you expect some kind of celestial trumpeting to welcome you to the world of tween artisans … But you must resist the urge to self-congratulate … It is time to put aside the instruction manual and venture into the belly of the whale: Rainbow Loom’s YouTube community.
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In an article for Forbes, writer (and father) Jordan Shapiro argues that Rainbow Loom teaches kids to “mediate effectively between virtual and material realities.” That’s because, in order to execute the more complex designs, you need to consult the toy’s Internet oracles—tweens who have posted detailed “how-to” videos online. My personal favorites are “Ashley Steph” and “Parker’s Videos,” but the options are as staggering as the demand is real …
The way the toy incorporates digital learning feels, to me, weirdly reminiscent of my adult life: I often use the Web to look up things like “how to open wine without a bottle opener” or “how to fold a hospital corner.” So I guess Rainbow Loom is “preparing” kids for that. But back to Ashley Steph. In the video I watched, one of the two girls behind the account is actually a terrific tour guide through the pied Rainbow Loom safari (except for occasionally when she needs to sloooow down.) She showed me how to select my colors, carry off my stitches, and fasten the diminutive c-clips that connected the two ends of my fishtail bracelet. Every so often a parent or sibling interrupted her while the iPhone camera rolled and she gave a polite answer before returning to the tutorial. Not once do viewers see Ashley Steph’s face—only her hands holding the loom or twirling the hook across the stretchy bands. Her videos aren’t vanity projects but acts of service. Soaking it in, I was impressed. Have kids always been so generous with their time and expertise, especially when it came to enlightening perfect strangers?
The sense of an online community flowering around Rainbow Loom gave me a glimmer of what we less-connected generations missed out on as kids. The Web itself is a pattern of interlaced users, and crafting with these semianonymous tweens made me feel a part of its warp and weft. The idea of digital literacy is really one of communication and collaboration—how do we train young people to use the information washing over them every time they go online? How do we teach them to work together in virtual space and in, you know, actual rooms? Maybe we should start by buying them all Rainbow Looms. (Just kidding, they all have them already.)
This idea of Rainbow Loom as gateway to digital literacy intrigues me. But look at how it naturally teaches the concept of digital citizenship. In the video series she describes, viewers see hands (no identifiable faces) and first (but not last) names. Kids are using search strategies not for school but for personal learning, making it easier for them to bring prior knowledge to the table and evaluate strong versus weaker resources. (Your project either turns out or it doesn’t; you feel empowered or confused or somewhere in-between, both of which are powerful personal markers for credibility for young minds.)
There’s also another important piece here: videos as service, not as self-promotion, another element I think we’ve under-discussed as educators interested in youth profiles online.
Her idea in the last paragraph, in which she and the Forbes columnist noodle about Rainbow Loom bridging online and offline communities is powerful, too — it’s much of what I’m discovering in this year’s Michigan Makers sites. Oftentimes, our kids are choosing face-to-face over virtual activities, and tactile over digital ones. They aren’t yearning for digital-for-digital’s-sake. (As a funded iSchool project, I sometimes get nervous when kids basically say, “Yeah, yeah, enough about 3D modeling software. Are you gonna let us SEW this week?”) Part of the magic of maker activities is that they can bridge between online and offline — they aren’t either/or. Tutorials, blogs, and YouTube videos represent online knowledge acquisition, but the loop (no pun intended) isn’t completed until you create something physical.
And physical creation just feels good — I’m more and more convinced that as humans, we need to make stuff with our hands. Maybe that’s why it feels good for us to clean out a closet or wash dishes by hand or make dinner from scratch or sew on our own button or solder our own broken circuit or weave a bunch of silicone rubber bands.
(PS – Despite their popularity, it must be said that Rainbow Loom plastic pegs and silicone bands are not very environmentally friendly. But it’s nice to see a Michigan entrepreneur flourish.)