Episode 133: Reimagining Education through Makerspaces with David Martelli of Guild Hall Learning

David Martelli is a dedicated educator and leader in STEM learning, with over 20 years of experience designing innovative educational spaces and programs. His career began in the U.S. Air Force, where he led high-tech programs before transitioning into education. As Head of Computer Science and Engineering at a school, he built a cutting-edge Makerspace, giving students hands-on experience with technology and engineering.

During our discussion, David describes his educator journey, highlighting his experience in robotics and computer science, his transition from engineering to teaching, and the impact of COVID-19 on his educational initiatives. We also get into why Guild Hall’s Makerspaces are so helpful for students.

 
 
 
 
 

Read the transcript for this episode:

Welcome to Educator Forever, where we empower teachers to innovate education. Join us each week to hear stories of teachers expanding their impacts beyond the classroom and explore ways to reimagine teaching and learning.


David Martelli is a dedicated educator and leader in STEM learning with over 20 years of experience designing innovative educational spaces and programs. His career began in the US Air Force, where he led high tech programs, before transitioning into education as head of Computer Science and Engineering at a school he built a cutting edge maker space, giving students hands on experience with technology and engineering driven by a passion for interactive learning. Dave founded Guild Hall learning educational makerspace, a center focused on STEM art and engineering education through partnerships with schools and educators, he provides tools and resources that make learning more engaging and practical. A self described straight F student torn mentor, Dave is committed to breaking traditional education barriers and bringing meaningful STEM opportunities to students. Welcome, Dave, so nice to have you here. Thank you so much for having me. Can you start off by telling us about your professional journey?


David Martelli  

Yeah, so I started off not having an amazing time in school in general, I was really interested in things, but I tend to be hyper focused on the things that I was personally interested in. After jumping in, what I was most interested in was robotics and computers. And even despite me having kind of a rougher time with school, I was able to land pretty nice jobs. So as a systems engineer with Northrop Grumman in the Department of Defense, I've helped many startups in the education and the technical world kind of get going. And the entire time I was as a hobby on the side teaching. I'd either be teaching robotics or martial arts or something like that, right? Eventually, I kind of got a little bit worn out of of that pure engineering, coding and technical side of things, so I decided to take a little bit of a break and just take up teaching as kind of my full time job. I was lucky enough that I was approached by a school that specializes in gifted education over in Massachusetts, and they were like, Hey, we're looking to build out an entire computer science and engineering program with Makerspace and all these other things. We're looking for someone with both the technical as well as the educational background. It's like, Sure, why not? And that was a really cool adventure. We had a lot of kids that were extremely passionate about a lot of things, but many, many of them were very passionate about STEM related subjects. So we were able to build out a full VR lab. We were able to build out two maker spaces for different age ranges, and it was just an absolute, absolutely wondrous journey. Then COVID hit. So once COVID, yeah, that's kind of a big question, one in a lot of people, I suppose. But what was interesting, we knew that we wanted to continue in this particular direction. We had gone so far as to as to approve in our schools Master Plan A several million dollar Makerspace specifically to keep going with this, but with all the financial and the obviously student issues that came with COVID, it just wasn't in the cards anymore. The entire department got kind of shelled out. And while I was sitting there on Zoom trying to teach all my students, I realized that my way of teaching wasn't particularly suited to it, because I like having every student to be following a generalized rubric, but be able to approach that rubric with projects of their own design. So every single person I had 130 students or so, and it was grade school, so anywhere from three years old all the way up through high school, trying, in person, to be able to manage and remember 130 different projects, and be able to run around, do all the research, make sure I'm actually there, supporting them and doing all that wasn't so bad. It was. It was difficult, but wasn't terrible. Doing it over Zoom and whatnot was just completely impossible at that point, I noticed other teachers were kind of having a similar a similar problem, not necessarily because they were trying to manage 130 different projects that were very vastly different. Like some were doing electromag levitation, others were doing, you know, game development and unity. Others were doing robots and all that sort of stuff. But just keeping up with their kids in general, with hands on projects was pretty impossible for them. So I decide, why not put my my kind of previous job skills to use and develop a software project? So we built a software called guild. Guild stands for Guided, Universal, Intelligent Learning device. Military got me really good at naming acronyms.


David Martelli  

So what the basic premise of it was is that we'll have a bunch of different lessons across all of STEM and it'll have all of the lesson plans, all of the check in points, all of resources to help support those lessons. And then it would use a couple of AI tricks to be able to figure out what each kid is doing individually, and kind of start pushing things towards them that they would be either really interested in or would be able to help continue to upskill them. So the system itself was meant to manage the students progression and path with as little oversight for me as is possible, so the kid had more free range to be able to really develop their skills, as long as they're within asset River, and then I would be there more to support them, more to act as a mentor, basically for them, to kind of help them go through we pushed that to about a dozen different schools across I think it was either six or seven countries, just to see how well it would work outside of my own little test case. And some of them it worked amazing. But for the majority, it didn't work at all. The reason being seemed to be that it was too broad. There was it was very hard for the system to keep up with the technical capabilities of the of the computers in Ecuador versus United States, right? Or what this teacher happened to know for any background knowledge, right? So that was a really interesting problem. I thought. I was like, hey, what if we unclaimed this down a little bit. And we said, what if we put it in its own little building its own little box, and let every type of student possible come in, and we built the system from kind of a smaller niche all the way out as much as possible? And that's how Guild Hall was born. It is the hall of Guild at that point, since we've opened up two and a half locations. One's open for members and things like that. Sorry, two of them are open for members and outside programs and whatnot, and one's just a training spot for teachers and and kind of larger event. We've partnered with nonprofits that specialize in helping underprivileged kids get access to the best possible resources to help improve their potential future outcomes. We are working, see, we're at Microsoft for for a big event for them in a couple of weeks. So we've, we've ended up being able to expand it, kind of everywhere, all with the software kind of slowly building up to fill in the slots that help support us as we go. That's awesome. A lot of breath. I love hearing about the journey too, and how it was like, Hey, you tried something and then you shifted it based on what you found out, and then it led to something that seems really amazing. So congratulations on landing there. And can you tell us a little bit more about Guild Hall and, like, do students come after school? Like, how is the space used by students? And also, just a little more about, like, what is the approach when they come in? Yeah, so we have students come in from a couple of different places. We started off primarily as an after school membership, just to kind of make make it so that we had kids that really wanted to be here, and we didn't have necessarily any boundaries in what we could do. So that worked out really well. We found out what kids were really interested in this kind of area, as well as the best way to teach other instructors how to how to be able to support them from there now, we work with schools, both public and private to either host events. We're in Massachusetts, so we have we work with Massachusetts workforce grant development programs so that we can help give teacher trainings that that are fully reimbursed for the most part, to any any teacher or organization inside Massachusetts, and we're looking to expand that out now. We do private events, we do birthday parties, we have some larger organizations where we run their entire computer science programs, and we do that all just using our our tools, as well as our instructors. So it's kind of they can focus on the on the core subjects that they are really good at, and then we make sure that our skills are constantly evolving and constantly up to date, which has worked out pretty well for them. As far as what students look like when they come in, we found that students that really have agency over what they're trying to learn and what they're trying to do, tend to have the quickest, highest, motivated and best outcomes, right? So what we do, when every student comes in here, for the for members, or for any of our classes that are longer than one session, we sit them down and we have an entire interview process. Say, All right, you see what we can do here, and you've seen some of the other projects and stuff that other kids are doing, right? One of this is really interesting to you, and what is terrifying and you don't want to touch with 10 foot pole, right? Of those, what do you kind of want to what does your future look like in your mind? Right? And we get vastly different answers from an eight year old versus 16 year old, right? But that's kind of the fun part of it. Also and then we have a bunch of questions, a bunch of like prompting that we do with the kid to be able to get an idea of who they are, right? We feed that into our system, and we start off with a project base to say, all right, there's a you can do anything here, and we're not going to stop you from doing that. If you had nothing stopping you. You had absolutely no limitations, no money, skill limitations, nothing. What would you do? Right? My favorite example when I'm when I'm giving this interview is, I want to create a satellite that is revolving in geosynchronous orbit around the skylight that is in the middle of our studio. Right over there. It'll have a laser pointer that's pointing directly down into that, and then right at about seven o'clock, it'll start blinking clean up on the big white table that's right underneath it, and they'll every now and then, I can just spam you with messages to have fun with it, right? So like, go ahead. There's nothing you can't do. We could figure all of that out, given enough time in research. We can figure all that. I got a colleague of mine that I worked with for a while that went up, took his class to do a cube, sat on the Artemis project. So already even know people that could potentially get us in with NASA, right? So if that's this, the the the place we want to go, we then look at their key project, the thing that they would really do given, you know, given any resources, we say, okay, let's break that down, right? What about this is the most interesting to you? Okay, well, I really like the idea of sending something into space. Okay, cool. Have you ever made anything go off a table, right? Let's start there, right? Yes, okay. Have you made anything go above a roof, right? All right. Let's try and build our way up to that. What kind of chemistry do you need to know? What kind of technology is out there for you to figure out? Right? Could be the same thing? Oh, I really like the idea of playing with lasers, because lasers are cool. Like, if I could have sharks with lasers everywhere, it'd be the best fishing trip ever, right? So if you've never used a laser pointer before. How do you take a laser pointer and turn it into a message, right? How do lasers work, right? How do you now start controlling that with a computer and Arduino or Raspberry Pi or whatever have you, right? So we take whatever their dream projects are, we break it down into actionable steps, and we start teaching them how to look at these as as really achievable goals. And then we put some form of project and around there to get them started. As they go on, moststudents will kind of deviate a little bit. There's three pathways that we found that most students end up in. One, they come in, they love coding, they want to be a coder forever. Game Dev is all that's on their mind, and they have never touched a computer before. So they come in, they grab their gaming laptop, we set them up with all the equipment, and we start working through that, and within, you know, a month or two, they realize, this is terrible. I never want to do this ever in my life, right? I was like, Okay, that's interesting. So that's one possible solution, right? You thought you wanted to do something, and turns out you might not want to do that after all, right, once looking at the reality of it, that is, I went to a vocational school myself. That is a common outcome for vocational schools, sure, right? A common outcome for colleges, I think, is, I heard a statistic somewhere recently that 30 something percent of people that go to university actually go end up somewhere in that field that they studied, right? So not great. It was even less. I think there's two kids in my shop that ended up going into computer technology. Wow, out of 30. So that's one interesting outlook. The next one is okay, I like doing this, and I am going to start taking on projects, and I'm going to just get fed projects and try and build it up. And then we can even add to your resume, even at eight years old, we can start giving you a portfolio of projects that are real world and useful, right? And then that will help them get a job. And then we have the other type of kid that came in with their own mission in life, and they started doing it, and they just like, oh, I can. I can make a t shirt, and then I can throw it on Etsy. And as soon as I throw it on Etsy, I can start getting money. I can get this machine and put this over here so I can start going, and I can get my friends and start throwing them cash, and then maybe they'll start doing it, so I can go focus on product development, right? We have a couple of those kids too, right? So the three end up being either tried it and you hate it, good thing to know before you spend God knows how many 100 1000s of dollars on college, right? Two, you like it, and you decide you want it to be your career. And that is a great option, and we can help you with that. Three you want to be a business person and you really want to be your own entrepreneur, your own boss.


David Martelli  

We love seeing that. My wife runs daycares, childcare centers and other schools as well. So she's been an entrepreneur since she was about 12 years old, doing film and videography. I started a manufacturing thing when I was 12, about the same time, and started building up from there. So we are extremely welcoming to those kind of people here, just because, who knows, you can start at any time. My eight year old already has a slime shop. That is my  entirety of everything. 


Lily Jones  

Oh, yeah, my 12 year old has had a slime shop for a couple years too.


David Martelli  

Yeah, i How's your kitchen looks? 


Lily Jones  

Not good.


David Martelli  

We ended up converting an entire, uh, second bedroom that we had, and we put the two kids to sleep together so there can just be a full manufacturing plant in there. It's the only way we can make dinners good. 


Lily Jones  

Well, that's awesome. I love hearing about this approach, and it seems like it really is based on, you know, all the things that I think educators know work right, like agency and choice and engagement and flexibility too, right? Like, as you said, sometimes people come in they're like, Yeah, I'm really interested in this one thing, and then after doing it, it's like, yeah, maybe I'm not interested in it anymore. Same thing with adults, right? Like, the one thing we choose we might not be interested in forever, and that's okay, but it's like, embracing the process of it too. 


David Martelli  

Yeah, I would say it'd be cool if more adults embrace the childlike process more than because you get stuck in a career and you end up being stuck in it, not because it's something that you actually like doing, or even something that's within your like your domain of genius, right? But it's just where you ended up landing right? Where we can look at a kid and them exploring and running around is kind of natural. One of the cool things we found here is because we have so many kids working on so many different things. A kid will discover something they never knew was possible before, right? We had a big craze about resin rings, where you'd use a binary of Oxy resin to to come up with either a ring or a piece of jewelry or something like that. Every now and then we get like a meme project, where one person does it and everyone else starts to Sure. But we had one kid that was just like, he they did it, and then they're like, oh, I want to polish this a little bit and make it nicer, and then, oh, I want to add some wooden inlay to it. And they just started going, like, there's a kid that was doing nothing but robotics since the time they got here. And then they really found a passion and just the small, detailed work of being able to make jewelry and make and woodworking and that like, right? And they just kept going with it, and they would have never discovered that if people around them weren't doing it right, sure, yeah, being part of a community and seeing what other people are doing and exposing the process of it can really inspire people in so many different ways. And I know too, just hearing you talk that failure must be a part of this too, because I believe failure is a part of all learning experiences. So I'd love to hear what you see as the role of failure in learning and innovation. If you want to do anything really, really well, and you've never done it before, it would be just completely irresponsible to think that you would do it correctly the first time, even if there is such a thing as correct, right, depending on what is art, it's hard to say there's a correct or an incorrect art right, but it's like if you put one of the hard times that, especially with like the standardized testing side of things, is it assumes that there's always a right answer, or there is a more right answer than something else based off of someone else's criteria. Right? And that kind of trains a fear around, oh no, if I do this the wrong way, then I will a get it wrong, right, and I'll be punished for that. I'll get a bad grade. My parents will owe me whatever have you, right? I won't get that scholarship. I won't get into the college that I want to get into, right? And it puts so much pressure a on the kids to to stop being creative and stop taking risks and chances, right? So, so on one side, you can say, at some point, if you get good enough at what you're doing, someone will ask you to do something that no one has ever done before. No one necessarily knows what right or wrong is for that potentially, as a first, right? You might have some KPIs or something that they kind of view you in a direction, right? But you know, how do you navigate that? If there is no correct answer, do you just sit there and go like, Oh no, oh no. What? What am I supposed to do, and then stop there, right?


David Martelli  

The other side of it is, let's say that there is a right answer to something that doesn't mean there isn't potentially a more right answer or better answer for a different, different place, right? So I really, really love drawing, and drawing with a pencil is the best way to do it on paper, but it's really not good to do it on water, right? There are other mediums, and there are other ways to draw and the other ways to paint, depending on where what the actual medium you're looking at is or the outcome you're looking for, right? So having the freedom to be allowed to just mess up and mess around and really, like, invent new things, right, you can only technically be right if something's been invented or thought of before, right? Doesn't allow for a lot of new creation. And while I think there is a strong thought process out there that humans in general feel like they're they're done right, like this is the technology we have. I am the person I am. I will always be that person. Right? We're constantly evolving. Our society is constantly evolving. Technology is constantly evolving. Constantly evolving, especially in the technology space, is evolving daily, right? Look at chatgpt. It's everywhere, and everyone uses it right now. It didn't exist two years ago, right? So, like even GUILD systems, there are systems that we theorized we would need when we first started six years ago, building out the software that just got invented this month, right? So, like someone had that thought with a lot more mathematicians than I have, right? If they weren't allowed to mess around and screw up a bunch, right? And they wouldn't be able to create it.


Lily Jones  

From a business perspective, it's also interesting. There's a very common phrase, especially around Silicon Valley style startups, that if you're you've released a product that you are proud of. You waited way, way, way too long to release it right? The reason for that is perfectionism is nice, but it stops you from ever actually doing anything and sharing it with anyone else, right? So let's say I want my website for camps, because I do camps, right? And I'm like, Oh, I could. I could find a better picture for this that makes people understand my camp way, way better, and others description can be tweaked just a little bit, right? And that'd be great, and they'll be all better. And then what's the perfect time to have it in the perfect day? Right? By the time I've settled on perfection, right, the summer is over and business, right?


David Martelli  

You can always just throw something out there and then mess with it and iterate it on on the way through. Right? We found the most popular program that we have is called Combat robotics, which really delves into iteration and learning. Which kids are extremely resilient to in an educational setting? Whichare they're they're very scared. I guess, to try it. So the the entire, the entire process is, you have two table, you have two robots. Robots just have motors and battery, that's it, and on a piece of cardboard, right? Very, very, very simple to build should take, takes my three year old, or, sorry, four year old now, God, takes my four year old somewhere around five minutes to build one after the second time of doing it. So they're extremely simple, right? They build their robot, they let it go, and they joust. The first one to fall off, loses, and they have to go back and change their design, right? And we've done some studies around this. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Everyone really gets into it. It's pretty competitive, but it's also as people that get into it the right way, they they end up keep running back and forth with new ideas constantly, right? But we've, we've run it a few different ways just to study this. Um, say, hey,if your robot loses, you have to change something about it, then come back and and iterate on the design, and then come back and try it again, right? You can take as long as you want to build your robot. See what happens. It's an hour long class. We let them go. The majority of those kids inside in a standard educational setting. So inside High School, something like that, will take 45 minutes to build their first robot, and then they will end up battling it twice, right? And then we have another classroom down the hall, and they always say you have three minutes to build your first robot. If you don't build your first robot by then, you do not get the second. You know, I take one of your motors away, and you don't get you have to try and figure it out with only one motor, right? They are highly incentivized to mess up and just keep going right there the understanding of the material, right, and their ability to rapidly look at a robot that doesn't work and then fix it for that, the one that has been encouraged to rapidly iterate versus the one that has not, is like unimaginable order of magnitude, better than these guys that spent all their time trying to design it right? So just the the understanding of domain of knowledge is just almost immeasurably better, right? Their willingness to start plugging things in and unplug them to figure out what the problem is, because sometimes we'll, like, we'll break one of the wires in a way that's hard for you to notice, and then they'll just, you know, the idea is, can they figure out that they need to replace it. Can they debug down to where the problem is right? They'll just rail and run through it and get to it very, very quickly. Whereas, in the the other group that didn't do that and was encouraged to take as long as they want to, they couldn't figure it out in some cases, and if they did, it just took a long time, right? But also, like the creativity, the the function of the robot, its ability to even just go straight and reach the other end of the table from the high iteration group was just way, way, way better. Um. So it's not even just like, hey, failure is a medium of allowing creativity and allow new information, new products, new technologies, to develop. Right? They understand the knowledge like an unbelievably amount better, right? Than the people that were just told, sit here and perfect it before you give it to me, right? You really don't, don't mess up, right? And that's what we're finding across multiple domains, from computer programming to music, everything, right? The ones that are told mess up and just figure it out and keep going forward. We've done it even where we did not give them any instruction and we said, Here's your pieces. Figure it out, right? They're so much faster, universally.


Lily Jones  

So fascinating, absolutely. And it's like, which one is similar to a traditional school, right? Like the one that feels like it has to be perfect and that there's a right and the wrong answer. And I think that thinking about, like, the structures of schools and how they're set up, so much of it is for traditional schools set up in a right and wrong kind of binary, and we're all going for being right and like, we, God forbid, we're wrong, right? And so taking that away and seeing the freedom and creativity that comes from it is fascinating. And I think it goes along with a lot of what I experienced as an educator in a traditional school. You know, when kids are given freedom, and when we make it less of a big deal to not, quote, unquote, meet expectations, and kind of get rid of the whole idea of expectations. So much can happen. And I think also, what stood out to me in your sharing that is just like building resilience so much kids and grown ups and people in general, you know, go around just so afraid of making a mistake that we almost don't build that muscle. And so giving kids, almost forcing them right to build that muscle. Of like, you are have these constraints. You're not going to get it right, or you're not going to get it right the first time. Like, that's okay, right? We learn to try again and again and again. Where, I think that you know, kids, and I see in grown ups of you know, working with people who want to make a change in their life or work in a different way. In education, it feels really scary because we haven't had those experiences of like trying and failing and evolving and going along through the process. 


David Martelli  

The so we do a lot of teacher training, and the biggest resistance we get when we when even stem oriented teachers right, is in our own studio, one of the immediate things that we say on our interview of new instructors, and we're extremely selective. We only bring in instructors and mentors here that have previous or current working experience in the field that they're looking to. They have to be collaborative. They have to also be good with kids, very hard to mix all of those things, right? Um, but one of the first thing we do is like, you have to be comfortable on a daily basis, right, having absolutely no idea what the kid is trying to do or how to do it, right? So you have to be comfortable working through the problem solving process with the kid, and be comfortable saying, I don't know to that kid, right, but we can figure it out, right? And in that way, you're able to model what that process looks like. If you have a teacher that has all of the right answers, the kids will never have the opportunity to see a role model, or any adults really struggling through the process of dealing with something that's not, you know, granted, not black and white, right? By having to teach or even seeing someone that says, I don't know, right, and being okay with that, and then having a process to work through that, right? And the biggest, the biggest resistance we've had when dealing with with teachers is, hey, are you okay? You know, not knowing something and having a kid approach you with that. And even if you have, like, a solid project, and everyone's building the same tin can with a with a buzzy motor in it to or whatever they're making, right? If a kid comes up to you and asks you a question to learn more about it because they're interested, right? Are you okay deviating from your plan and allowing that kid to mess around experiment? And you also say, I don't. What do you think? How would you try it? How would you go about, you know, finding out the answer to your question, right? And just letting them explore. And we get so caught up in classroom management, many of the times that we're we're like, oh, I let this one kid go off the rails on their own thing, right? Which is an amazing learning opportunity for them. Their hair might catch on fire. Little Timmy over there is going to start complaining, why don't I get to do that? Right? All of these millions of things that we think about as a teacher is like, Oh my God, that my classroom will dissolve into chaos, and then I'm going to be behind my desk just sipping on my Dunkin Donuts, just hoping and praying. Right? A teacher's job is hard. It's one of the hardest jobs it there is right? I've I've bounced around a lot. I've done everything from from startups to military style engineering. I was a stunt performer for a while, right? Getting hit by cars and jumping out at 30 miles an hour, right? I have never faced a job that has left me more tired and just staring at a blank white wall at the end of the day. And being an educator, there's nothing else like it, right? And like it's like, it's not supposed to be easy. And you should know that going into as a teacher, like, it's not going to be easy, right? But you're like, your position, your job title, quite literally, is to help shape the futures of these children, right? So, like, whatever it takes to do that really, really is whatever it takes, right? And that's the freedom and flexibility of an adult, acting a little bit more like a child and being okay with messing up a bit right, and not knowing exactly what to do, right? You don't have to, just like, throw the rules into the air and be like, Hey, everyone, do whatever you want kids that we'll figure it out as we go, no, no, but small steps right, encourage the kids as they're going, Hey, if you finish early, do something else right. Or take what you got and then build it and do it more right. Hey, you don't understand this. Okay, what do you understand? And play with it so that you can inch your way up just a little bit more, right? Or how can I help you to make another concept in this they'll make you get it right. So like, be okay to play with, not just the middle of the road kids, small backstory, if I, if I can go on a small tangent for a moment: I loved robots ever since I was six years old. I remember there is this thing called Robot Wars. The original Robot Wars with Mark Thorpe all the way in San Francisco, California, back in 92 I want to say. And he, I guess I was nine years old. But anyways, that guy built an entire competition for competing robots against each other. Turns out he didn't know how to build a robot. He only knew how to do metal sculpture, so all the robots there that he brought couldn't move right. But everyone else brought in the robots. No one else knew that until afterwards. By the way, we had a well back in the time, back in the day, so a little nine year old me was texting this guy over aim every annoying, definitely annoying the hell out of the guy, right? But, like, I was just really into it, right? So I got so into it that I was, like, went up to my metal shop teacher, right? I said, Hey, let me, let me build a robot in here. I have no idea what I'm doing. He had no idea what he was doing, right? It was like, Well, you got to do your classroom because, like, I'll do the entire year's worth of classwork in two weeks, just let me do it right? So I was like, alright, so I did, I did the entire there's three weeks, but I did the entire year's worth, of course, in three weeks, which he shouldn't have let me do, right, based off of how he was. I came in after school a little bit too, but I was just working a little faster than I probably safely should have, right? And then after I was like, All right, I got this, and I built this beautiful robot, spent the rest of the year on it, and listed a couple of my friends to come in and help me. There's a gigantic pyramid that had Bill Clinton's head on it and a little beanie that spun on a motor, right? Really cool looking, I thought, right? Had spikes coming out in every direction, right? No one really knew about it, except for me and my shop teacher, because we both thought it was really cool. And he really, really wanted to help me, because it's like, oh, this kid's got a passion for it. He was an industry guy before, because he was a shop teacher, right? So it's like, all right, you know, have a ball. I'll help you as much as I can, right? And there are some mistakes made, by the way, like we want neither of us knew how to do anything with batteries or motors at that point, so there is at least two fires set that I can remember off the top of my head. Right? We started building our safety protocol as we're doing it anyways, eventually I get my robot right, and I got it on a remote control so I can go. I took out all the electronics. Have an RC car at the time, right? And I'm like, Ah, this is so cool. I'm gonna take it for a little road test. So I started driving it through this which the principal of my school saw it, and was just like, what is that? Why are you driving a gigantic weapon through my school? Who let you do this? Right? And I immediately got suspended. Um, so it's like, oh, well, that was great, right? Um, to their credit, after a lot of volleying back and forth from me, my parents, the shop teacher and everything like that, it ended up being okay, but like, I got yelled at for doing this cool thing, which then was literally what spawned my entire career, right? The shop teacher, I have to imagine, got like, screamed at, right? But that job, like he set my entire future career path like guaranteed, right? There was two teachers I can think of that did it, and both were completely unconventional teachers that would just be people with you, rather than being teachers, right?


David Martelli  

And I talk to other kids, those are the kind of teachers are the most impactful, right? So like that for administrators to listen to this conversation, right? If something's going a little wonky inside your school, right? Obviously, make sure that everything's safe, but like, get the why, right, understand it from your teacher and support your teacher. Right? If nothing is unsafe and this kid is learning above and beyond, right, celebrate that. Right. Don't be scared completely about all the liability about the parents reactions from the other parents that have nothing to do with it, like anything like that, right? Just let it happen at least a little bit and guide it if you're really that scared, right? Giving... Empowering your students is one thing; empowering your teachers, to be allowed to empower your students like that -- it has to start from there, right? Districts arescared, right? 


Lily Jones  

Yes, absolutely. And same thing that we were saying with students learning. I mean, same thing with teachers, right? Giving agency, having teachers be involved, having them be able to have the flexibility to make choices based on the kids in front of them. You know, I think that is so key too, for everyone, teachers and students. So thank you so much, Dave, it's been such a pleasure talking with you. Can you tell folks how they can connect with you? 


David Martelli  

Yes, you can find us at Guildhall, learning.com G, U, I, L, D, H, A, L, L, learning.com you can find me on basically all the socials at the David Martelli, just as it shows on the screen there. And thank you so much for the opportunity. This was a great conversation. Had a lot of fun. 


Lily Jones  

Yes, me too. Thanks so much.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai



Lily Jones