THE ELI WHITNEY MUSEUM

The Eli Whitney Museum was established in 1979 on the site of
Whitney's 1798 armory - the first modern American Factory.
The Museum preserves the site and its legacy...
the learning through experience and experiment, the self guided
discovery that is called Yankee ingenuity.

In 1990, the Museum established the Whitney Workshop, a learning
laboratory that studies and supports gifted and inventive students
who are impatient with the reading and writing tasks of conventional
classrooms. Though often frustrated in school, Workshop students
have taken World Medals in the Odyssey of the Mind design competition.
These students help construct the Museum's exhibitions,
and teach its classes.
 

THE PROPOSAL

The Leonardo Projects will design and test 15 Design Problem
statements for students in 4th, 5th, and 6th grades. Each of these
will formulate a Design Problem that appears in Leonardo's notebooks
to challenge contemporary children. The topics will introduce the divisions
of design: architecture, stage design, graphic design, engineering of
structures and machines. Each problem will guide teacher presentation
and prepare students to create solutions in school or at home.

The Leonardo Project will test the computer's ability to inform design
with feedback. Children in 20 classrooms will test the problem statements.
Photographs of their work will be digitized to allow teachers and students
to sort images by theme: gender, age, dimensions of creativity, etc.
The digital index will both teach and evaluate
the project.
 

WHY LEONARDO?

Leonardo's vision conveys a way of thinking. Trust experience...
not the promises of words, he cautions his detractors. Modelo! Test this
with a model, he reminds himself. His vision is practical and passionate.
His notebooks capture all that captures the imagination of a child:
costumes, catapults, cars. His name embraces learning without boundaries.
His name embraces the very origins of modern thinking.

Too often elementary classrooms isolate art as a diversion independent of
the real thinking of school. In Leonardo, there is no such distinction: art is
the essence of thinking. His name elevates the tinkering of experimental
building to a high cultural activity.
 

THE TARGET POPULATION: YOUNG LEONARDOS

Wm Brown taught his first Leonardo class at the Creative Arts Workshop in
New Haven in 1982. The class set out to link the passion for making things
in 10 to 12 year - olds to a distinct cultural legacy. The class drew
enormously talented students and an unanticipated discovery. The students
showed a remarkable gift for decoding Leonardo's drawings.
Their creations impressed even themselves. One student puzzled: This is
confusing. You know, in my school, I'm one of the dumb kids. Others
acknowledged that they too were receiving special help with spelling or
writing or reading. Something in Leonardo had drawn to a class of fourteen,
eight students who were dyslexic: very bright, frustrated in school.

A close look at Leonardo's life revealed a kindred spirit. He apologized that
his writing lacked the eloquence of a scholar, he struggled to learn Latin,
his elegant mathematics was riddled with elementary arithmetic errors.
Yet do we begin to describe Leonardo as disabled?