KBLOG 14: My First Encounter with Velcro and How it Helps Me Teach
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The Challenge:
The skills that inventors have are skills I want my students to develop. In my mind. as I teach, I try to emphasize inventor skills related to curiosity, creativity and perseverance. Most of my students will not become inventors, but they can definitely use those skills in their lives.
A Solution:
I had my initial encounter with Velcro on my first plane trip that I took with my dad in 1966 (yes, I am oldish). Little did I realize that my Velcro encounter would shape my teaching career. In fact I remember little else about the trip except that Velcro and of course my first flight. On the back of the seat in front of me there was a cloth that went over the top of the seat that rested under the head of the person sitting in the forward seat. The cloth was attached to the back of the seat by a strip of material that I later found out was an invention called Velcro. I spent the rest of the flight, much to the annoyance of my dad and surrounding passengers, uncontrollably attaching and reattaching the Velcro, making that Velcro zip sound repeatedly. I was smitten by the stuff. Many years later I found out that Frenchman George de Mestral, at the age of 33, while on a hunting trip found burdock burs on his pants and dog’s fur. When this happens to most of us, we brush them off without thinking. Out of pure curiosity, Mestral looked at the burs under the microscope and observed the thousands of tiny hooks on the burdock bur. He made the intellectual-entrepreneurial leap that he may be able to create a synthetic form of burr-like hooks catching loops in a fabric. It took many years before he received a patent for his idea (1955) and to come up with a way to mass-manufacture the hooks. Mestral named his product Velcro by combining the two French words “velvet” and “crochet” (meaning hook in French). It took twenty years of personally investing a large sum of money and brain power into his idea of Velcro to get to production. Velcro literally “took off” in the mid-60’s once NASA discovered that it was a great solution to keep objects attached to surfaces during man-space flights. This story, which I ask my students to research, is a one I want students to know about. It combines all the inventor characteristics I want my students to have: curiosity, observing the world around them and taking action based on those observations, scientific insight, determination and an appreciation of the entrepreneurial spirit. I have my students research the invention story behind their favorite products, then the class uses those stories to see the pattern that emerges related to the journey of an inventor. This is how I motivated my students to start to make their own inventions in an invention class that I taught. I will elaborate on that course in future KBLOGS.
Resources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eToAEyTdmrE – Use this video to introduce the topic of Velcro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3mdOhqAKw0 – The story the Velcro
https://www.velcro.com/news-and-blog/2016/11/an-idea-that-stuck-how-george-de-mestral-invented-the-velcro-fastener/ - Velcro Brand Story
