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Super Secret Agent Phone

  • Posted On 03rd March
  • Volume: A Life Astounded
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I volunteer as a tutor at 826 Chicago. It is a pretty wild gig with kids running all over the place all ready to learn whatever I can teach them. The gig is ostensibly a creative writing program, but we work on homework and art and all manner of cool stuff.

Lex goes (more than I do, in fact) and makes brains smart as well.

The Boring Store, 826 Chi’s hard-copy meat-space front-for-sure is a super secret spy supply as much as it is a great place for kids to go to get their minds blown.

There is always a fun project to be done to make The Boring Store more interesting for teh kiddehs.

I took on a little electronics project recently to create a Super Secret Agent Phone with all manner of interesting bells and whistles. It’s like the Bat-Phone, only way cooler.

So far I’ve got a working prototype of all of the hardware connectivity rolling like an Autobot.

What do you think?

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  • Hmmmmmm … makes me wonder if you’re there for the kids or there for how some kid might think you’re wonderful …. I mean, you ARE wonderful after all … just … wondering ….

    The above was posted by Paula on the March 13, 2009.
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    • I’m there for the kids. Some kids think I’m wonderful, some think I’m overbearing and others are totally ambivalent toward me. It is a lot of hard work and I don’t think I’d be able to do it for purely selfish reasons. Honestly, the rate of return is so low that I seriously doubt it’d be a good ego-well anyway. I’m competing with cookies and cartoons and other kids and any number of urban distractions. A lot of them don’t think it’s “cool” to learn. Hopefully this phone project will help with that. If it is interesting to a handful of kids then my job is done.

      I’m done with 826 at the end of this semester; Lex and I are running Bots4Tots this year with a local robot workshop, so it is likely that I’ll never see the phone actually in action. I wonder if that speaks to ego at all.

      The above was posted by skinnytie on the March 16, 2009.

  • I think you did a really spectacular job! The kids are going to love it! It was awesome to watch. Yep, that’s right, I saw it all, folks, from beginning to end. It’s an amazing feat indeed to re-engineer a fifty year old device like this- AND keep the authentic ringer and hang-up-nobbies. The best part was watching you unravel the mystery of the rotary dialing. You thought it was so much more complex than it was, and when you disassembled and inspected it, you almost fell over at the actual simplicity it represented. I think we both have a newfound respect for the rotary phone and its engineers. These old phones are like cockroaches- they may not look pretty, but they are about as durable and functional as can be.

    The above was posted by Alexis Nordling on the March 16, 2009.
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