AnnMarie P. Thomas Paths to Here Interview
Educator, designer, engineer, and human
AnnMarie P. Thomas, Paths to Here Interview
Educator, designer, engineer, and human.
Paths to Here Introduction
I first met AnnMarie when I was working to start World Maker Faire at the NY Hall of Science in Queens. I had been going to Maker Faires for a few years and was taken with the makers, thinkers, and above all the do-ers behind the Faires. Among the whole constellation of energetic, brilliant, hard-to-define people I met in the Maker Faire orbit, AnnMarie stood out for all those qualities and more. Like so many Makers, she had a bottomless enthusiasm for generating new ideas and energy and focus for actually getting them done. The more I learned about her through many conversations, the more I marveled at the unexpectedness of her interests and commitment to sharing her enthusiasm with students as a professor and with the rest of the public as an author, advisor, and articulate leader of the Maker movement. Her Path to Here was among the hardest to describe, defined as it is from opportunity, talent, circumstance, and constraint. While it is not a linear path, she has shaped its twists and turns to good account in the service of her commitment to joyful teaching and learning.
AnnMarie P. Thomas Bio
AnnMarie Thomas is an educator, designer, engineer, and human. She is passionate about creating playful learning experiences.
Dr. Thomas spent 19 years as a college faculty member. Her first two years as an educator were at Art Center College of Design. From 2006-2024 she taught at the University of St. Thomas, where she was a tenured full professor of both Mechanical Engineering (in the School of Engineering) and Entrepreneurship (in the Opus College of Business.) She is the co-founder of the University of St. Thomas' Center for Engineering Education, and the graduate certificate in Engineering Education. AnnMarie founded and led the Playful Learning Lab (at UST), which explored ways to encourage children of all ages to embrace playful learning. She and her students created Squishy Circuits.
She is the executive director of OK Go Sandbox, which she co-founded with the band OK Go. As an author, AnnMarie has written dozens of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. She is the author of the book "Making Makers: Kids, Tools, and the Future of Education."
As a consultant and collaborator, AnnMarie has worked with varied organizations, including Disney Imagineering, LEGO Education, LEGO Foundation, Google, Disney Imagineering, Alinea, MN Children's Museum, OceanX, Twin Cities Trapeze Center, Diavolo, and numerous K-12 schools. She is a frequent keynote speaker at events and conferences around the world.
In 2020, AnnMarie was awarded the LEGO Prize.
AnnMarie earned Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Caltech and an S.B. in Ocean Engineering (with a minor in Music) from MIT. She completed a professional certificate in Sustainable Design from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. AnnMarie has a post-doctoral certificate in Marketing and Management from the University of Florida's Warrington School of Business (which led to AACSB Scholarly Academic status.) To aid her work with Metro Deaf School, AnnMarie took multiple classes through Gallaudet University in Deaf Studies and American Sign Language.
AnnMarie is an amateur aerialist (specializing in static and flying trapeze), and a beginner magician.
What is the first thing you remember, your earliest memory?
Oh, man. What is the earliest thing I remember? It's probably summer. I'm in a backyard in a bathing suit. My family had a house on a barrier island off the coast of New Jersey, Seven Mile Island, but we shared the house with eight other adults. So, in my earliest memory, I would be the only kid, sharing this house on a little island with a bunch of elementary school teachers, many of whom spent the summer working as bartenders, and my parents. I'd be running around in a bathing suit. The house was on a dead-end street and everyone on the island, which is three blocks wide, could walk to the beach. But we were right at the end, next to the garbage dump and fire siren that went off every day, which is probably why we could afford this beach house. The backyard, where everyone would hang out for parties, had grass and a little shed full of crickets.
Are you the only kid in this scenario?
There were lots of kids on our block. My birthday parties were epic. There was music, food, and drink from nearby Philly. I think the parties for my early birthdays were an excuse for the adults to throw a party, so they were over the top and I felt exceptional. My house would have had my two parents, me, and eventually my little sister, but then my aunt, my uncle, and maybe four other adults who lived upstairs, teachers during the school year, and bartenders in the summer. It was like I had lots of parents to test out things with me. I was a smart kid, and it was a great place to spend summers. >>
Does it feel threatened because of climate change?
Oh, yeah, it'll be gone. I'm heading out there next week with my daughters to take advantage of it while it lasts. I mean, the town starts on 6th Street and it's not because no one liked one through five. There is a history of storms eroding the island and I anticipate it will speed up over the coming years.
Tell me about your parents and your immediate family?
I grew up in a nuclear family of my mother, father, and my younger sister. I have two half-siblings. Our family is a mix of Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, and a little German thrown in. My dad was an accountant and part of a trio of entrepreneurs. They were quite successful with restaurants, but they did other things like a doll factory when I was little. My mother had been a psychiatric nurse and stopped working when I was born. My dad had gone to college, as did my older brother and sister, but neither my mother nor grandparents had. So doing a PhD was a little out of the norm for my immediate family.
I started in Pennsylvania; we moved towns when I was about six. I remember we had a baby grand piano. I had been taking piano lessons up until then, but I practiced on a paper piano that we'd roll out and I would just play on the paper. We still have that baby grand in my house in Minnesota that my kids learned on it, and my husband and I play. But the piano was a big deal.
We started in Catholic schools, then my sister and I went to public schools. When it was about time for me to go to high school, I was the weird kid in the public school so my parents were advised that they should look for a private school for me because the public high school wasn't sure what to do with me. I ended up at a fabulous Quaker Friend's school that handles quirkiness well. We would live in Pennsylvania during the year for school; on the last day of school, my mother would pick us up and drive us to New Jersey to Seven Mile Island, and we'd stay there until 5 a.m. the first day of school.
So it sounds like you had wonderful, close childhood. I'm very curious how you became so voracious for learning and diverse experiences filled with intense self-cultivation. When did that pattern and habit of mind come up and how did it affect you?
The high school was really quirky. I was there mainly because I'd been a gifted and talented student in public school, but they thought I wasn't very good at math and science. They weren't quite sure: I could outscore anyone on standardized tests, but I didn't do well on classroom things.
But in the summer, I was hardcore theater. In this little town in New Jersey, there was a community theater called the Avalon Players. I started when I was four. These weren't Broadway productions. They were your parents sewing costumes and maybe performing. But I did that every summer; it was my identity, I was the theater kid. They needed a church cantor at my Roman Catholic church. I was around 12 and there was a young boy who was the organist for the church. I got to spend multiple hours working on music with him. It was our own little theater, I sang masses a couple of times a week as a teenager. I also helped coordinate a weekly outreach program that the Avalon players did at the vacation home for blind children. So I was juggling a lot of different things.
Given my academic and professional credentials, people assume that I had great grades, but I struggled through middle and high school. There were C's involved. My parents didn't put much pressure on me, we were not a hardcore academic house, but they always read books. Many evenings, they would have tea, they'd each have a novel, and everyone's reading and eating these ginger snap cookies. We were not helicopter-parented at all, not just doing our own thing, but doing lots of our own things, multiple things.
I got into a bunch of colleges and then had to figure out how to visit them all. My parents dropped me off at the train station. I'd never taken a train and I had, literally, a sack of peanut butter sandwiches. I took trains, buses, and taxis around the Northeast. Places I'd never been, and I had never been on a bus or a train.
Through this independence, it sounds like you developed a strong sense of self-direction and competence.
Sort of, but I should be careful. I was always worried I was going to fail out of school. I was not confident that I would be the best at things. I was confident that I would figure out how to get things done.
I took every math and science class offered in high school, but I really went there because of their fine arts program. I was a drama major and I was a painting major. I did two years of daily oil painting class. I did music composition, I did theater classes, and I really focused on the fine arts. My parents weren't supportive of my majoring in fine art, but instead encouraged me to major in something else and minor in the arts.
I ended up going to MIT because to me, engineering really is like a fine art. It's creativity. Maybe you're not using paints, but you're coming up with ideas and you're creating things people haven't seen before. So I loved, loved the idea of engineering, but was terrified of going to MIT where everyone else had been a valedictorian. My school didn't have valedictorians. I had C's in high school. It's a little bit of a miracle that I got in. So what do I want to major in? Well, I'm going to fail out the first semester anyway, I was pretty sure. So what's the smallest major? I was coming from this tiny school where I was used to 10 person classes. Some of MIT's classes are hundreds. The smallest major was nuclear engineering, but it seemed like there was too large a chance of me killing someone if I was a nuclear engineering major. The second smallest was ocean engineering, which sounded fantastic. You know, underwater robots and boats and I had been a kid who grew up on an island sailing and swimming, so that was phenomenal.
I majored in ocean engineering with only 3 or 4 other students in the major my year; I was the only girl, and the faculty was all male. I minored in music as I had agreed with my parents. I always say that being the only woman at something is better than being one of two women. Everyone looks the same unless there are two like you see the other person who doesn't quite look the same, so I don't think I was usually even aware that I stood out. In my whole academic career, if the class was project-based, I had an A. If the class was not project-based, I probably didn't even get a B. So I was always working.
Within weeks of getting to MIT, I got my first research job in a lab building robotic fish. My research, lab work, studies, and music from my composition classes were my life at MIT. At MIT, you pick a dorm that you live in for all four years so you have a home base. There was a lovely boy who was older than me that I had a massive crush on; our 20th wedding anniversary is this summer. We didn't really date in college, but we met again afterwards. Going to college was the first time I'd ever been away for a sizable chunk of time, except for two weeks as an exchange student in high school.
I minored in music theory, learning chord progressions, ear training, functional harmony, and counterpoint. I also had the opportunity to study composition with some great teachers, like John Harbison. I wasn't great. I mean, I did it and enjoyed it, but I wasn't going to be the best. There's nothing I'm great at. I am decent. I am like a B minus at an almost ridiculous number of things.
It's funny. I don't always talk about the music parts of my study. But it is clearly always there. I took an African music class as one of my history classes. And I cannot do tests to save my life. So I think I failed the test. But they realized that I could sing. The African Music Ensemble didn't have any singers that year. The professor asked me, instead of a retest, you want to learn to sing this song (in a language that I'd never heard before.) So one on one with the professor, I learned how to sing this song, syllable by syllable. I performed it, and got an A in the class despite the poor marks on my exam.
By the end of my years at MIT, I realized that I really wanted to teach. And there wasn't high school engineering back in the nineties, so I needed a PhD. I got accepted at Caltech though I'd never been there or even to LA. Caltech paid for me to visit, and I made time to see that charming boy from college who used to live in my dorm and is now my husband. It was lovely and I ended up there for grad school. My future husband was finishing his PhD there and seemed quite happy.
Did you go there to study aquatic engineering?
They don't have that there, so I studied mechanical engineering, focusing on pulsatile jet propulsion, which is how jellyfish swim. It quickly became obvious that Caltech is a very theoretical school and I am not a very theoretical person. So it was super, super painful, it was not generally a happy place for me.
But somewhere in my first year, I found out that you could take art classes at Art Center College of Design. I took a product design class here and there, and they started to know about me. They invited me to work with a sound artist, Steve Roden who wanted to take earthquake data from a Caltech professor and turn it into sound and a sculpture. I worked with him on the software, technology, robotics to translate the data into sound and motion. I did this in the evenings and didn't really connect it with my work at Caltech. The piece was well received and was up for three months. I recently heard from a curator who had a grant to recreate the piece after 20 years, and he asked me if I could help. I immediately reached out to Steve Roden and learned that he sadly had very early onset Alzheimers. So, for this project, I am reliving my 20s. The piece was called Ear(th).
Again, if the class has a project, I got an A. If the class was just test based, I did not. Sometimes professors would catch on and let me just do the projects.
Do you see that chasm between doing things and conceptualizing them or memorizing them or learning their underpinnings as a deficit? Or do you see it more as this is how you function, and this is how you want to function?
I don't know, I don't spend a lot of time reflecting on it. I would love to know what it would be like to be a good student. But that ship has clearly sailed. My grad school GPA was a 2.8, not for lack of effort. I actually just dropped out of the Gallaudet certificate program in ASL, which I took because my lab was working with the deaf community. I ended up dropping out just short of the certificate. The highest level class in the program is just beyond me at the speed it is taught. So I'm finding other ways to learn the material, at my own pace. But I didn't need the credential. I needed the cultural knowledge and as much of the language as I could get so I could work more authentically with my partners.
After MIT and Caltech, how did you pick up all those different threads? Which ones did you end up following?
After doing the Steve Roden project at Art Center College of Design, I was completing my research at Caltech and continued to take classes in design at the Art Center College of Design. I got asked to join their faculty as an adjunct so I taught a class on bio-inspired design. Also, I got married around the same time at the age of 25. That one class grew because it was popular, so the Art Center College of Design asked if I would also be interested in teaching robotics. I had a community of artists to work with and I'd go and do my math homework there, because I liked being there better than Caltech.
I think physically spending time at the Art Center College of Design was probably very key. Artists like Steve Roden treated me as an equal while I was trying to figure out how to use robotics for artistic purposes. I also decided that I wanted to create more programs for kids. So we started running robotics conferences at Caltech for middle school students. Lots of little things that weren't really necessarily the best path to a traditional engineering or academic career. I wanted to teach, but I didn't want to teach at a huge research university with lots of graduate students. The best man at our wedding was working at a Catholic university in Minnesota, near where my husband grew up and his parents live. I applied to the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and became a faculty member. I had to really reinvent what I was going to teach, because I wasn't going to do the fluid dynamics work I had done at Caltech, in part because I never really loved it.
I explored a few different directions, finally I realized I principally wanted to work with kids, hands down. I had avoided this, because I thought everybody wants to work with kids. Turns out, not a lot of professors do, but I am always drawn to the less obvious path. Part of how my husband had convinced me to move to Minnesota was that there were three circus schools within an hour of the university. As a kid I'd dabbled in flying trapeze, and my dad knew how to juggle. So pre-kids, during my first two years as a faculty member, I was doing circus training three nights a week. And it struck me that the flying trapeze is really a giant pendulum, and a circus is like a giant physics lab. Instead of spring, like pulling a little spring and doing harmonic oscillation, you go on the trampoline. You put the students up on a bungee trapeze and have them jump. I thought I bet I could do a class on this, so I got a small grant to teach a "dynamics of circus" class.
It was also around this time I subscribed to Make Magazine. I'd used it when I was an art teacher and the maker movement was taking off. I was wishing that I could teach my toddler to do circuitry, but of course she can't use a soldering iron. Paintable circuits were kind of cool, but unreliable and hard to use. Sewing circuits with conductive thread isn't really meant for two-year old's. I thought that there has to be a way to sculpt this which is how we ended up inventing Squishy Circuis using play dough. Now if you are the flying trapeze flying professor who also does play dough circuitry, lots of things start to kind of bubble up in your aether.
Things just continued to spiral. I was invited to scientific and learning conferences, including the TED conference. It became obvious that my strength was not going to be hardcore traditional research, but there was a lot of discovery to be done in play and learning. At the time there weren't many major labs in my university, and most students would say "I work in the Thomas lab" or something, but I never wanted the students to define themselves by me. That's how we became the Playful Learning Lab so students would define themselves by a shared focus as opposed by defining themselves by me.
The whole idea of playful learning started snowballing. I was writing for Make Magazine, we're doing music projects and music visualization. This is when I got tenured as a professor, but I actually left for a year to lead the Maker Education Initiative. I missed teaching, so went back to the University and became a business professor and all of these things sort of tie together. The business faculty was thinking about entrepreneurship, creativity, and design thinking and they really didn't have people to teach those things. So I became I was a professor in business and in engineering. I was already actually teaching education at the time, too, because I had co-founded a center for engineering education. Engineering is in the school standards, but it's not in teacher training.
Every fall from around 2010-2015 I taught a class on technology prototyping for business students. Students wanted to do apps and they want to do robots, but most business schools aren't teaching them how to build it. So I would teach the class where we do Arduino and we'd do some scratch programming, and some 3D printing, some sketching, kind of an intro to engineering, but specifically geared for business students. They were also looking at tech entrepreneurship.
I got a certificate in environmental sustainability and taught a class in the business school on life cycle assessment and systems thinking, getting business students to look at the environmental side of business. The class was pretty popular.
Around the same time in 2017, I met the lead singer of OK Go, a band whose videos I loved using in my engineering and education classes. Within 5 weeks, we had come up with the idea and funding for OK Go Sandbox, our big educational effort. I was running one of the largest labs at the university which would typically have 20 to 30 students on payroll that included 12 different majors. We were bringing in grants and donations, but I'm also teaching six to nine courses a year. Mine was the door that was always open. I loved it but I was afraid of getting burnt out.
We touched the question of exhaustion. It sounds to me like you've pushed yourself to your limits in your work life. Is there any part of you that says I need to not be so extended?
No, part of it is the way I teach. I'm a teacher who gets the calls after my students graduate about life decisions, or their wedding, all this great stuff. I realized that that doesn't scale. If I add 15 students a year, I can't be the kind of mentor that I had been. So I'd have to reinvent regardless; I don't know that it was exhaustion. It's more recognizing my own scaling issues and being too stubborn to reinvent a different way to do it when I liked the way that it worked.
All that said, after last year I knew I had to go on sabbatical because I was exhausted just from the pandemic. And we did a lot during the pandemic. I mean, our lab went in a hyper drive. We had just won the LEGO prize. We were running a summer institute in the summer of 2020. The gas station on my corner was burned during the riots after George Floyd was killed. That's our community. We also worked in the deaf community with the deaf and the deaf blind. Those kids had a tough ride when school shut down. So that summer we immediately went into production mode to start a summer camp for deaf and deaf blind students, through Zoom and with videos. That immediately jumped into: "wait, how do I teach my hands-on freshmen classes fall of 2020 if I can't have them in the room?" We packed packages with snacks and other things and send them all the freshmen. This all worked, but there was never any downtime and by the Fall of 2023, I was definitely exhausted. I don't think I could have recouped my energy. I couldn't become the old me and I didn't want to reinvent a new me in an academic setting. It's less exhaustion at that point and more like forward-looking exhaustion.
So I hope that if I step aside as a senior professor, it opens up some lines for some amazing young folks who are trying to start their academic career. As a tenured academic, like I'm holding a space; there is a limited number of those jobs. I truly felt that I am not doing this job the way I want to do it. I don't have the energy or desire to find the energy to do it the way I believe it should be done. Let's step aside and let someone else do it.
That brings us to where you are right now. It seems like an interesting time to talk because you're in the process of trying to reinvent with some parameters that are unclear to me. It seems like you have an intuitive sense of what it is that you want to do now. Is that a fair way of putting it?
Yeah, that's a good way, a lot of serendipity. When I was 21, I would keep a note, I would keep an index card in pencil (so I could change it) listing the five companies I want to work for. One of these was LEGO. During my years at the university, I ended up working with LEGO and I am now a consultant to LEGO and have spent a couple of months working with them in Denmark. So I hit that one. Another was Disney and I got to work with them during the Playful Learning Labs. I wrote a book for them on robots and droids. I worked with Disney Imagineering on some of their science content for other products. So I crossed that one off. DEKA is Dean Kamen's robotics company. When I was 21, I was utterly enamored of DEKA. I've worked with the robotics competition called FIRST, but also when I was at Caltech, I ran a kids robotics conference and we had an engineer from DEKA come and guest lecture. So I ticked that one off. Bluefin Robotics was on my list, and I got to go to sea with some of their team after I graduated college (on an MIT deep sea archaeology project.) I think the note card got me into the habit of always thinking about what my aspirations were in terms of places to work. I always wrote it in pencil so I could change them as my interests changed.
Now, I am being open to serendipity a little bit. OceanX, a nonprofit doing incredible ocean exploration work invited me to help with their education programs. This has led to opportunities I never dreamt I would have. I went to Singapore to work with teachers and students there, and I am heading off to Indonesia next month to work with students there.
I'm doing smaller consulting projects with individual school districts or organizations, but I'm not looking per se for the next permanent thing. I'm very privileged to be in a point in my career where it would be okay if I didn't have a client for a little while so I can wait to see if the things look right.
If you win academia, you never step foot outside of academia. You start as an undergraduate and you die as a tenured professor, a straight shot. I'm trying very hard to break that. One of my dearest mentors and friends told me to "Give yourself a year at least, where you just aren't allowed to take a full-time, you're an employee full-time of a place, because you have to kind of break that mindset of having to have the thing right away."
So right now, given everything, the things that are both in process and are up in the air what is it that gets you going in the morning, what are you excited about?
All of my current projects are ones in which I will probably only be brought in when there are major things that have to happen right away. My evenings are mine. Music is part of my life, but not a huge part, I play piano a couple of times a week, and I love to read. I'm sort of obsessed with magic and sleight of hand, which happened through a chance encounter with a new undergraduate who was coming in as a freshman and was a professional magician.I usually didn't hire freshmen for my lab, but having known magicians in the past, I knew he'd likely be a perfect research student since he clearly had a strong work ethic and could be trusted with confidential information.
My family and I were very into flying trapeze before COVID, so we had to abandon that and find a new hobby. I thought of this magician student in my lab, and how fascinating the magic work he did seemed. So, I started taking some magic lessons and for some reason it got really sticky to me because of psychology. I think it's a lot about learning. If you look at why a trick is surprising, you encounter the assumptions you make, like object permanence. It is even interesting to watch how you take in information differently when you're surprised. If we can throw our students like slightly off when we're doing something, like they're going to remember that more. Then my youngest daughter took it up very heavily and she's booking her own gigs now, she's serious. But I just, I love it. So that was one of my gifts to myself: I signed up for a year of lessons with a local magician three to four times a week. Even when I'm traveling, I've done magic lessons from LEGO headquarters. I've done magic lessons from a ship.