Meeting Kids Where They Are: Welcoming Neurodiversity at the Montana Science Center

WRITTEN BY STEVE ALLISON-BUNNELL

A young visitor sat frozen in front of the empty 3D workspace on the computer screen, his simmering frustration about to blow. He had arrived in our makerspace at the Montana Science Center excited to try 3D printing. Now my deliberately open-ended prompt, “What would you like to make?” stopped him in his tracks. His grandmother could see trouble brewing and tried to offer him an escape: “It’s OK if it’s too hard. You can do something else.” To me, she whispered, “He’s autistic, you know.”

Tenacity is one of the superpowers of the autistic brain, and he was not going to let go in spite of the overwhelm. “No!” he insisted, panicstricken that this opportunity would be withdrawn.

I didn’t want to see him quit any more than I wanted him to have a tantrum. “What’s your favorite animal?” I asked, aiming to be more concrete. “I don’t know,” said the boy, his mind short-circuiting. I took a breath to pause and question my assumptions.

“Which of these do you like?” I asked, pointing to the palette of geometric shapes on the screen. Again, “I don’t know.”

“How about this one?” I pulled a diamond shape onto the workspace.

“Oh, yes, I like that.” He relaxed, and began to stretch and move the diamond. Fifteen minutes later he had added other shapes to an abstract composition – very much all his own – that I could help him print. It was hard for him to wait until it came off the machine, but when it did, his satisfaction and sense of accomplishment was as palpable as his grandmother’s relief.

I was happy for his victory; well-aware it was not guaranteed. But it was also all in a day’s work in the STEAMlab, where every child who comes up the stairs brings their own constellation of interests, abilities and needs. Our task is to see each visitor as they are, rather than what we judge they should be able to do. In this, I have been very inspired by autism advocates such as Barry Prizant, author of Uniquely Human. While this paradigm is essential for working with neurodiverse individuals, it benefits everyone. The true measure of success is how far they go beyond their personal starting point rather than some absolute scale of quality of product.

In spite of a long history of social and clinical stigma, neurodiverse people are seldom less than, and more often more — more intensely focused, more emotionally sensitive, more able to perceive subtle patterns and connections. And if there’s truth to the idea that “weaknesses are strengths overdone,” I’ve been repeatedly reminded that the challenges neurodiverse kids face in the STEAMlab frequently result from these amplified abilities. This boy didn’t suffer from a lack of imagination so much as a surplus of strong feelings. So, as a teacher, giving him the experience of feeling seen and finding a path through the overwhelm was just about as important to me as helping him learn to 3D print.

Steve Allison-Bunnell is the STEAMlab and Exhibits Coordinator at the Montana Science Center, where he loves to teach and make high-tech art. He has been a contributor to local art installations including Cabinets of Curiosity and Bumblewood Thicket.