Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don't quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity.

When you tinker, there are no instructions — but there are also no failures, no right or wrong ways of doing things. It's about figuring out how things work and reworking them.

Contraptions, machines, wildly mismatched objects working in harmony—this is the stuff of tinkering.

Tinkering is, at its most basic, a process that marries play and inquiry.

This summer at the Exploratorium, animate your tinkering gears with an imaginative series of exhibitions, films, and public programs:

*Try your hand at taking things apart, creating chain reactions, or building whirligigs, windmills, and other playful machines.

*View the world from high up in the sky through our kite cams, or refashion a completely new world through scratch animation.

*Check out the Tinkering! Film Series, chock full of whimsical, kid-friendly films from all over the world.

And we're proud to present two major temporary exhibitions that embody the idea of tinkering and will inspire all ages: the humorous automata of London's Cabaret Mechanical Theatre and the innovative glasswork of Cutting Edge: Artists Experiment with Glass.