Sketchpad | Exploratorium

Tinkering + Brazilian Creative Learning Network (BCLN)

14

Jul / 21

14 Jul / 21

Posted by Ryoko

As mentioned in the previous post, the Tinkering Studio is part of a global collaborative project focusing on the intersection of technology and play. One of our partners is the Brazilian Creative Learning Network (BCLN), which is a network of educators, artists, researchers, entrepreneurs, students and organizations dedicated to promoting more hands-on, creative, and inclusive practices in the education of children and young people in Brazil.

We are currently working together to prototype and develop tinkering activities for future professional development workshops for BCLN (on a small scale). We wanted to document our efforts and share our learnings through a series of blog posts.

A good start:

The Tinkering Studio has previously collaborated on a few projects with BCLN, and we know from those experiences that we have a shared understanding of creative learning and tinkering. That is a good start, as we feel that having a shared understanding is essential for meaningful collaboration. We are also excited to work closely with the BCLN members, who come from a variety of backgrounds, including school teachers, researchers, and coordinators with the secretary of education.

In addition, BCLN has been running a portal network for teachers for over six years, where teachers can connect, share, and reflect on various creative learning projects. It was wonderful to learn that the network had spread as a grassroots movement and that there was already a networking mechanism in place to connect those enthusiastic educators in Brazil.

RBAC is a Portuguese abbreviation for BCLN, which stands for Rede Brasileira de Aprendizagem Criativa (Brazilian Creative Learning Network).

Short-term focuses:

After a couple of initial meetings, we have decided to prioritize the following as short-term focuses to help them achieve their long-term goal of promoting hands-on and creative educational practices throughout Brazil.

1. Experience tinkering activities as learners

2. Prototype the activity design for teachers

3. Co-create a professional development workshop for teachers

→How can we use documentation to make learning and tinkering more visible?

→How can we support teachers to develop tinkering activities as co-designers rather than simply following “recipes”?

→How can we model facilitation practices to support hands-on, creative, and student-centered learning?

“To promote tinkering and exploration culture in educational activities, to make them understand through experience, more than just the ‘recipe’ of the activities —how can we spread this from teacher to teacher? “

--- Nathan Rabinovitch, BCLN

Joint R&D sessions:

We had a brainstorming session and chose these six activities as the subject of future R&D.

Cardboard exploration
LED light & shadow box
Cart of forces
Balance explorations
Scratch video sensing
Chain reaction

Our R&D efforts are aimed at identifying ways to use tinkering activities to exemplify specific tinkering values, qualities, and dispositions. For example, one of the important qualities of tinkering is an emphasis on “process over product”. What activity, then, could we use to best support “process over product"? And how could we successfully demonstrate that the activity exemplifies the tinkering values in future professional development (PD) workshops?

To answer these questions, both of our teams, BCLN and Tinkering Studio, as well as two selected Brazilian teachers, began prototyping activities for future PD workshops. The first activity we chose was balance explorations. This is a fantastic opportunity for us to connect with like-minded educators in Brazil and get to know them better through an authentic playful tinkering experience.

(To be continued)

This project was made possible through generous support from the LEGO Foundation.

Tinkering with Technology and Play

13

May / 21

13 May / 21

Posted by Deanna

Technology and Play

The Tinkering Studio is part of a collaborative project with educators from around the world focusing on the intersections of technology and play. One of our partners is Right to Play in Rwanda, an international non-profit organization that empowers children through the power of play. It's wonderful to meet new collaborators, especially ones with a robust tinkering practice themselves. Early on in the project, team members shared what tinkering looks like with kids they work with and shared the following documentation:

A child made a face mask using a basket weaving technique.

This child made an excavator after being inspired by one at a construction site.

Finding inspiration from the world around them and making objects of personal significance are key indicators of a tinkering practice. With a shared love and appreciation for tinkering, we started our collaboration by hosting a tinkering experience for the Right to Play team that we developed during the pandemic. We love to start any new relationship with a hands-on experience to embody what tinkering looks like in a shared experience that we can all reference and reflect on.

Sharing a Tinkering Experience

We sat down with the Right to Play team (virtually) to get to know one another through a tinkering experience. We spent 90 minutes together making Shadow Remix drawings and reflecting on the educational and creative possibilities of the experience.

Engage as Learners

After introducing the activity, we created shadows and shared our creations on Padlet. Our conversations flowed between sharing over video, text, and images. One wonderful moment was when Franklin shared this shadow he created (center) and how he made it (left) and made the following remark.

Franklin used a pen and a wall plug to make his shadow.

He noted that his shadow looked like a building.

A remix of Franklin's shadow into a magical castle.

"At first, I thought it was complicated. But when others presented what they had done and that it was simple, I saw I just had to grab something around me to explore." - Franklin Gakuba Murangira

Franklin noted that the activity felt simpler once he started working with the physical materials, which aligns with how we think about designing for tinkering experiences. Our work centers around this belief and we design our tinkering experiences to be evocative and invite learner's questions.

Engage as Educators

It is part of our tinkering practice to reflect together on our experience as learners, to discuss what we noticed, and how the experience connects to our education practice. During our reflection, David shared that his exploration allowed for an opportunity for his daughter to share her own interpretation of a shadow. She walked by while he was making his shadow and shared her interpretation with him.

"I think it’s a good way to start conversation about something they know. You can develop conversation that is not necessarily pre-planned but something that can help people to talk about. When they visualize something in the shadow, that means they have a prior knowledge about it. So it can start conversation about what they know, what they think, and what they’d like to share.” - David Rugaaju

One of the big ideas behind designing for "tinkerablility" is to create opportunities for storytelling and for learners to bring their own experience into the exploration. David said that when learners are inspired by materials or an activity, they tend to connect that experience to their interests and prior knowledge. Educators can then build on that prior knowledge by asking questions and letting the learner follow their interests.

Next Steps

After our initial workshop, we're left with lingering questions. How does tinkering support personally meaningful explorations and align with what individuals bring to the table? Can learners develop their own motivations by re-engaging with a theme or topic (ex: light and shadow)? We look forward to digging into this question further with the Right to Play team, both with longer interactions with kids over weeks as well as in limited or one-time experiences.

This project was made possible through generous support from the LEGO Foundation.

Tinkering with Balls, Ramps, and Bridges

05

May / 21

05 May / 21

Posted by Tinkering Community

Guest post by Ihuoma Iheukwumere, Site Director at Transbay Child Development Center. Ihuoma is passionate about providing effective and robust learning experiences for young learners while empowering the educators who work with them to do the same. She spent the first decade+ in the classroom, always looking to take the children on a journey for the next STEM project. In her leadership role, Ihuoma is focused on bringing to life the vision of a school where STEM is not just approachable but a great springboard for student achievement. She is committed to improving equitable access and delivery of educational experiences to a diverse audience of early learners.

Our preschool classroom started an exploration of balls and ramps using pegboards in late summer 2020. With the transition of new children from the toddler classroom into the preschool space in October 2020, the staff discovered that our newest preschoolers were also interested, however they had a harder time manipulating the pegboards - putting in/pulling out the pegs and balancing the tracks using the grooves.

Our friends from the Exploratorium introduced us to some new materials (Soft foam balls and the book Carrot and Pea) that have the potential to support our younger learners to be comfortable and confident exploring this subject while encouraging the older children to delve a little deeper.

We like to think that Carrot and Pea is the most non-threatening book to present the idea of working with ramps, bridges and towers to young children. The presentation of science concepts using familiar foods is brilliant. The unlikely friendship between Colin the carrot (a rectangular prism) and Lee the Pea (a sphere) created the window of opportunity for us to have conversations about the properties of each shape and what was possible.

Exploring Lee, the Pea

The staff had a planning meeting to take our unique classroom into consideration. Considering that we have a mixed age classroom (2yo 6mos to 5yo) a wide range of skill sets, and some English Language Learners, we decided to introduced one material at a time to get them fluent in it. We also used the K-W-L teaching strategy to assess what they know about balls before and after they had engaged with it.

"The pea is a sphere. It rolls and bounces" - Levon

Reading from the book, Carrot and Pea introduced the children to some new vocabulary words describing the properties of a ball. Roll and Bounce.

The staff observed that some of our children didn’t understand what bounce meant. While most of them could not verbally describe what bounce meant.

Teacher: What does bounce mean?

Jaion (5yo): She gesticulates waving her arms up and down from side to side.

Jai (5yo): “It’s when the ball goes into the hoop.” He stands using one hand in an up and down motion (like a basketball).

Kylie: “It’s like this. That’s bounce” (she makes a jumping motion with her whole body).

Teacher: “So what is happening? If I take this ball and wave my hands and jump is it bouncing?"

Students laugh and say no. They took another chance verbalizing their thinking.

Kylie: “You have to hold it up”

Jai: “You have to drop it down and it will bounce.”

This allowed us to define bounce as “what happens when you drop a ball and it hits another surface (ex. Floor or Wall) and it comes back.”

They were excited to try it out. Each child received a ping pong ball and it was an explosive burst of exploration. Children were very engaged in exploring the phenomenon of bouncing. The teachers supported them observe what happens when the ball bounces, how high it can bounce and how fast it bounced.

The hands on activity supported them make real connections to the word bounce. Also deconstructing the movements required to achieve a bounce supported them to make the connections quickly. Children organically found new ways to make the ball bounce higher. They started throwing the balls up and letting it fall, tossing over their heads, throwing it at the wall to create a series of bounces. The staff supported them answer these questions:

How high can you bounce the ball?
What did you do to make the ball bounce higher?
What else did you find out about the ball?

Roll

The staff posed another question to the children. “What other ways can you move the ball if the ball is at rest and isn’t moving?” They pondered on this question. We observed that they struggled to express themselves verbally relying on non-verbal cues to show their understanding.

Jaion: “I can move it with a stick.

Teacher: “I agree. What if you don’t have a stick?”

Jai: “The ball moves when you touch it.”

Jason: (Demonstrates rolling the ball letting it roll off his finger tips)

Jaion: “You need to push it!”

Other peers start to roll their balls using different styles. Pushing on it or rolling off their fingers.

Teacher Van: What happens when the ball rolls and hits the wall?

It took the children a minute while observing what happens when the ball hits the wall. Then they all yelled, “It BOUNCED!”

This moment was really pivotal because not only were they truly observing but they had arrived at the conclusion that it would change direction not only vertically but horizontally. This knowledge they would need further down the road in their exploration.

After several days of exploration a child excitedly tells the teacher, “I have two more new ways of moving the ball. You can let the air blow on it by itself or you can blow air with your mouth. Do you see?” - James

Staff Reflection

The uncertainty the children faced seemed to recede as the staff provided ample time to explore the phenomenon of bouncing. Providing vocabulary and thinking prompts supported them to express themselves. The initial use of ping pong balls was successful for children to understand the word bounce because ping pong balls have an exaggerated bounce compared to the soft foam balls. They became confident and started tinkering on their own as they played, figuring out other ways to manipulate the balls to bounce and roll. Having the book available to revisit the pictures was also helpful. We are off to a great start.