The promise and the promises of Making in science education

23

Feb / 17

23 Feb / 17

Posted by Luigi

Bronwyn Bevan (former Director of Research and Learning at the Exploratorium) just published an expanded literature review of the research on Making for the National Academies of Science committee on Out-of-School Time STEM.

Though practice is still way ahead of research in Making and Tinkering, this new paper references 66 different studies, many of them are new ones published in the last 18 months. Recent publications document how STEM-Rich Making supports the development of STEM learning identities, deepens engagement with STEM concepts and practices, and leverages learners’ cultural resources.

The paper was published in the journal Studies in Science Education, and it might be of interest to anyone interested in the connections between research and practice in our making and tinkering programs. You can download it by clicking here.

Takin’ It To The Streets! (or rather, to the Libraries!)

05

Jan / 17

05 Jan / 17

Posted by Luigi

This is a guest post by Vivian Altmann

My Exploratorium program, Community Educational Engagement, facilitated drop-in workshops on “Tinkering with Tops” at SFPL branches throughout the city this December. We’ve done a bunch of different hands-on, making and tinkering workshops at branch libraries since about 2011.

In recent years, our main and branch libraries throughout San Francisco have really flourished as more than spaces to read, study, and explore books. They’ve developed into welcoming, active community centers with all sorts of programming for folks of all ages.

My on-call staff—facilitators from the XTech program—and I visited the Oceanview, Chinatown, Bayview, and Excelsior branch libraries laden with cardboard, golf pencils, scissors, hot glue, markers, mini-binder clips, washers (for weights) and LOTS of decorative washi tape. We tinkered with tops at each venue for about two and a half hours.

Several Exploratorium programs develop activities and methods of facilitation—the Tinkering Studio, the Teacher Institute, and the Institute for Inquiry, to name a few—but tend to implement those activities in somewhat controlled settings—I mean, if one can ever really call a classroom “controlled.” But you know what I mean: settings that are familiar, with participants of a specific age range, and in known numbers.

The challenge for me and for my staff is to roll with whatever the situation presents to us. What will the space look like? How big will it be? Will there be natural light? Will we have a separate room or be in a corner of the library trying to facilitate an engaging activity while staying quiet enough not to disturb the other library patrons? How many folks will show up? Will the ages range from preschoolers to teens?

One element that we can control is making sure to have enough facilitators working that we can cover almost all eventualities.

Several things surprised me. First of all, I didn’t think that making and playing with tops would keep kids interested for over two hours. But virtually all the participants stayed that long building, decorating, testing them out and adjusting, exclaiming, “Oh, I have another idea” and creating multiple tops. It certainly helped that we had a lot of staff to assist and with whom one could engage in conversation, bounce ideas around, and try stuff out. And making sure we had a huge array of washi tape, markers, and stickers inspired creativity in both decoration and design.

I was also surprised by how engaged and focused very young children could be with tops. In one particular instance at the Oceanview branch, a girl of maybe three worked with her mom to make a top that she delightedly decorated with all the glitter and rhinestone tape we had on hand. I’m guessing the concept of balance wasn’t too important at her age. But this little girl and her mom were investigating persistence of vision! The fact that her random (to my eye) placing of glitter tape on her top took on the look of circles of bright colored light as her top spun was magical!

At this branch, we were in a small room upstairs with windows letting in bright sunlight. Spinning in the sunlight made it look almost alive! I likened it to seeing time lapse video of a crowded freeway at night, with all the lights from the cars sparkling as they streak past. You could see her excitement when her top transformed in the sunlight. This is not a photo of that particular top but another one with glitter tape (Batman also makes an appearance) to give you an idea of how the tape might reflect when the top is spun.

At the Brooks-Burton Bayview branch, a little boy who was also about three worked with his mother to create this amazing top. At three years old, he was directing her to cut this exacting, symmetrical shape which they both decorated in Raiders colors. Experimenting with one of our facilitators, through trial and error, this boy came up with the optimal spots to glue the weights (on the underside) so that it spun for almost a minute. (We brought stop-watches.) This three-year-old was given the time, space, materials, assistance, and encouragement to create this feat of engineering!

I’m struck by the sense of sharing and community that always unfolds during any of our off-site workshops. My XTech facilitator staff is adept at engaging anyone—from three-year-olds to older adults. (And in two cases we did in fact have an older adult stop by, solo, to hang out, chat, and build a top. After all, libraries are a safe, warm place to come into out of the cold.)
When one of my staff was asked by a group of girls at the Excelsior branch if they could make any shape and turn it into a top, she told them to try. I mean, why not? They ended up making six tops shaped like animals. Placing the spindle properly so that these oddly-shaped tops would spin was a challenge. But through some trial and error—success! All six tops spun well.

Creating the space, time, and lively atmosphere to tinker resulted in double-decker tops, tops shaped like sea creatures, tops that looked like they were so off balance that they’d never spin but balanced by strategically-glued hidden weights, tops with complex geometric shapes, tops that were works of art. A couple of teens who stopped by the Bayview branch let their sports allegiances inform their respective designs. They spent a lot of time playing with the best way to spin—the two-finger approach or the between-the-palms method. These older kids were most engaged with how weights versus no weights would affect duration of spin.

In the coming couple of weeks, I will be trying out “Tinkering with Tops” at two other venues—a family science night with about 50 families at an SFUSD elementary school and at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital’s schoolroom. Both situations should be entirely different from each other and from the library venues. But I’m looking forward to seeing what folks create now that I’ve been given a taste of the possibilities.

tops vivian guest post libraries

The Art of Tinkering Workshop – November 2016

18

Aug / 16

15

replies

18 Aug / 16

Posted by Luigi

15 replies

The Art of Tinkering
– A three day workshop about tinkering, making, thinking, and learning –
November 16-18, 2016 @ the Exploratorium

The Tinkering Studio team is excited to announce a hands-on workshop at the Exploratorium! The workshop is designed to investigate together how tinkering and making experiences support fundamental STEM thinking and learning, and is aimed at educators from all backgrounds, settings, and experience levels. During three days together we will explore tinkering and making activities that we feel have the potential to blend science and art explorations, exemplify best practices for critical thinking, and incorporate creative ways of becoming active participants in the process of tinkering and making.

The workshop is articulated around core tinkering activities designed to build upon each other over the course of three days. We will alternate between delving into making and tinkering with a learner’s mindset, and then carefully reflecting and deconstructing those experiences through an educational lens. At the end of our work together you will be equipped to formulate a practical action plan to take the logical next step to implement tinkering in your practice, whether you are just starting out, or are interested in expanding an existing plan. You will also meet other educators from all kinds of backgrounds interested in the same work, and will make lasting connections to support each other!

“How do I apply?”
Send a letter of interest to tinkering@exploratorium.edu! We ask that you commit to the full three days of the workshop, and we strongly encourage you to come with a colleague or thinking partner. There is a fee for this workshop, which will cover:

All supplies, tools, and consumables materials used during the workshop
Electronic activity guides and a copy of The Art of Tinkering book
Continental breakfast, snacks, and full lunch each day of the workshop

“Having an understanding and confidence to move back and forth between directing and allowing space is foundational to making tinkering really work for learning.” — workshop participant

The Art of Tinkering workshop will be led by Tinkering Studio educators who have worked with over 100,000 learners of all ages, in settings as diverse kindergarten classrooms, graduate school courses, community centers, public schools, Tibetan monasteries, science museums, and cultural festivals around the world.

The fine print: Workshop participation is limited, and applications will be processed on a first come, first serve basis. The workshop fee does not cover costs associated with travel, hotel, or meals and incidental personal expenses.

Workshop Art of Tinkering professional development

Humor and whimsy as portals to making

21

Jun / 16

21 Jun / 16

Posted by Luigi

“Try a little snarkasm”

During this National Week of Making extravaganza, let’s take a moment to celebrate the sillier side of tinkering, and indulge in remembering some of the less practical and most fun projects that have come out of the Tinkering Studio. But first, a slightly more serious note.

Tinkering is a highly engaging form of making and thinking with your hands, it encourages people to pose their own goals and define success for themselves, but at the same time it can put learners in a vulnerable position, that of not knowing: the right answer, the next step, whether they’re doing it right. It is important that we create an emotionally safe and personally friendly space to allow visitors to navigate those feelings.

One shortcut to connect with learners at an emotional level is through considered use of humor and whimsy, which are always present in Tinkering Studio offerings in one way or another. We enjoy unusual juxtapositions of topics, like sewing with circuits or using familiar materials in unfamiliar ways, and use humor to lower the barriers for entry for those who might approach the activities more tentatively. Playful and whimsical aspects of activities set a tone for what we value beyond "capital S" Science, and hint that these tinkering experience might embrace more than traditional didactic science learning. They are a way of presenting ourselves as fully rounded human beings, rather than idealized “experts,” but they also encourage visitors to feel that we will accept all aspects of them, including the silly and fun ideas they might have.

We often refer to this quality of our work as “snarkasm,” a term that suggests perhaps a more cutting tone than we intend. It originated in the occasion of the 2011 ASTC conference, the first time we really presented our work to a large and important audience of our professional peers, creating the first Cabinet of Curiosities which collected artifacts and artwork created over the course of the last few years. Perhaps recognizing that at first glance a lot of these objects might seem silly, frivolous, or pointless, we reacted by embracing and reclaiming our point of view with humorous “toe tags” describing each item in funny ways. I wrote approximately 50 snarky descriptions for things that we loved for one reason or another. Unfortunately my documentation skills failed me at the time and I did not take any clear photos of the toe tags in action, so I will just have to recreate some of my favorites.

You get the idea… it’s about having a perspective on your own work that allows you to take the work as seriously as possible, while still not taking yourself all that seriously, staying open and delighted by the strange and idiosyncratically quirky places the work takes you, and celebrating the awkward. In fact, we have a long running series of blog posts titled “tinkering moment of zen” that try to capture just that. Sometimes it’s Tim Hunkin eating a self-portrait carved into a banana. Sometimes it’s Scott Weaver juggling frisbees into the toothpick sculpture that took him 35 years to build. More often it’s funny little moments that are part of this strange job, like an ironic juxtaposition in the elevator, or an impromptu bit of pumpkin juggling (what’s with all the juggling, anyway?), that time when Nicole decided to cut a cake with a jigsaw, or the wimpiest pushup competition ever (Lianna totally won).

But more often we express humor and whimsy directly in the artifacts and details that we create and share with our visitors. These are objects that permeate the Tinkering Studio environment, usually without a sign with a description or explanation (unless they are a sign, in which case they are their own sign). They reward visitors’ curiosity, exploration, and sometimes low stature. Here are some of the highlights over the past few years!

A chandelier made of clothes hangers adorns the Tinkering Studio. It is fun to see the moment when a kid realizes what they are looking at, and are compelled to tell all their friends. (Bonus: here is a photo of Nicole prototyping the first version)

A bearskin rug made of cardboard, created to complement a cardboard fireplace frame for a monitor. As you do.

A set of giant cardboard tools made by Scout Tran-Caffee originally to make large scale stop motion animations. They now hang from various spots in the Learning Studio, along with a giant Kraken tentacle (that one was made by a different cardboard artist, Jesse Wilson)

A drawing by the über-talented illustrator Iris Gottlieb that is our way of communicating to visitors that the marbles we use in our Marble Machines area are not a choking hazard…

A “fire alarm,” inspired by the circuitry work of Forrest M. Mims III, which hangs in the Tinkering Studio right next to the actual fire alarm.

My dog Pepper comes to work with me sometimes, and she likes to sit by the large glass doors that face the exhibit hall. Often kids (and adults) try to interact with her through the glass, it almost feels like she’s one of the exhibits. So I made her a label.

The fact that we have a tinkering vending machine in our space is funny enough, but after going back and forth about whether we should have a “small parts disclaimer” on it, and what language we should use, this is the sign that stuck…

Finally, here is a little treat for the shorter visitors: all the drawers’ handles make little faces. Of all the “easter eggs” hidden in the Tinkering Studio, this is perhaps the one that is noticed by the fewest people.

Week of making national week of making snarkasm humor whimsy

Reinvent Old Technologies and Discover New Ones

20

Jun / 16

20 Jun / 16

Posted by Luigi

The blog post below comes from Vivian Altmann, who directs our Community Educational Engagement efforts.

I’m planning for my upcoming week with the elementary-age summer camp program at 826 Valencia here in San Francisco. The camp is called “Exploring Words” and the focus is on literacy, as is the main focus of all of 826 Valencia’s year-round programs. It’s a national program started by author Dave Eggers and most of the San Francisco site’s students live in the immediate neighborhood of 826 Valencia. It’s a neighborhood with a strong Latino population and a good amount of immigrant families. A lot of the students are bilingual in Spanish and English and their writing is encouraged in both languages. The idea is to make them confident and articulate in expressing themselves, as well as supporting each student’s progress in school.

I worked with 826’s San Francisco site last summer as well. The staff there has been incorporating more science, tinkering, and making into their summer curriculum for the past few years because, hey—it’s fun and brings out the best in kids. And, from my perspective, experimenting, tinkering, and making are so very rich as sources of inspiration for creative writing. I like to say that science is poetry.

Scientists, artists, and poets all look at the same world, try to make sense of it, and then communicate what they learn, observe, or discover to others. Scientists and poets may use different tools and different language, but they are all exploring the same things. Interpreting scientific phenomena through the lens of poetry and creative writing is one way of making meaning.

So in the context of last summer at 826 Valencia, quite possibly the only thing better than making a kaleidoscope or building a scribble bot is to then also write a wild story or freeform poem about it. Since 826 regularly publishes student work, those making-inspired creative stories and poems get read by folks way beyond the “walls” of 826 or the Exploratorium.

Last summer the 826 students (and interns) made Scribble Bots, aka scribbling machines, with me and Leslie Hernandez (one of my Exploratorium colleagues from the Explo’s XTech Program) during week five of camp. (We did other stuff the prior four weeks.) 826 has some particularly smart, funny, and energetic kids so I was expecting some cool Scribble Bots. But their focus, attention to detail, and building skills resulted in the kookiest and sturdiest (sturdiness and balance is a big factor) Scribble Bots I’ve seen. A number of their resultant Scribble Bot stories and poems were published in “Turquoise is Waiting Until Midnight,” the student book of written works that came out of the 2015 Exploring Words summer.

This summer I won’t be spending the full five weeks of camp with 826, but we will spend one week on both stop-motion animation and “Nature Bots.” Looking at the idea of reinventing old technologies, certainly the next iteration of last summer’s Scribble Bots will be Nature Bots. Making Scribble Bots required a lot of tinkering with balance so that the bots would scribble without falling over. Not that tough with marking pens for legs since you can balance a bot on a nice tripod or quad of evenly-placed pens. But gathering materials like branches and leaves and pine cones and who-knows-what and then adding the weight of a motor and a battery will mean that these students will have to take their creations to the next level and really think about balance and motion in a more complex way. Plus making something far more freeform like a Nature Bot means opening the creative floodgates for each to have a unique look, mobility, and personality. The 826 Valencia staff and interns will be great at guiding the students toward translating the freeform of a Nature Bot into freeform poetry.

Stop-motion animation likewise will be the next iteration of our work on visual perception from last summer. We learned some of the basics of how the human eye and brain work in summer of 2015. Making actual short animated films this summer will build on the simple activities (flipsticks and thaumatropes, anyone?) we did then.

So I’m thinking about the other part of this blog’s theme that I am to consider—discovering new technologies—and I am leaning toward the idea that what’s old is actually new for a lot of younger kids. The best way for me to explain this is via an anecdote from an experience I had at the end of 2015. A reporter with WNYC asked me this question during an interview about another project:
“With younger people having grown up with digital, portable, wireless technology as a regular part of their lives, does the work you do become harder? Is it more difficult to get the signal through the noise? Or are they perhaps more receptive for some reason?”
My response:
An interesting question you pose – in essence is the medium of technology blocking the message?
In general, I think that people are people and having genuine human experiences that don’t involve modern, digital technology is always going to be compelling. Especially if they’re surprising, counterintuitive, and just plain fun.
But your question does bring up an anecdote about an experience I had just last week. A colleague and I were part of an event for SFUSD elementary school children sponsored by our Mayor’s office at City Hall.
One of the artifacts I was demonstrating and with which I was engaging kids in conversation was something called a Mirror Mirage—basically a flying saucer-shaped thing with both inside halves of the “saucer” coated in reflective material. Two mirrored parabolic dishes that fit together.
When a tiny plastic object (in this case a little plastic frog) is placed in the center of the lower mirrored dish, one sees what’s called a real image that seems to float just above the small opening in the top mirrored dish. Almost every school kid that day said, “It’s a hologram” or “It’s digital and you have tiny cameras in there.” And when I showed them that no, it was just two parabolic mirrors and a little plastic frog, but that these things created a 3-D reflection in mid-air, it elicited a “Whoa! No way!” from each and every one of them. The real trumps the digital because in a generation that takes technology for granted, something so viscerally experiential and seemingly so simple becomes the true surprise. And again that spark, that surprise, might generate further curiosity and observation. That’s the goal, anyway.

This blog post is part of a series of Tinkering Studio posts highlighting a variety of ideas during the National Week of Making. weekofmaking.org

national week of making Week of making 826 valencia

Alien Salvation by Tim Hunkin

21

Apr / 16

21 Apr / 16

Posted by Luigi

Last month, during his yearly residency with us, Tim Hunkin worked on a cam-timed series of tiny theater boxes that told a story, narrated (with sound effects!) on a recordable sound chip. Ryan shared a blog post about it, along with a roughly recorded video. Here is a nicer video giving a sense of what the contraption looked like, the intended use, and better video and sound. Enjoy!

tim hunkin alien salvation tiny theaters Video

Tops Kit

14

Apr / 16

1

replies

14 Apr / 16

Posted by Luigi

1 replies

The latest addition to our Tinkering Studio vending machine is a “Tops Kit,” meant to encourage playful exploration of spinning tops! The video above is a quick series of ideas and provocation for things you can try with our kit, but it is really meant to be a starting point and a way to rapidly start messing about with some ideas about balance, size, and weight distribution.

The kit is intentionally minimal: like most good tinkering activities it is easy to get started and have an initial success, while allowing you to go deeper and explore more complex variables.

We've included a nicely square piece of cardboard with a perfect center pre-marked for you to get started with no guesswork. A pencil and a piece of string allow you to create an impromptu compass to make very large scale circles, or experiment with string-powered starting mechanisms!

Everything else is up to your imagination and willingness to explore. If you play with this kit and create interesting tops, please let us know in the comments below!

tops tops kit

This summer: A tinkering workshop in Milan!

28

Mar / 16

28 Mar / 16

Posted by Luigi

The National Museum of Science and Technology, in collaboration with the Tinkering Studio, will host a three day workshop in Milan, Italy on June 14 – 16! This is a professional development workshop aimed at exploring how tinkering and making can support fundamental STEM thinking, creativity, and innovation, similar to the Art of Tinkering workshop that we host here at the Exploratorium on a regular basis. So if you're closer to Milan than to San Francisco and are interested in participating, click on the image above to download the full pdf application poster and sign up!

Workshop milan museo scienza

The Art of Tinkering Workshop – March 2016

23

Feb / 16

23 Feb / 16

Posted by Luigi

The Art of Tinkering
– A three day workshop about tinkering, making, thinking, and learning –
March 15-17, 2016 @ the Exploratorium

The Tinkering Studio team is excited to announce a hands-on workshop at the Exploratorium! The workshop is designed to investigate together how tinkering and making experiences support fundamental STEM thinking and learning, and is aimed at educators from all backgrounds, settings, and experience levels. During three days together we will explore tinkering and making activities that we feel have the potential to blend science and art explorations, exemplify best practices for critical thinking, and incorporate creative ways of becoming active participants in the process of tinkering and making.

The workshop is articulated around core tinkering activities designed to build upon each other over the course of three days. We will alternate between delving into making and tinkering with a learner’s mindset, and then carefully reflecting and deconstructing those experiences through an educational lens. At the end of our work together you will be equipped to formulate a practical action plan to take the logical next step to implement tinkering in your practice, whether you are just starting out, or are interested in expanding an existing plan. You will also meet other educators from all kinds of backgrounds interested in the same work, and will make lasting connections to support each other!

“How do I apply?”
Send a letter of interest to tinkering@exploratorium.edu! We ask that you commit to the full three days of the workshop, and we strongly encourage you to come with a colleague or thinking partner. There is a fee for this workshop, which will cover:

All supplies, tools, and consumables materials used during the workshop
Electronic activity guides and a copy of The Art of Tinkering book
Continental breakfast, snacks, and full lunch each day of the workshop

“Having an understanding and confidence to move back and forth between directing and allowing space is foundational to making tinkering really work for learning.” – workshop participant

The Art of Tinkering workshop will be led by Tinkering Studio educators who have worked with over 100,000 learners of all ages, in settings as diverse Kindergarten classrooms, graduate school courses, community centers, public schools, Tibetan monasteries, science museums, and cultural festivals around the world.

The fine print: Workshop participation is limited, and applications will be processed on a first come, first serve basis. The workshop fee does not cover costs associated with travel, hotel, or meals and incidental personal expenses.

Workshop Art of Tinkering announcement

Telling a toddler's story with Scratch

21

Jan / 16

1

replies

21 Jan / 16

Posted by Luigi

1 replies

For the last week or so we have been playing and experimenting with storytelling using Scratch and MakeyMakey with the awesome Ricarose Roque.

I was struck by how powerful the compulsion to create a narrative can be. Coincidentally, my own (I can't believe he's) almost three-year-old son has recently started being very interested in stories: he likes it when people make up stories for him and asks to be told the same ones over and over again, but he's also practicing coming up with his own original narratives. A few days ago, I managed to capture him making up his own narrative on video. It's meandering and weaves in and out of a plot, as toddler narratives tend to do, but it gave me the idea to try and animate his story using Scratch.

In the original video you can hear me interjecting comments and prodding the story along here and there, so I edited the video to keep only the “plot points” in his own voice. That also cut it down to a manageable 24 seconds of story time. Then I exported the audio, imported it into Scratch, and delved into creating a simple animation that is timed to his story. You can check out the results directly in Scratch by clicking here, and see the code that is running the whole thing. Below is a video of the animation with an inset of Marcello actually telling the story.

I found Scratch to be a great tool to make a simple visual narrative come alive. When I showed it to Marcello his response was delighted, and he asked me to replay it about 10 times. What I would like to explore is for this to become more of a collaboration, where we are working on either the story or the animation together, perhaps with him making suggestions for what happens next and me working out how to implement that with him present. It feels like developmentally that's still a few months away, his imagination is too jumpy and his patience not quite able to stretch enough to cover me futzing around with blocks and sprites, but it was a very promising introduction to simple programming in a way that can be shared and enjoyed by a toddler!

scratch playful programming narrative storytelling toddler