Blog Posts by lianna

Tinkering with STEAM in Early Childhood Settings

06

Jan / 20

06 Jan / 20

Posted by Lianna

Last month I had the privilege of presenting at the annual California STEAM Symposium with our colleauges Ihuoma and Holly on the findings of our first round of STEAM Starters - a project focused on supporting young learners and early childhood educators through tinkering. Our session, titled Tinkering with STEAM in Early Childhood Settings, invited participants to engage with hands-on tinkering experiences and learn about our collaborative process between the Tinkering Studio and two local preschools. The session started with an introductory exploration of Light Play. We set up three different stations around the room with curated materials sets where folks could engage with light and shadow related phenomena.

Image description: two long tables against a wall displaying light play materials including colorful acrylic shapes and filters, dyed water bottles, 3D figurines, slow moving motor platforms, and lights embedded in wood blocks. There are four white screens propped between the tables and the walls.

We always learn something new when facilitating workshops offsite. At this workshop we tried portable pop-up diffusers (typically used by photographers) as projection screens and they worked great! We'll definitely use these at future workshops. Inevitably, there are complications along the way as well. The morning of the workshop we learned that we couldn't turn off the lights in the room without impacting all of our neighboring sessions as well. Although this activity works better in the dark, the participants still had fun investigating and making observations. (In fact, I was so busy facilitating the group I forgot to take photos of the workshop in action!)

After the light play session, Ihuoma, Holly, and I delved into sharing about the STEAM Starters project. I gave a brief introduction to tinkering as a playful, inquiry-driven process and shared the trajectory of the collaborative arc. Since the project involved several different groups coming together, it was important for us to include both hands-on leanring and time to get on the same page with our goals and values. Our process of activity testing, documentation and iteration, and reflection was a cyclical process that we revisited throughout the course of our 16 weeks of programming.

Next, Ihuoma and Holly shared their experiences of our collaboration. They focused on their schools' respective starting points and comfort with STEAM, important stories of student growth and learning, and the impact of reflection and documentation. Some teachers at the start of the project felt very comfortable with open-ended exploration and STEAM-related content, whereas others felt nervousness and that science wasn't for them. Across both schools, the children were able to engage deeply with materials-based investigations, ask questions, make observations, connect to past expereinces, and document their work. The educators who were most nervous about science experienced important changes in their teaching practice as well. They were able to make a mental shift from feeling they needed to be an "expert" on a topic to being a co-learner alongside their students, and grew in confidence of being able to identify and support moments of STEAM learning.

We ended the presentation with a brief Q&A session for participants. Folks were interested in learning more about how documentation can support assessment, how tinkering as an approach could support learners of different ages, and where they can find the light blocks for their own classrooms (Instructable coming soon!). It's always a joy to share our work with colleagues and make connections with others in the field working in this realm.

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This project is supported through a generous grant from the Early Learning and Care Division at the California Department of Education.

See You in Anaheim!

22

Nov / 19

22 Nov / 19

Posted by Lianna

We're excited to announce that we'll be presenting some of the initial findings from our STEAM Starters project at the California STEAM Symposium in Anaheim. Our session is titled Tinkering with STEAM in Early Childhood Settings and will take place on Monday, December 9 at 11:40 AM-12:40 PM.

The best part of this presentation is that I'll be co-leading it with Holly and Ihuoma, two of the teachers from the first round of our collaborative site work. In addition to facilitating a hands-on activity experience, we'll also be sharing on our findings related to the impact tinkering has had on the youth in their classrooms as well as what we've all learned as professionals engaged in STEAM education.

If you're planning to attend this conference we'd love to see you at our session!

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This project is supported through a generous grant from the Early Learning and Care Division at the California Department of Education.

Wiiiiiiiiinnnndddd

01

Aug / 19

01 Aug / 19

Posted by Lianna

This is a guest post from our summer intern Lucy!

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If you had told me a few months ago that I would spend the greater part of my summer researching and curating exhibitions and activities for the number one museum in San Francisco (according to TripAdvisor), I would never have pictured quite so many pipe cleaners. But now that I’m wrapping up my time here at the Exploratorium, I’m recognizing just how valuable pipe cleaners--and their playful material peers--can be. Even when compared to the 19th century oil paintings that line the walls in some of the lower ranked institutions in the city (please do not mistake my snark for disrespect. I love me some fine art).

Take my most recent project: the early childhood wind tube. I was compelled to pull out this more accessible wind tube--an iteration of the common TS activity--because I had already had excellent exposure to activity design and facilitation through the astute conversations I heard throughout the Learning Studio over the span of the summer. Since I had never participated in the previous wind tube activities, this was a chance for me to try out the tricks of the trade. Everyone at the TS has inspired me with the pointed decisions they make about materials and set up for every activity. I’ve been so impressed by their thoughtfulness in creating activities that encourage both engagement and curiosity and leave room for innovation. Notably, I’ve been struck by this idea of “creating tension,” or staging a problem or challenge for a learner to tackle through the process of discovery. This could be putting a light source too close to an object in order to create a blurry shadow or asking the learner to figure out how to get their scribbling machines moving with only a spinning motor. This is, of course, the balance that every educator strives toward, but at the TS I see so much more value placed on the process of discovery than the product.

So, in my curation of the wind tube materials, I tried to emulate this tension. I included a lot of objects that wouldn’t move in exciting ways when placed in the tube--from ping pong balls to washers that didn’t budge, to paper airplanes that tended to take immediate, damaging nose dives. Once I had also collected free floating objects like coffee filters and paper wads, I tested my luck on the floor with kids seven years old or younger. It was truly amazing to watch them troubleshoot. I saw a lot of variations of parachutes, some two-tiered or clunky, some simple fabrics anchored at only two ends. Some kids would simply--and successfully--use an object that floated more successfully, like a cup or a piece of fabric, to propel the immobile object up the tube. I ran through like 15 pipe cleaners per hour. In every case, the kids were grappling with concepts like weight and air resistance based on their own, internal motivation to fix whatever issue they had encountered.

It was incredibly rewarding, not to mention super cute, to watch the thought processes of the younger kids who engaged with the wind tube. Though I would love to continue to experiment with ways to guide kids into their own realizations of the deeper physics of wind and gravity, I’m constrained by both their time on the floor and mine in the Tinkering Studio. Nonetheless, it was such a rewarding exercise to think deeply and methodologically about how to use a limited palette of familiar materials to create a truly productive--and fun!--activity. So, even though my days of museum curation are stymied by my imminent departure, it’s been such a pleasure to (nose) dive into them at such a wonderful institution.

Lunar Lighting

29

Jul / 19

29 Jul / 19

Posted by Lianna

This is a guest post from our summer intern Lucy!

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Happy Moon Landing! This past Saturday marked the official 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission’s “giant leap for mankind,” and, in tribute, we here at the Exploratorium are taking equally monumental steps towards greatness. In the form of Light Play.

This past week’s moon themed iteration of the activity featured inspiring developments in our approach--from materials to set up to facilitation--and a surprising number of cows. While we took a momentary step back from the early childhood lense we’ve adopted recently, deciding to focus on the moon automatically made our preparation for LP feel more deliberate and thoughtful. First of all, though we’d already thought of LP out of the literal (shadow) box, we got to mix it up even further. For example, we toyed with different spherical projection screens as a way to emulate the moon (aka that giant spherical projection screen up in the sky). We first hung white, styrofoam spheres from the ceiling, but since they also proved to be effective wrecking balls we moved them onto grounded stands. Nonetheless, they ended up casting a beautiful moon-like shadow that really put kids in the head space of all things lunar.

Our other innovative projection surface was a giant white balloon. As projection screens go, it was sort of difficult to manage since getting a shadow high enough up to project onto the balloon was a real challenge. But since we already had to use bigger tables to account for the space of our new materials, this gave the kids more room to move their materials and light sources around the room. Ultimately, this forced really interesting explorations of space: both the finite space on the floor and the infinite space of outer space. The kids had to really tinker with their placement of the light and shadow source, so they also began to project on wider surfaces like the walls and ceiling as well. This enabled them to think even more carefully about where the light was coming from and how to get the shadow they wanted.

And, ultimately, what made Moon Play so fun was the shadow stories the kids ended up projecting. These stories were augmented by two major things. The first were a collection of colored and clear acrylic pieces that yours truly cut and etched out on the laser cutter. Sticking to the moon theme, the acrylic had some classics like an astronaut and a shooting star, but to encourage more creative designs I also chose a witch flying on a broomstick, a howling wolf and a cow. The etchings from the laser cutter cast rather beautiful shadows that made each piece all that more fun and dynamic. The kids on the floor really took to them because of the detail, and because of the second change we made to promote stories: telling them to make one. This facilitation technique came naturally from the cutouts, because they all practically begged to be remixed into an interesting take on a classic story. It was also a really successful way to get the kids to engage with the materials, create a vision and attempt to execute it. With the bigger table space, they tended to work together to move objects, cover lights, turn lights off and add new objects into the space to manifest their collective vision.

Moon Play is not over: we’ve still got a few more weeks of July to play with it and tweak the activity. Overall, quite like Apollo 11, our mission was a holistically successful, collaborative exploration into the unknown. I, for one, am excited to see our Apollo 12.

Tinkering with the Shop

25

Jul / 19

25 Jul / 19

Posted by Lianna

This is a guest post by our summer intern Nomar!

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As enormous as the Exploratorium is, storage space is important. The more I used the woodshop in the Tinkering Studio, the more I noticed minor ways we could make it feel a little more spacious in there. What stuck out to me the most was the drills and chargers that take up a chunk of the chop saw table so my first thought was to use PVC pipes as slots for the drills as I’ve seen in other shops I’ve worked in. But it just didn’t feel right to use some plain old PVC and some idea I’ve seen many times before. I decided to have more fun with it and even get a little more picky to make it even more convenient, specific to the studio, and maybe a little more interesting.

I decided to connect the PVC in a small series of tees and elbows to get that PVC look. Attaching it to the peg board does require the person to reach over the chop saw table a little bit so I came up with a new design where it would be attached to the underside of a shelf and therefore extended away from the wall, requiring less reach. Above the shelf will be a wood track along the peg board for the battery chargers to sit upright on, each one having its own lock so they could individually come off if need be. This whole design not only cleans up the chop saw table, but also creates more space and accessibility in the shop. But it didn’t have that bit of fun I was looking for so I figured I’d push it to another level and turn the PVC slots into a playable instrument. Now, I have yet to even prototype so I’m not very sure how my idea will go but my imagined design for this is creating some sort of foam slots for the drills to fit into when placed into the PVC slots. The foam would have something like a series of dowels sticking out around the exterior so when the drills are activated, the foam would catch onto the spinning tip of the drill and the dowels would come around and hit a wooden xylophone block somewhere inside the PVC. I’m interested in seeing what the connected PVC will do to the sound of the xylophone blocks. I expect it to be amplified in some ways but I hope the tubing gives the sound a cool effect.

When I explain to someone what I’m doing, they always seem to be a bit confused until I tell them the music aspect is just for fun. For some reason the idea of something so pointless but yet so joyful makes me laugh out of happiness. Adding unexpected spins to things like this really brings out that childish joy from within and just gives you something to laugh at or play with. Afterall, why not bring a little bit of the Exploratorium fun into the shop? It’s those little moments that craft a nice day.

Explore and Let Explore

15

Jul / 19

15 Jul / 19

Posted by Lianna

This is a guest post from our summer intern Nomar!

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Learning to sharpen your use of communication is something that is ever-growing. Every new experience we have with communication provides a new context in which you can use it in a different way. Prior to my experiences with the Tinkering Studio, the only interactions that I have had in working with groups of children was in a more instructional environment rather than an explorative one. One thing that has become very apparent to me is that it is one thing to be able to turn ideas and concepts into words that someone else can chew on and it is another thing to cultivate someone’s curiosity. The cultivation of thought differs from the feeding of information as it doesn’t have a teacher nor a student but instead a curious mind and its patron.

The cultivation of thought is a narrow sweet spot in the spectrum of balancing communication and space that is specific to each person. Some people learn very well when they are given information to memorize and books to study, but not everyone fits that mold. This then alters the concept of learning for people who learn differently as they start to feel like they’re “not good at learning”. People tend to forget that creativity and asking questions is a part of learning just as much as reading a biography is. But finding this sweet spot as a facilitator is indeed very challenging. I often times see parents forget to give their child space and authority to guide a learning experience because they quickly turn to shifting their attention to what they’re “supposed to see” rather then just letting them find out. Sometimes, our biases and urges to correct others get in our way of letting things happen. A helpful mindset to have when in this position is the beginner’s mindset.

As a facilitator for exploration, it is good to approach every new person with a receptive mind to get an idea of what that person needs in order to have an enriching experience supported by you. The beginner’s mindset also allows you to level with the learner as it can be hard to explore with full integrity when you have someone who you think is an expert hovering over you. Recently, a child building a scribble machine was a bit shy to ask me questions which was then impeding his ability to make any progress on his project. When I saw him sitting and looking around at everyone else, I would walk over and see how he was doing. At one point he asked me if what we were doing was easy for me. I replied by telling him it was actually my first time working with that activity and that I had only a few minutes of more experience than him. He asked me for my name and I his and by the end of it he had a functioning scribble machine and a piece of paper where he wrote up the materials he needed to make his own at home. That day I learned that it is important to be a friend along with a facilitator.

The same goes for working on a team. Getting to experience what it’s like to be on the Tinkering team has been a wonderful new experience with communication. Being conscious and respectful of one another’s time and interests is important to the team. Everything from figuring out what times work best for people to making sure that the people involved are genuinely interested and curious about the topic seems to be what drives the group. Everyone is always so open and ready to listen to your ideas and support you in whatever way they can. This practice of listening with fully open ears has shown me what the power of careful listening can do. Giving feedback and suggestions is just as important as listening with full attention. All these skills are crucial to cultivating each other's curiosity while maintaining a productive team.

As Tinkerers, there is a child in all of us who we need to let loose to guide our own learning experiences. And by tinkerers I mean anyone who has ever had any moments where exploration was the driving force in their learning experience. Some of us need to reconnect and communicate with that child within us to let go of what we feel is wrong or right and forget about feeling self-conscious. It is the curiosity within us that makes life so interesting but it is the communication among us that allows that curiosity to flourish.

Turtles and Tribulations

11

Jul / 19

11 Jul / 19

Posted by Lianna

This is a guest post from our summer intern Lucy!

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Over the first four weeks of my summer at the Tinkering Studio, I’ve encountered a wondrous collection of new tools, materials and concepts. From the inner workings of bandsaws to the inner workings of terrifying mechanical toys, I’ve been introduced to the underlying skills and philosophies of tinkering in the only way I could imagine: being totally thrown into it. Luckily, I’ve been assured by multiple members of the team that the tinkerer’s best approach is a beginner’s mindset. Since that is (in general) my only mindset, I was happy last week to dive into TurtleStitch, the newest exploration in the TS’s foray into computational tinkering.

TurtleStitch is a program that classically pairs coding with turtles and—you guessed it—embroidery. Through its Scratch-inspired interface, anyone with access to a computer and a computerized embroidery machine can create a design to be realized in just minutes. Quite like TurtleArt, which we’ve been tinkering with over the last few weeks as well, this program blurs the line between the digital and physical world rather seamlessly (heh). But as we’ve discovered with TurtleArt, the digital/tangible switcharoo presents a unique set of challenges as well as opportunities.

The first challenge was simply setting up the embroidery machine. After managing to thread our machine (a Brother SE-400) with spooled embroidery thread, making a makeshift ironing board with my laptop case and shoving a denim fabric in the embroidery ring, I triumphantly set the machine to a preloaded design. And promptly broke the needle. Two more broken needles later and I found success with a thin simple fabric. Rallied by this, I finally connected the machine to my laptop with relative ease.

TurtleStitch is still in the beginning phases of development, but they recently released a new update with integrates more embroidery-specific functions—stitch size and the like. These additions are exciting and important when figuring out how to code your design. I discovered with my first couple of attempts, for example, that a simple running stitch is too thin to show up well on the fabric. The first small, simple flower that I coded looks miniscule compared to the triple stitched designs over it. Also, the remnants of the old system before the newest additions make the interface feel unnecessarily complicated. This is exacerbated by the fact that the translation between the code and the machine can be tricky. While the program allows you to code for color, the only important factor ends up being, of course, the color of the thread you chose. Not only that, but no matter the size of the design you code, the machine will only create a pattern a couple inches wide.

So, the process in itself is exciting and undeniably tinkerable, but also very complicated as an activity on the floor. We’d love to be able to provide kids will all the materials for their vision—colorful fabric of all different kinds, multiple colors of thread, a large pattern—but, as a facilitator, all of those things are complicated to set up efficiently and successfully. At the same time, we have the same challenges that I’ve seen through my whole time at the TS of having to walk the fine line between kickstarting the kids’ imagination and giving them an example which they follow without real engagement. Ultimately, it’s a problem of imagination, either too much or too little. It’s all about finding that perfect balance. Fortunately, we have some time to tinker with it.

Early Childhood Data Collection

27

Jun / 19

27 Jun / 19

Posted by Lianna

In the Tinkering Studio we love looking for evidence of learning through making and building personally meaningful artifacts. In our current early childhood work, we've had the opportunity to work with 3 to 5 year olds over an extended period of time exploring marble machines while also supporting early childhood educators to see STEAM in children's natural play. A beautiful moment of an educator intervention to deepen the children's learning happened last week around the idea of data collection.

Liz and Michael (pseudonyms) have been fixated on the idea of creating "obstacles" for their marble to overcome as it travels down its pathway. They got to a point in their process where they were testing quickly but not making careful observations of why the marble would sometimes make it into the cup at the end and other times it would fall out. Their teacher Daisy noticed this and stepped in with a thoughtful facilitation approach that completely changed their energy. She started by asking a series of questions that helped them slow down and refocus their attention on how the marbles were moving. Since they have an existing practice of charting information, she then suggested that this might be an opportunity to try that here. They decided that when the marbles go in the cup they would draw a happy face, and when they fall off, they would draw a confused face. This facilitation intervention significantly changed the focus of how they were building, supporting them to be more purposeful and observational. They took turns between dropping marbles and tracking on their data sheet.

As you can see in the photo, as they revised their designs they ended up with a lot more happy faces than confused faces!

I love the idea that data collection can happen in such a clear way at a very early age. They would count how many went in versus fell off on a given test, and begin to propose theories about why it's happening. This demonstrates an ability to abstract from an action that happened in the past to a visual representation of why it's meaningful.

It also reminds me that careful and deliberate facilitation that still follows the learners' paths is vital for helping young learners to continue developing their own understandings of how the world around them works. I'm curious to see where Liz and Michael will take their explorations next!

This project is supported through a generous grant from the Early Learning and Care Division at the California Department of Education.

Value Mapping for STEAM Starters

16

May / 19

16 May / 19

Posted by Lianna

Over the next several months we'll be embarking on a project we're calling STEAM Starters - it's all about tinkering with young learners and supporting early childhood teachers to facilitate tinkering experiences with these little ones. We're lucky to be working with two partner schools in this first phase of this project where we can protoype and iterate on STEAM-rich activities together. Whenever we're beginning new relationships such as these, I think it's important for everyone to come together and discuss our goals, intentions, and values. At our kickoff planning sessions at each school we started by taking the time to discuss what our hopes were for: the kids we work with, ourselves as educators, the family networks of the children, and the school environment.

One of my favorite themes that arose from these conversations is the idea of the educator as a perpetual learner. One teacher said she wanted to develop her "science mind" as part of collaborating on this project. We'll use daily reflections as one way to support this goal of growing our own skills over the course of the project.

Another theme that came up at both schools was the idea of using documentation to show rich evidence of student learning through play and tinkering. We've only had a few sessions at the schools, and already we're seeing wonderful examples of deep engagement and inquiry with a slightly modified set of Marble Machines materials. We'll share more examples of these learning stories as they emerge.

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This project is supported through a generous grant from the Early Learning and Care Division at the California Department of Education.

Tape Helps

01

Apr / 19

01 Apr / 19

Posted by Lianna

If you're like me, April 1st can be stressful since you never know what's real and what's a joke. This post is to celebrate a real marble machine made by two young visitors last week that perfectly illustrates one of my favorite Tinkering Studio adages: when in doubt, tape helps!

These two builders spent about 40 minutes working on their marble machine. While they used several methods to overcome their building challenges, copious amounts of tape was by far their favorite way to fix any problems they encountered.

Happy Spring, and if you're feeling stuck by all the tricks coming your way today, remember: tape helps.