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. 

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.

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.

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.