Over the last couple of years the Tinkering Studio embarked in the exploration of a rather challenging topic: how can we meaningfully make use of digital technologies in the context of a tinkering learning environment? The question we have been and continue to be intrigued by is how to think of technology and computation as a means to expand and deepen the investigations and possibilities of tinkering, rather than thinking of it as an end in and of itself, something to be “taught” to children for its own sake.
We’ve dubbed this approach computational tinkering, as a riff on the computational thinking approach, and explored it largely thanks to a project called Tinkering in the Digital Age, or TiDA for short. Our explorations spanned many different phenomena and approaches, and we produced six documents at the end of the project that summarize our experiments and findings, and provide some ideas for trying these lines of inquiry for yourself. So this is a roundup of all the guides that resulted from over two years of work with the Tinkering in the Digital Age project!
This work was supported by a grant from Science Sandbox, an initiative of the Simons Foundation
This project was made possible through the generous support from the LEGO Foundation
