4 A Good Tinkering Session

What a Tinkering Session Looks Like When It’s Working

A lot of times good tinkering just happens. This can be a goal: to get our kids to the point that they’ll feed contentedly on a hot-n-ready tinkering opportunity and even be able to cook one up for themselves. But many times, especially at the beginning, you’ll need to put some legwork into setting it up. To facilitate good tinkering, you should think about the general scheme you want and the grand framework for the tinkering you’d like to see happening. There are some key characteristics you should look for in the tinkering session. It’s also good to think a bit about the kids you’ll be working with.

Tinkering Schemes

At the Community Science Workshops of which I’ve been part, we engage in more than tinkering. We’re a community resource for education of the hands-on, technical sort, and we attempt to serve whatever the community’s needs are in this area. That said, a whole lot of what we do is tinkering. Our tinkering can be divided roughly into two basic structural categories:

• Free-form, aka open structure, aka, at times “madhouse,” “nutso,” or, “Who the heck is in charge here!?”

• Class group, aka “all-on-the-same-page”

Free Form Tinkering

At the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop, we especially value our freeform tinkering. Forgive my unbounded self-satisfaction, but I view it as a true paragon of education and learning. When we’re tinkering up a storm, everyone present has chosen to be there, at that time, to work on a project of their own choice. There are no institutional restrictions, no time limits, no tests or evaluation of students, and no curriculum beyond the projects’ models and materials hanging about, a small set of books, and the Internet in the corner. Daily we see dreams and ideas turn into reality as life-sustaining skills and confidence are built on a solid foundation of joy, all in a comfortable, unstructured, and supportive atmosphere. Educational paradise, I’ve said to myself many times, couldn’t look much different.

Thanks to the good support of the City of Watsonville and our various donors, we currently offer free-form tinkering at seven sites, 15 times per week. Woohoo! Kids come in and are able to do whatever they want with whichever materials we have on hand, and we help them the best we can. We’ll even get more materials with our meager budget to continue the tinkering tomorrow, look up information on how to do what the kids want to do, and call up experts if we run out of expertise. Our Workshop is set up for awesome tinkering on demand in the areas of sewing and needlework, microscopy, electricity and electronics, magnetism, music and instrument making, woodworking, metalworking, plastic forming, cardboard construction, dissection of both animals and appliances, papier-mâché, safe-and-sane chemistry, bicycle maintenance, simple optics, arts and crafts, astronomy, gardening and potted plants, cooking, aquarium life, small animal behavior, and probably others.

Kids come in whenever the door is open. It’s a bit like a recreation center, only with many opportunities for full-content, full-throttle learning. Most kids wander around a bit and see what’s new and then choose an area to sink their teeth into. Others wander all afternoon. Still others ask us what they should do. We’ll help them find their ideal project and others to work together with, but we’ll never coerce them to do anything. If they insist on causing trouble, we’ll kick them out (into the park outside), but only for a while; we’ll even follow them home to be sure their parents know we want them back in the Workshop when then can follow the rules.

Speaking of rules, we’ve got only a few solid ones, aside from the safety rules described in the Logistics section. Here they are:

• No food in the Workshop, unless I get some.

Just kidding, but really, I’ve gotten through many a long, hungry afternoon with that line.

• Respect all (stuff, one another, yourself).

• Clean up after yourself (ha!).

• Get smarter!

The first one pretty much covers everything. Like the golden rule, if everyone would but follow it, things would be dandy. For example, we could have a rule that says, explicitly, “Don’t screw up other kids’ projects,” but the first rule rules in this case.

Try as we may, we can’t seem to enforce that second one, but we still have hope, and it gives our lives meaning to think that once in a while maybe one kid will learn a few cleaning-up skills and surprise his mom when he gets home.

The third rule is a guard against lazy butts just sitting on their cans in the midst of all our fruitful activity. They’re a bad influence, and we’ve found we can’t let them crop up and multiply, so we’ll tell them they have to tinker with something or they’re not getting smarter and they’ll have to leave. Sometimes it works. Of course, we reserve the right to tack addendums on to any of these rules anytime we want.

Sounds pretty wonderful, eh? Almost surreal. Before you write me off as a teller of tall tales, let me make clear that it took us many years to get the space set up for this. It’s quite a subtle challenge to have everything available for all these areas of tinkering and still keep chaos at bay. Not to say that we are always successful at keeping chaos at bay, but often we are. We often get 30 to 50 kids in the main Workshop all jamming on great tinkering projects. We have two adult staff present at all times and try to have at least a couple of high-school helpers on duty as well. When a day is really hopping, we’ll be bouncing around like crazy from project to project, and inevitably some kids may get frustrated and leave. But they can return another calmer day and resume where they left off.

Project models are key to our operations. We try to maintain a good 50 or so project models that span the areas previously listed, all hanging invitingly from the walls and ceiling. It is a challenge to maintain them while also letting the kids take them down and use them as a model to work from. But it’s worth it because models allow kids to tinker toward a goal in a way written directions never can. Models also allow for a bunch of kids to work on different projects without step-by-step assistance. Learning to follow the model instead of cookbook directions is another element nearly extinct in our schools.

Not everything needs a model. For example, the under-table storage bins full of messed-up household appliances are a no-brainer. Particularly for your wild, freespirited kids, you may just need to encourage a bit of analytical destruction and they’re on their way. We also have project write-ups for many model-less projects in a little folder with photos and all, but this is most often used when a kid has exhausted interest in our set of models. Many of these write-ups have cookbook directions, but even these directions offer various paths to various goals. We attempt to avoid cookie-cutter projects at all costs.

We have this free-form scheme running at our satellite sites as well, where we drive a van full of tools and materials and project models to locations with high kid concentrations. We unload our stuff—a few boxes of junk, a set of plastic drawers full of supplies, and a desktop scroll saw and hand power drill—and haul it all into the community space, whether it be a park or an apartment complex, then let the tinkering begin.

We also do limited free-form tinkering at events such as Earth Day or the Strawberry Festival, or at a family science night at a school. We’ll have piles of just a few different materials toward a couple of project possibilities, and let kids and families tinker with them in whatever manner they so choose.

Class Group Tinkering

The class group scheme is what we use when we go to schools or when we receive set groups of kids at the Workshop. This may take place either during the school day or after school. We take materials for a single project and let everyone tinker at making their own, either alone or in groups. We prepare one or two working models of the project and show how it works at the beginning of the period. We show more or less how to tinker it together, giving detailed directions at tricky or dangerous parts and vague directions for the rest, leaving plenty of room for creativity and new ideas. Then we ask a couple of focus questions to get them thinking about how it works and spend the rest of the period tinkering. Five or ten minutes before the end of the period, with luck after a bit of cleanup has occurred, we attempt to sit the students down in a tight group and have a discussion about what happened, what they observed, and what they learned. We’ll go back and address the focus questions if anyone is interested.

In this scheme, we’re limited by the time restrictions of an institution and also by the fact that on any given day, some students are there not by their own choice. This difference is vast and significant. Tinkering doesn’t necessarily fit well into time restrictions. When kids know they may not be back, we can’t encourage large projects.

When everyone is tinkering toward a similar goal, there are inevitable bottlenecks, at the drill station for example. And finally, just one kid who’s being forced to participate in something she’s uninterested in can sour the whole room.

Still, there are advantages. Over the weeks, we can run through a set of projects that give kids a deeper view into a topic, such as electricity and magnetism or light and color. We’ll choose projects we know to be widely popular and encourage uninterested students to alter them to their own satisfaction, or even tinker with the materials we’ve provided toward a completely different project vision.

It’s nice to have everyone on the same page when we’re discussing what’s going on; everyone can offer observations from their own experience. It’s nice to have a final discussion—closure is good for everyone—though in our experience, it’s the single most difficult part of the day: the minds of kids who’ve been taught at all day long and are ready to go home are not necessarily open for more pondering. Sometimes we try to do the closure in small groups as they’re finishing up their tinkering. This way there is less tension and stress when kids are ignoring the discussion and goofing off.

We do our class group tinkering with two high-school helpers whenever possible. The more help you have, the less direction you have to give, and the more you can let kids figure things out themselves. The limit is often the kids’ toleration of frustration; we want to give them the valuable chance to struggle through a problem without assistance but also want to be able to run over at the last minute before they chuck the pieces in the trash and give up for life. Clearly some students are more used to this model of learning than others. More on these issues shortly.

One final note on tinkering structures: at the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop, we rarely carry out the standard laboratory exercise, with set procedure, single phenomenon analysis, data taking, and report. We rarely do an “inquiry exercise,” where the students are walking together with the instructor through a limited set of experiences, talking about them as they go. We also lecture to the students as little as possible. To be clear, we don’t think any of these are ineffective or unwise ways of doing education. We do see that schools have more or less got them covered. Many schools are extremely constrained in what they can do, and while we may try to influence them to change and broaden their vision, at the Workshop we strive in large part to do what schools don’t. Thus we try to maximize freedom and student choice, maximize the possibilities of pursuing personal fascination, maximize opportunities for students to seek their inner genius, and maximize joy.¹

Frameworks for Tinkering

Aside from choosing the structure in which the tinkering occurs, you’ll need to think about the general framework you want to create around it. The results will be quite different within different frameworks. I’ll describe four here, and certainly there are others.

Studio

This is our modus operandi for the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop: free-form, open door, open structure—a big welcome to all to start and continue tinkering projects of their choice. We provide a sort of community space for tinkering. I’ve likened our Community Science Workshops to libraries, rec centers, and clubhouses, and here’s another comparison: a communal artist studio, where the materials and tools are shared and the goals are determined by the participants. Our place is really well set up for this, but I’ve seen classrooms transformed into very nice tinkering studios, too.

Competition

This is a common one in school science class or engineering clubs: make a device that beats the others. Good fun and the quintessential external motivation,² a competition focuses the tinkering toward a singular goal. Most engineers end up competing regularly in the reality of the business world, though environmental engineers often have broader goals, and public works engineers must cooperate with many and varied interests. Don’t forget that in nearly every competition the majority of the kids lose. This is not insignificant.

Cooperation

This is also popular: “Let’s all work together to build a duct tape boat!” The bigger the project, the easier it is for a lot of students to be involved in it. But kids all tinkering on separate projects can also be cooperative because they’re trading ideas, giving suggestions and critique, etc. The cooperative tinkering can also be toward a reallife issue, such as growing gardens or understanding bicycles enough to fix them. (Of course, you can encourage cooperation regardless of the framework. I think it’s always a good idea. The space can be arranged so that it’s easy for students to work together. The facilitator can set the scene, perhaps with a, “Hey, be sure and check out one another’s projects; you may get some good ideas and may even want to work together.”)

Individual Exposé

This is the science fair model, often quite competitive, but unnecessarily so. Instead of giving medals to the “winners” while declaring that winning isn’t everything, why not a certificate to each entry describing the unique excellence that it has? You needn’t coordinate with the local branch of the national science fair if it seems too difficult or limiting. Each kid or group of kids can work on a tinkering project with the goal of showing it at a public event or to a group of people (bigwigs, parents, younger kids, peers, and old folks). I’ve done several “mini-museums” this way, and Mini Maker Faires following this model are sprouting up all over. An external audience often changes the way things go and is a good experience for kids. Having to explain and answer questions about your tinkering is fine brain exercise.

Characteristics of a Good Tinkering Session

Facilitating tinkering well is much like excelling at any art form. It entails nailing a whole range of factors spot-on every time. Here’s a list of some of those factors in no particular order.

The session is focused on the students

Not the final projects, not the materials, not the tools (valuable as they may be), not the concepts you hope the students learn, and certainly not you. You are accompanying these youngsters in the process of learning to tinker and learning from tinkering, so focus on them.

The facilitator is not lecturing much to the group

I’d say 20 percent of the time is an absolute maximum, and that’s only when you are dealing with a complex topic and the students are way interested in it. We routinely talk for less than 15 minutes out of a two-hour class group session. At the free-form Workshop, we may not talk much at all beyond giving occasional, on-demand pointers. We’ve noticed that this can be tough for experienced teachers; old habits die hard. But the point here is that the student will learn primarily from the stuff, only secondarily from you.

The facilitator is engaged nearly constantly with the students

This one is a particular challenge for me. When everyone is tooling away on their tinkering, sometimes I like to just let them go. It’s OK to just tinker quietly along beside the students, but it is nearly always beneficial to get a student to talk about the current state of their project. If one doesn’t want to talk, others will. Aside from developing language and communication skills, they’re crystallizing what they’re doing, planning, and learning.

Students are working together

Students often want to build their own project and often don’t want to help one another, but we still encourage them to work together as much as possible. They’ll learn more that way, even if one of the things they learn is that they’d rather tinker solo.

Many materials are available, and many options are open

We try to approximate the universe in our Workshop, and it’s not unreasonable. In the end, we all live in the universe, so what argument can you make for the benefit of limiting this reality for your students? Essentially, all limitations we do impose are natural—no, we can’t build a nuclear reactor, no we can’t experiment with real gold—as opposed to arbitrarily determined by us. As I learned from my friends who work in early child development, we look for every opportunity to say, “Yes!”

Questions are thick in the air

How does this work? Have you ever seen anything like this before? Why is yours running so much smoother than mine? Did you see my cousin’s version of this, with the car battery? Do you remember learning about this in school? Is this like what we did last year with the egg cartons and syringes? Is there any way to make this work better? How can I change mine into a birthday present for my mom? How come when I do this, that happens? What the heck is going on here?

(This one’s a bit nebulous...) There is an atmosphere of joyous desperation

You’ve seen kids offered some challenge, such as getting a ball out of a tree, and go nearly berserk falling over themselves to solve the problem. That’s what we’re looking for. That’s the mind wide open and ready to suck in any new knowledge or wisdom that floats by. Of course, there is rarely any true time pressure for anything when you’re a kid, but when you’re keen to work on something, you want to really go at it! Alternatively, you can also aim for the calm, steady, Zen sort of tinkering that you’ll often find in violin makers or jewelry crafters. You may have a different population of kids than me—I think I’ve achieved that with my students two or three times in the last 20 years.

Clear order exists amidst the noise and mess

Again, it’s a balance, but entirely possible. For safety’s sake, the floor must be reasonably clean and the hazardous tools must be used in an orderly fashion. It must be clear who’s in charge and the boundaries of behavior must be well known by all. Beyond that, take an aspirin for your head and revel in the good, good learning.

Students

(Here I’ll be talking in broad generalizations; obviously each kid is a special gem of unfathomable potential, always changing and growing. Don’t fall into the treacherous trap of thinking that the one who’s the bane of your existence will always be, or that the little genius is the one heading for greatness. Still, I think it’s useful to lay out these general thoughts.)

At the Workshop, we see some kids who’ve never touched a tool, never been given the opportunity to solve a technical problem, never learned to tie their shoes (thanks a lot, Velcro!), and who turn to authority to know what to do in any given situation. It’s an irony that often this kid resists listening and following directions, since in the end, that’s all he really knows. When away from authority, he’ll often follow his buddies, which is not an entirely healthy way to live. A good tinkering session can be a life-changing experience for him.

With this kid in the free-form tinkering scheme, we’ve found that we’ll need to suggest a project, put him with others already tinkering with a goal, or stay with him until we’ve found a good match and he’s well plugged in. This kid can be pretty fragile. Once in a while, we’ve been too busy with other kids to stay with him, and he leaves frustrated, never to return. In the class group situation, he’ll often be the screwball, disrupting to avoid showing his lack of comfort, claiming boredom (yeah right, with all these tools and materials?), or just shutting down. It takes insistent, calm, repetitive invitation and just the right amount of assistance to make it work for him. Your first goal as facilitator is for him to have a good taste of success.

We also get master tinkerers, some of them know-it-alls. Well, come right in! Sometimes she’ll have a project idea all ready in the incubator that is her mind. She may ask for assistance or she may not. A lot of times she’ll run into obstacles and need our help. In the event that she’s not jamming away on a project, we’ll put her to work helping others if she’s keen to, and regularly pump her for new ideas. Some kids like this can be on the lazy side, in which case they’ll build a few awesome projects and then complain that “there’s nothing new here.” Oh, no, no, my friend: that’s why you’re here! I have this funny little motor and gear setup someone ripped from a DVD player, and I was thinking you could hook it up to this toy bear to get a reciprocating motion. We truly do look to these young masters for new ideas, new versions of old tinkering projects, new life from old junk. We’ve seen time and time again that the best ideas for kids come from kids. Most kids come into the Workshop, wander around, choose something to do, and start working on it. In the class groups, most kids see the project, are interested in trying it out, and start in at it. As they begin to work, you can soon get a feel for their previous experience in that given area of tinkering, their dexterity with this set of tools, and also their general ability to solve problems and figure things out. Your facilitation then should respond to their realities, here and now. Frustration is a common response to tinkering. Dealing with and overcoming frustrating situations is key to successful tinkering, and I would say also to a happy life. Here the tinkering facilitator can really make positive changes in kids, though sometimes it’s painful. A key question for facilitators is this: what’s your response to a kid whining to you for help when he could very well figure it out himself by looking around and asking his colleagues for direction? This situation arises nearly every day for us, and it takes some skill and fortitude to confront it gently, firmly, and effectively each time.

This frustration management is the very core of what we offer by facilitating tinkering. If kids can handle their own frustration, they won’t need us to help them tinker. Many, many do need us desperately and are much for the better when, with our help, they’ve worked through a snag. Think what you may about the relative benefits to humanity of various professions, but when I’ve helped a whiny kid to understand that she can do it herself or that she can get help from any number of sources or she can figure out what’s holding her back and fix it, I’m very much satisfied with my place in the universe.

I tell my students that when they’re feeling extremely frustrated, they should also be experiencing a rising joy, since they’re nearly at the point of breaking through. That “tinkerer’s high,” like the surge of a long-distance runner, is not only pleasant and fulfilling, but also an essential ingredient to the overall experience of a scientist, engineer, technician, or artisan. Keep your eyes open for it, both in yourself and in your students.

Certain students will benefit tremendously from the hands-on tinkering experience. These students have had a rough time in the classroom, with great difficulty in learning and remembering what they’re “supposed” to know. They’ve been told repeatedly by institutions and by individuals that they’re not smart and not good at various skills. Not all students that schools have labeled failures will thrive on tinkering, but a good chunk of them will. Maybe the kid can’t or won’t listen and follow directions, but when she’s given freedom to figure things out and create things herself, she can shine. If she’s the communicative sort, you’ll hear about it as she walks away: “I’m good at tinkering!” or “I can make anything with tools!”

The kid’s found her genius. She’s on her way to self fulfillment, which means there’s less chance she’ll be a drag on society when she grows up. It’s heartening to know that years of oppressive, nagging degradation in our homes and institutions can be countered by a few successful flings in the realm of tinkering. The positive experience you facilitate with a kid tinkering may have multitudinous ramifications in their future. They may have renewed patience to try to learn at school and new dreams of a potential career. As Dan Sudran says, we’re not just messing around with kids and junk here, we’re changing the world. Keep the faith.