2 The Value of Tinkering in the Learning Process

If you bought this book, it’s likely that you already have an instinctive understanding of the value of tinkering. However, I’d like to take a few pages to expose tinkering’s central role in learning and the creation of knowledge, both in the past and within today’s educational institutions.

Why Tinkering Is Essential

Frank Oppenheimer, brother of Robert, who led the Manhattan Project, created the Exploratorium in San Francisco: a museum of art, science, and human perception. For over 40 years it has been an international paradigm of hands-on science museums.

Frank’s great idea was that people can enjoy themselves at a deep level and learn a lot by tinkering around with things, and should thus have the chance to do so in a public space specifically set up for this activity. He knew he didn’t need much funding to get started with such an endeavor, and he knew that to be a world-class museum, the public would need to be involved from the very start. Thus, in 1969, after obtaining a lease on the magnificent Palace of Fine Arts from the City of San Francisco for $1 a year, Frank moved in a lot of his old science lab demonstration apparatus, along with heaps of interesting materials, and set up a basic shop. He then put up a welcome sign, opened the door, and began tinkering with whoever came in.

Since writing this, the Exploratorium has moved to a new and bigger site across town, for which many of the exhibits have been rebuilt. Some of the originals remain, together with hundreds of fresh new ones, all allowing visitors to tinker with fundamental aspects of nature. The essence of the exhibits is a focused and particularly intimate manner of experiencing and interacting with a natural phenomenon. Many millions of visitors have been inspired by the opportunity to tinker by means of these exhibits. The Exploratorium Teacher Institute created the award-winning Science Snackbook, which has directions for making simplified versions of the best of these exhibits with common materials in any classroom. The fantastic response to this book enabled many more students to have the experience of tinkering with natural phenomena. Frank, who died in 1985, would have been thrilled. Back when he was a teacher, he noted that students in a given class often had no idea why they were there. He thought this was

“...a scandal. Their experience was so meager, their whole contact with the natural world so restricted, that I thought a place was needed where they could walk through a kind of woods of natural phenomena. ¹”

Later he would describe the value of the Exploratorium in terms of that personal experience:

“The notion that you can learn everything without ever doing it, as is sometimes implied in the classroom, is...outrageous, and the important thing in the Exploratorium is that people feel free to touch things, to change things, to make their own discoveries... It’s like the difference between teaching swimming in a classroom and teaching swimming in the bay.²”

But today, many students still sit listlessly in science and math class while the teacher talks about phenomena they’ve never experienced. Often my staff and I have seen students’ first taste of tinkering to be startling and new, not like anything they’ve done before. Dan Sudran, founder and director of the original Community Science Workshop, once pointed out that whereas we tend to hope each kid has a bit of experience in the physical world of fixing things, taking things apart, and touching and mangling various materials, today’s high-tech kids have less than no experience: they often have negative experience, in that they have really only tinkered extensively in the virtual world, where the laws of physics and biology needn’t apply.

Dr. John King, my mentor professor at MIT and winner of the Oersted Prize for physics teaching, called the experience with the ins and outs of real stuff “mulch” and saw it as a foremost priority in the production of future scientists. He tinkered endlessly in his lab, which held scrap wood, metal, and plastic on basic workbenches, as well as high-tech diffusion pumps and radiation detectors. He knew full well that both low and high tech are nearly always necessary for significant advances, and so one must have a feel for both, that is, sufficient mulch from a variety of sources, if one is to truly understand and create.

Dr. King developed the X courses at MIT, with my humble assistance. These courses taught basic mechanics and electricity and magnetism concepts by means of a set of “brown bag” experiments that the students brought back to their dorms each week to build and tinker with. Through these personal experiences, they charted some of the fundamental quantities of the universe, such as the gravitational constant and the permittivity of free space.

Students in the standard, non-X courses had to accept this info on the word of authority. Students in the X courses had only to trust their apparatus. This, gentle reader, is an enormous difference. In fact, I believe it is the difference between knowledge and mere information. Dr. John King wrapped it up with his mantra:

There is no substitute for hands-on fooling around with real stuff.

When I first heard his mantra, it rang true. I grew up on a hog farm in Missouri, where I did a heck of a lot of tinkering and learned most of the valuable things in life. Certainly, you can’t raise pigs on theory alone. Everything about the farming process is real. Even when you use information from some authority, such as how much bean meal to add to the corn for maximum efficiency of growth, it is with the knowledge that someone else raised a bunch of pigs with various amounts of bean meal, and found a peak on their graph. In other words, they tinkered systematically with pigs and their feed. It was absolutely not the case that a pig expert came up with this number by some sort of theoretical calculations behind a desk.

So it has always been natural and obvious for me that the authentic personal experience is critical. To offer such opportunities for students continues to be my first priority as an educator. I have carried out this sort of education for years and have seen it work exceptionally well in our Community Science Workshops and the sites we serve. I’ve seen schoolteachers pulling it off admirably in the face of stultifying restrictions in their classrooms.

I also see it at the hardware and home-improvement stores I frequent: families of all backgrounds buying stuff to do it themselves. They’ve already figured out the problem and objective; now they’re out to fix it or improve it, and in the process they’ll learn plenty. Doing it yourself is a branch of tinkering that is cheap, practical, fun, and hip, and it’s likely to teach you things you never dreamed of asking. Make: magazine, with its glorious regional Maker Faires, has been spreading the good word for years, and it’s all over the Web too. Instructables.com now has posted directions for approximately a gazillion projects you can peruse and tinker from, and Maker Shed continues to offer small electronic kits on the Web and in nearly every sizable community in the nation. Clearly, this tinkering thing is not going away anytime soon.

Tinkering Throughout History

Something so phenomenally wonderful could not be new. There is great a book called “Tinkering Throughout History.” It hasn’t been written yet, but it’s going to be a best seller. Imagine all the things we use regularly, absolutely rely on, that were developed through tinkering! The best stories will be from prehistory: fire, wheels, basketry, pottery, basic metallurgy. It will be a bit of a trick to write this book, as there will be no first-hand sources. But that doesn’t have to stop us from visualizing the scene, the cave person standing beside the fresh lava flow, shielding her face from the intense heat, dipping the stick into the molten magma again and again to see it catch fire and then burn out. “This could be really useful!” she mutters to herself.

But seriously, there is a book that outlines quite a bit of what humanity has learned from tinkering. It’s called A People’s History of Science; Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanicks” (Nation Books, 2005). Clifford D. Conner does start with prehistory and continues to the modern day, showing how knowledge has been created through people using their hands to tinker with their world. He compiles information from hundreds of sources to present a new, more accurate version of the story.

To understand tinkering throughout history, it is good to know the history of science, so here is a little primer: in the beginning, all was brutish and savage, and the hunter-gatherers knew nothing of science. Then came the Greeks, who thought up most of the useful science knowledge we know today. After that, the Romans used that knowledge to build a great empire, which soon fell, and the world descended into darkness for several centuries while people hunted witches. Through that world of gloom and despair, a sparse few beacons of scientific thought shone forth during the Enlightenment, directing the world to ever more logic and reason and penning the science concepts we now learn in school. Henceforth, every century a few brilliant scientists operating in revered academic institutions would arrive on the scene to advance our understanding of the universe, and to them we need be ever grateful. You chuckle, perhaps, but this is pretty much what you get when you read your average account of the history of science. You are left with the impression that the greats were great solely due to their intelligence and persistence, that there was no context to their discoveries, that they figured it all out themselves by thinking hard about general principles. In short, you’d be left to think there was no tinkering, only grand experiments in professional labs, and then only to prove wise, prophetic theories, which preceded the lab work and always turned out right.

Reading the history of science is a lot like reading the history of women in a normal history book: what’s missing is more important than what’s written. Most history you read is just that: his story, not hers. If you want to know her story, you have to dig a bit deeper, work a little harder. Likewise, if you want to know what we’ve learned from tinkering, you may not get it in your average science history book.

For instance, if you are curious about where Newton got his background and motivation to work on the problem of gravity and planetary motion, you have to understand that the entire mariner community of Europe at the time was working to solve the ultra-practical problem of determining longitude at sea. Newton made use of all the empirical data and findings from navigators and ships’ astronomers to form his theory. This is often skipped over by his biographers to make space for more aggrandizing praise of his persona.

Conner’s thesis, roughly synopsizing, is that nearly all the scientific knowledge we have came to us by means of tinkering. Hunter-gatherers tinkered with resources at their disposal to create tools and agriculture. Ancient mariners tinkered with navigation and shipbuilding to arrive at successful methods. The Greeks, along with the Egyptians and Babylonians and Chinese before them, tinkered with what their predecessors had developed to find out even more.

Perhaps most fascinating of all, during the Renaissance and “Scientific Revolution,” when the famous scientists we all know and admire made such great strides forward, there were parallel and leading advances being made within the craft guilds and artisan’s organizations, advances we rarely read about. These vocational groups were not at the top of the social ladder, and the elite institutions looked down on them, mostly ignoring the value of their contributions. But a few broad-minded scientists from the mainstream realized that this was where real knowledge was being generated, where the real breakthroughs were happening. These scientists descended the social ladder, entered the workshops, mines, and herbariums, gathered the information available there, and used it to form new scientific frameworks for understanding.

Some of these scientists, notably Galileo and Boyle, gave full credit in their writings to the craftspeople and artisans whence they took their empirical information, yet this key element is often missing from their biographies. Other scientists tried to cover up what they’d lifted from common practitioners, claiming individual genius. Sometimes bitter disputes arose around this intellectual property. After all, the scientists were often independently wealthy, whereas the artisans relied on proprietary information to maintain an edge in the market.

Conner’s examples are myriad. William Gilbert wrote a groundbreaking academic treatise on magnetism in 1600 based entirely on experimentation, something unheard of in that time. Where did he get his methods and data? Not from the scribbling of ensconced academics devoid of first-hand experience, but rather from people who knew magnets well and used them in their everyday work: blacksmiths, miners, sailors, and instrument-makers. Galileo worked out the mathematical proof that launching a projectile at 45° will achieve maximum horizontal distance, but freely revealed that he got that fact not from theoretical prediction but from gunners at the Venetian Arsenal. Robert Boyle (of Boyle’s law fame, hailed as the first real chemist distinct from his alchemist predecessors) made it clear to his contemporaries that to attain useful data it is essential to go “to such a variety of mechanick people (as distillers, druggists, smiths, turners, &c.), that a great part of his time, and perhaps all his patience, shall be spent in waiting upon tradesmen...” Conner summarizes that thus:

“the experimental method that characterizes modern science originated not in the minds of a few elite scholars in universities but in the daily practice of thousands of anonymous craftsmen who were continuously utilizing trial-and-error procedures with materials and tools in their quest to perfect their crafts.³ [Note: By “craftsmen,” he meant craftspeople.]”

From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively not by removing ourselves from the world to ponder and theorize, but rather by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff. In short, we have learned primarily by tinkering.

Fast-forwarding to the modern world, a bizarre paradox has set in. Despite a thriving do-it-yourself, Maker movement, shop classes are an endangered species, and I still know some people who don’t have a pair of pliers in the house. The level of our reliance on high-tech gadgets and systems is soaring ever higher, and with it our dependency on people who can fix them, yet there continues to exist a social stigma for working with one’s hands.⁴ Despite a screaming need for it, tinkering is still stuck in a charming-but-unnecessary peripheral corner in society’s collective mind.

To be sure, it won’t be possible to go back to prehistory, when pretty much everyone knew pretty much everything about how to extract pretty much all the necessities of life from their environment. The mire of complicated artifacts and materials we thrash through on a daily basis is beyond the grasp of any one mind. Can you think of one mechanical object you rely on daily that you could build from scratch? I’ve been astonished more than once by friends who’ve worked 20 years in the high-tech research and development world but swear helplessness when it comes to getting my laptop back in working condition. It’s easy to see how one could throw up one’s hands at the complexity of it all.

Part of the message of this book is that the paradox need not stand, the complexity need not be daunting, and the stigma can be erased. It is entirely possible, for example, with utmost integrity and self-respect, to learn a good bit about your cell phone/laptop/doorbell/car/furnace/supper by tinkering around with it. The information you acquire may prove useful, or may not, but the process of getting it can be fulfilling and prepare you for further fabulous forays into learning with your hands. Those who work professionally with their hands should be lauded for their vital contributions. We should embrace the manual tinkering trades as integral to our existence and elevate these masters to the level of our academicians. This idea is not so much radical as reality—this is the way our world works.

Not for Everyone?

Some kids are not going to fall in love with hands-on tinkering. Even after tasting carefully thought out, well-presented, opportunity-rich tinkering sessions, some students will choose to learn in more abstract or removed manners. I’ve learned to accept this, though it took years of therapy and medication. No, but really, we all learn differently, and it makes sense that everyone’s seat will not fit in any one saddle. Some people will not tinker with their hands, but rather with ideas, and ideas can also be seen as tools. (Tools that you never have to clean up and put away.) Some people will be content to embrace the computer and only tinker virtually, which is to say, not necessarily with physical reality. That said, several truths still stand.

I think it is indisputable, for instance, that all children need exposure to a hands-on, reality-based, tinkering type of learning at least as much as they need exposure to abstract and rote learning. Since the latter has come to dominate schools, I spend my energy advocating for each and every student to have an opportunity to tinker. Music offers an excellent comparison. Not everyone will be able to carry a tune, or even appreciate the different sounds of different instruments, but it is commonly agreed (though not always funded) that every kid should be exposed to a good deal of music. The same holds with using one’s hands to make something: it’s part of being human.

Furthermore, all sorts of things are impossible to learn without experiencing them in an authentic, personal manner. Take Oppenheimer’s example of swimming again. Do you know anyone who says they can swim but has never jumped into the drink? How about cooking? Music? Sports? Even philosophy: I’m going to be skeptical of any philosopher who hasn’t had personally moving experiences with their belief.

In fact, in addition to mere skills, a range of entire professions—some that impact humanity on a deeply significant level—require learning through hands-on, individual experience. Essentially, there are no great engineers, scientists, architects, technicians, or artists who never had a chance to tinker, play, and try all sorts of variations in their profession. For our future and their own, all kids must be given the chance to tinker.

Especially girls! I encourage you to make a conscious effort to create a space for girls. At the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop, we have Girls Workshop once a week for an hour and a half, followed by an hour and a half of normal open door, coed workshop. We have snacks (and don’t generally have snacks other times) and sometimes a special project. We put up a big banner to remind people passing by that Girls Workshop is on.

The main reason we do this is to give girls a time when the Workshop is theirs, a time when they don’t have to compete with boys for space and attention. If boys come in, we tell them to come back after the girls’ session is over. The boys often react with a whine, “When is Boys Workshop?” to which we respond, “We don’t need a Boys Workshop.”

This is reality: every day boys are encouraged by society and media to engage in activities such as taking things apart, fixing things, operating tools and machinery, designing and building things with their hands, finding solutions to mechanical or electrical or scientific problems, pursuing technical degrees, and entering technical careers. Girls are often encouraged to avoid these things or, at the very least, they are assumed to have no interest in them. Thus, while many boys feel at home in a workshop environment, girls often must go through a critical realization in which they shift their thinking to include Workshop activities within the realm of positive and doable. And fun.⁵ We do everything possible to facilitate that critical realization. It often takes place together with a bunch of friends.

We put some effort into making our project models look attractive to girls (frilly decorations, such as ribbons and pompoms, and plenty of pink), but we are clear in our understanding that girls can and do enjoy every project that boys do, including hydraulic systems, electric cars, rockets, and even model toilets. Thus, there exist no “girl projects” in the Workshop, and we encourage girls to choose from all the projects available. We also encourage boys to learn to knit, sew, and do bead work. We also make a conscious effort to see and hear the girls in the Workshop every day, so for instance, if six kids are screaming for help, we’ll take care of the girls first, with the knowledge that the boys are much more likely to return even if they get frustrated and leave.