Tinkering is one of my favorite things to do. I grew up tinkering on a hog farm in Missouri. I got into a decent college and tinkered my way through a physics degree. Since then I’ve tinkered in several countries; for hire and pro bono; with street urchins and PhDs; below sea-level and at 5,000 meters; within elite institutions and with ragtag gangsters; toward lofty goals of enlightenment as well as cheap thrills; with close friends and total strangers; with high-tech paraphernalia and also art, music, and plumbing supplies; at all times day and night; and in various states of dress and undress. It’s all been magnificent and I highly recommend it.

So I wrote a book about my experiences tinkering, especially what I learned running a Community Science Workshop in the rural immigrant community of Watsonville, California. Called Tinkering, it’s full of projects and also info on how to run a small science center.

During and after my time in Watsonville, I was involved in pumping up the science and mathematics education in the tiny new nation of Timor-Leste (East Timor). There the National University and the Ministry of Education both asked me to help develop curriculum and train their science and mathematics teachers, so I have been tinkering with that on and off since 2000. I’ve lived here 10 years over the last 17, and steady since 2012 with my family. In my time in Timor I have learned a heck of a lot more about tinkering, which I’ll do my best to pass on to you in this book.

A lot of the tinkering I’ve done here has been in conjunction with a remarkable group of science and mathematics teachers known as SESIM. The acronym stands for the Center for the Study of Science and Mathematics, a curiously pompous name for these tireless young teachers pushing toward a better way to do education. We call what we do pratika. This is a Tetun word from Portuguese that has come to mean anything hands-on, experiential, lab centered, inquiry based—essentially learning through exploring and investigating; that is, tinkering.

In the United States, there are mobs of people working on doing this sort of education, each with a special tactic, some proclaiming their way to be the one true path to enlightenment. In Timor, essentially nobody else is doing education through tinkering. It’s all chalk and talk in the classrooms, so anything pratika is positive. In a decade or so when everyone here is using real stuff in the science and math classrooms, and kids are all comfortable learning from their own observations of experiments, and teachers are happy receiving and responding to a torrent of questions from their students, we’ll sort out the finer pedagogical distinctions between the 15 or so different inquiry approaches. For now we just play and learn with real stuff and have a rollicking good time at it.

I’ve worked together with the SESIM teacher-trainers to develop hundreds of pratika teaching activities, given dozens of seminars and workshops, and written some 20 manuals full of pratika activities (in Tetum, the lingua franca of Timor-Leste). We recently got ourselves a genuine lab at a large public school in the capital and filled it with interesting junk for tinkering. Local teachers bring their students there, and SESIM uses it as a national science center to support teachers in other districts working to create their own small science centers. I’ve documented some of our work here: www.timorpratika.wordpress.com.

One of the most fascinating parts of this experience for me was learning to use Timor’s set of cheap and free stuff to tinker. In the United States, I’ve long been accustomed to dumpster diving, gleaning from the streets and ditches, and keeping a keen eye on people’s trash.

Here in Timor, trash heaps do not hold nearly the same potential as dumpsters in the United States. On the whole, people tend to use stuff longer, fix it again and again, and throw things out only when they’re really trash. Then a crew of hard-up people roam the streets, making their living off what few valuable things do remain in the trash heaps.

So my colleagues and I have developed activities based on much more meager trash, and we’ve found other sources of cheap and free materials. One such source is the jungle; we’ve got pratika employing bamboo, banana leaves and branches, various parts of various palm trees, coconuts, rock-hard sago nuts, and the earth itself—sand, clay, stones, and pebbles of all sorts. Worry not: I’ll mention substitutions if you have trouble finding some of these in your temperate habitat, but the point is this: if you can’t find the ideal material, get creative!

Don’t spend much money; it’s not sustainable, and sustainability is key. It’s one of the three foundational principles of SESIM that make education work well. The other two are relevance and concreteness. Relevance should be pretty obvious, though it remains a real challenge when using imported textbooks. Concrete concepts are not some sort of limitation but rather the starting point; you should absolutely make the leap to the abstract eventually.

Warning: I’ve written some of these activities to a conceptual depth not common in how-to books; feel free to skim over the science explanations if you’d rather get on with more tinkerings. A few of these activities are not traditional tinkering topics. Free your mind! Food calendars, basketry math, and slingshot physics are absolutely tinkerable, and I’d argue they hold even more value than a 3D-printed Arduino-controlled blinky.

The activities here were developed by SESIM and myself over the last few years, and include influence from far and wide. Feel free to nab any one of them and run to the distant corners of the world.

Safety

Various tinkerings in this book can hurt you if you’re not careful—maybe even seriously. Safety is always first in any successful tinkering session, and here are a few areas of special concern as you use your level head to always be aware of risky situations:

• Hot glue hurts when it touches your skin, and the tip of the glue gun does, too. It will give you a big white blister and take the whole top layer of skin off. This can be quite a learning experience, but most agree that it’s not worth the pain. Using low-temperature hot glue will always work for the activities in this book, and small glue guns are easier to control than large ones.
• Electricity can kill you. None of the tinkerings in this book will connect directly to outlet voltage, but even if you’re just using the hot-glue gun, you should be mindful that the wires inside the insulation have the potential to stop your heart if you happen to touch them.
• Open flames can burn your house down. Don’t let them. Even if it’s just a candle, always have an adult on hand before lighting up. Never experiment with a candle or other flame on surfaces of wood, plastic, or cloth, and never in an environment where there may be other gases or liquids that may catch fire or explode. Having a fire extinguisher on hand is always a good idea. It saved my house once—see Chapter 2.
• Various tools and materials indicated in this book will cut, hack, pinch, poke, impale, or gash your tender skin. Don’t let them. You’re in charge, boss, so it’s up to you to make the tool do what it’s supposed to without hurting you.
• Some operations described in this book with high pressure or tension can launch projectiles, big and small, which can hurt you seriously. Avoid that situation. Your eyes are especially valuable as body parts go, and you should always take care to protect them first. Wearing safety glasses is something to take pride in, a badge of geekdom that you should embrace, heart and soul. Safety glasses will put you squarely on the road to a technical, tinkering future, and you’ll most surely want both eyes healthy to enjoy the whole experience.
• Chemicals can damage your skin or eyes, or even catch fire. There are no desperately dangerous chemicals used in this book, but still: Use caution when you have the slightest doubt about whether a given substance is safe to touch, smell, or mix with other chemicals. Have the fire extinguisher handy and the safety glasses on from the moment you open the bottle of alcohol or bleach, or the moment you begin mixing things you’ve never mixed before.

Note on the Metric System

Like most scientists, I’ll be using the metric system a lot in this book. In a few places I’ll mention miles or gallons or something we U.S. residents are familiar with, but in general, I love the metric system. It’s such a brilliant system that it’s hard to imagine why we don’t use it for everything. The history is pretty interesting. Back in the 1700s, every country and region around the world used different systems of measurement, different units for length, weight, volume, and so forth. Confusion reigned and it was easy to cheat and be cheated.

Then in 1790 five French scientists were commissioned to make a better system, and did they ever. The system they worked out was super simple, super well organized, and rooted in our number system, which happens to be based on the number 10. They said 10 millimeters is a centimeter, and 10 centimeters is a decimeter, and 10 decimeters is a meter, and 1,000 meters is a kilometer, and on and on.

Then, the brilliance continued. These French dudes said, oui, oui, the volume should be related to the length, so they put one cubic centimeter to equal one milliliter, and then 10 milliliters is a centiliter, 10 centiliters is a deciliter, 10 deciliters is a liter, and so on. It’s the same relations for volume units as for length! Oh, it makes my spine tingle.

But it gets better still. To make the connection between volume and mass, they used one of the most important and ever-present substances on Earth: water. They set one gram as the mass of one milliliter—that’s one cubic centimeter—of pure water. And then they linked the other mass units with just the same set of clever prefixes: milli-, centi-, deci-, right on up to kilo-. Isn’t it just gorgeous?

You’d think any reasoning person would see this system and snatch it right up, tossing away the old systems like so much rubbish. After all, 2 cups in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, but then 4 quarts in a gallon? What? And 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, 1,760 yards in a mile? Gimme a break! You can’t be serious!

We got that cumbersome system from the Brits. We sometimes call it the English system, which is kind of a laugh, because the Brits have long since embraced the metric system. (Although they did resist for a long time just because the metric system came from the French, and they hated the French. I like to think the scientists didn’t resist.)

We red-blooded Americans, on the other hand, continue to resist. Picture the scene: it’s 1977, Ms. Hansen’s third-grade class at Eugene Field Elementary School, Maryville, Missouri, time for math. “Children! We’re starting the measurement unit today! The United States has decided to convert to the metric system and so we get to learn all these new units of measure. It’s going to be great!”

She told us all about meters and grams and liters and explained quite clearly that you don’t have to do all the hairy conversion from liters to ounces, or meters to miles, because we’re just going to use the new units, and they’re a piece of cake. So soon the road signs will all be in kilometers, scales will be in kilograms, and drinks will be sold by the milliliter!

We sat there listening to her with starry eyes; sounded great to us! But back home, the adult murmurs began in many a household: Not going to foist that foreign system on me! What the heck is a kilometer anyway? I’ve used gallons all my life, is someone trying to rip us off? Is this some kind of a communist conspiracy?

To make a long, melancholy story short, my childhood compatriots and I got the metric system in math class every year for the next three or four grades, measuring stuff with meters, grams, and liters, before it slowly faded away to its current isolated position within the science lab. Out in the streets, we’ve still got our proud American miles with 5,280 feet, and our proud American pounds with 16 ounces, and our proud American gallons with 16 cups and who knows how many tablespoons, and woe to the person who has to convert between them, or who has to use some metric reference from another country. (Meanwhile, every other nation in greater America, North and South, uses metric.)

The epilogue here is beyond melancholy; it’s straight sad. In 1999 NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter, meant to gather weather data on the Red Planet. Instead of going into orbit, the $125 million instrument burned to a crisp in the thin Martian atmosphere, because the propulsion system was done partly in metric, and partly in “American,” with no conversion. Ouch. I think the engineers cried.

So now you know: embrace the metric system. It’s the best thing going.