Preface
You must have seen infants and toddlers tinkering with things: they’ll focus intently on some little object, say a little wooden box, grasp it clumsily, claw at it, look at it from all sides, shake it, pound on it trying to break it open. At some point, all of a sudden—pop—it comes open! Now the undexterous hands gather the little animal figures lying nearby. One by one the hands jam figures into the box. More and more are stuffed in until they’re sticking out the top. The lid is tried and found not to fit. It is mashed a few times, and then alternatives are attempted. More force is applied with large, local objects. A few figures are removed. The lid is tried again. An iterative process is begun until the lid finally snaps shut on the animals.
The kid just learned a bit about volume, three-dimensional space, opening and shutting, space and matter, properties of materials, arrangement of objects (“packing”), and the value of repeated attempts. This was done with no institution, no teacher, no curriculum, no explicit or predefined goals, no grades, no tests nor evaluation of any kind, no threat of punishment nor penalty, no reward, no praise, no scaffolding, no final discussion nor debriefing nor facilitated closure, but with immense and easily visible satisfaction. Young kids also learn like this in groups, with the significant advantage that they can learn from one another’s input as well.
I’ve never once heard anyone ask of this situation, “Well, yes, she is having fun, but is she learning anything?” Everyone believes she is, and a multibillion-dollar industry is built on selling parents sophisticated versions of that box and those animals precisely because parents want their kid to learn in this way. On the contrary, and quite perplexingly, when older students are exploring and tinkering in just the same manner, especially if it happens to be in an institution mandated to carry out education, one can hardly describe the scene without a chorus of glowering skeptics chiming in, as if on cue: “Well, yes, they’re having fun, but are they learning anything?”
Here’s my answer, the answer of this book: heck yes they’re learning something, and it may be the most valuable thing they’ve learned all week, and it may raise all sorts of questions in their minds that inspire them to learn more about what they’re tinkering with, and it may start them on a path to a satisfying career, not to mention good fun on their own time, and it may put them in the driver’s seat of their own education by realizing their competence and ability to learn through tinkering, and they may begin to demand more of just this sort of learning opportunity.
If you question how I know this learning took place in the course of that tinkering, I’ll have to confide that I have no proof beyond the following: most kids have learned oodles and oodles of stuff, including talking and walking, texting, and skateboarding, with just this hit-and-miss, trial-and-success, seat-of-the-pants approach. I believe this is called “proof by inspection.”
Now, you can get a PhD trying to show, incontrovertibly, that learning is happening in a tinkering environment, or attempting to work out exactly how it is happening. I’ll certainly not stand in your way. That’s far and away more important than developing the next generation of fill-inthe-bubble exams. But I’m not so interested in that. I’m comfortable with my gut instinct, and I’m enormously interested in and committed to trying to get more kids tinkering.
One of the great challenges scientists face when doing science is to hold their own experience as a single data point, worth no more and no less than the thousands of others they’ll need to draw a legitimate conclusion. But as you tread the path toward drawing a conclusion on this topic, allow me to present to you my data point to add to yours and all those others.
I grew up tinkering. Some of my earliest memories are tinkering. I have some memories of my dad tinkering beside me, and many memories of him trying to explain questions that arose during my tinkering, but mostly my memories are of hours and hours of lone tinkering, and then hours and hours of tinkering with my nerdy little buddies. These are deliciously sweet memories, and, given time, I can detail hundreds of concepts and truths I uncovered in the course of that tinkering, some of which were life’s absolute essentials and some of which I continue to use on a daily basis. I repeat: I learned that stuff through tinkering and because of tinkering.
I feel fortunate to have had this experience, and I see that it is often hard for people who have not grown up tinkering to learn to learn through tinkering (that was not a typo). It is certainly not impossible, but it’s as challenging as taking up music after ignoring it for the first several decades of your life. That said, you can absolutely make great music, and more importantly fulfill your life by making music, even if you take it up at a late date. The same is true for tinkering. Thus I encourage you, that is, give courage to you, even if you have never in your memory tinkered1, to begin tinkering today and don’t look back.
I’ve been running tinkering programs through the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop (WESW) for the last 15 years. Our staff of around 10 adults and 20 high-school helpers serves the Watsonville community both in schools and in afterschool sites. It never fails to stun me temporarily when a teacher or after-school facilitator has observed kids tinkering in our program and proclaims, as if offering breaking news, “The kids sure love it!” It is sad to think that perhaps it is not the norm but rather something rare and special to see joyful kids learning. I certainly see joy and enthusiasm as the status quo in all our programs. It’s a rare day when nobody present has a eureka moment. We see that many kids hunger for this stuff, stay engaged a long time, stay excited about it long after they’ve walked away with their new creation, and even bug us about it later when we see them again.
We work with a lot of “at-risk” kids, rough kids who are falling through the cracks of the system. We actually seek out these kids because we see that they are often quite successful at tinkering, using tools, making a project work, and adding new ideas. It is clear that often this success is new to them and that it builds confidence. This sort of confidence is solid—not the ephemeral sort that comes and goes with an authority figure’s praise—for after a successful tinkering experience, there is no question of the student’s capabilities. She needs no external indication beyond the functional project in hand to know that she has mastered those tools and materials and amassed those competencies, which are not soon lost. We also work with serious high-school students on track to high-powered colleges. They may know that
but they’ve never seen nor felt that magnetic force (F) spin a tiny coil of thin wire, having an electric current (qv), and suspended between the poles of a normal battery in the magnetic field (B) of a small magnet. It’s a working motor, merrily whirring away at around 600 rpm. We do this project even with elementary school students, but the high-school students can really sink their teeth into the concepts behind it.
Whether you’re a sage tinkerer or just about to take the plunge, I bid you Godspeed in your plans to do tinkering with your students, kids. You must know it’s much easier to sit and tell them stories, read from the textbook, and hand out questions and answers all prepackaged and indisputable. They won’t gain much from that, though, and it won’t feed their souls. They’ll get much more out of exploring and creating with an open-ended objective and a variety of materials and tools.
How to use this book
I wrote this book for adults to read, but if you’re a kid, welcome! Nothing here will cause you irreparable damage, and you may even get some insight into your own education. If you’re an adult, you should know that in the project sections I’ll be addressing you as the original student. This means I trust that you’ll go have an authentic tinkering experience for yourself before you try to set one up for your students. Even if you do read the activities here, run out of time, and end up tinkering together with students without first trying it out solo, know that you’ll be learning, just like them, and the more conscious you can be of this learning, the better you’ll be able to facilitate theirs. This also means in the project sections, I’ll tell you personally how to do it, but not much about how to lay it on your students.
I try to avoid the “once removed” language of some education books, where the teacher/facilitator is magically considered to have a deep understanding of something that is new to them. Thus, I don’t say, “tell the students the following” or “ask the students what they observe.” Instead I’ll tell you what to do and ask you what you observe. Then you can do the same with your students. In the text chapters I try to give you what tools and perspectives you need to make great tinkering happen on your own terms with your own group of students or your own kids, who you know much better than I. I wrote the book to be practical, first and foremost. I’ll cite a few research findings and other info sources, but only when they apply straightaway to carrying out good teaching with tinkering.
This is something of a reference book, so feel free to scan down to the given topic you’re concerned with. What will be presented comes primarily from what we’ve learned in our successful programming of over 20 years at the Community Science Workshops (CSWs) I’ve been part of in California, especially the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop, a small arm of the City of Watsonville Department of Public Works. We’ve received a lot of valuable feedback on the serious tinkering we do, and we’ve used that to hone our programs to great effectiveness.
In the chapters that follow I’ll give you a bit of background on why I think learning through tinkering is important now and has been throughout history (Chapter 2). I’ll lay out what a good tinkering session looks like (Chapter 4). There are a whole passel of logistics involved in carrying out tinkering with your students, but don’t worry, I’ve got you covered (Chapter 6). When teaching kids through tinkering it is best to think about the community or communities you’re working in as well as the kids’ roles in the little tinkering community you create (Chapter 8). I can assure you that many questions will arise in a good tinkering session, and you are not likely to know the answers to all of them, but that’s OK (Chapter 10). Finally, as long as you’re doing tinkering, you may as well align it to your state science standards and think about how you will assess the students (Chapter 12).
Now let’s get to it! We’ll start with a real tinkering activity!
Conventions Used in this Book
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Acknowledgments
Thanks first to Gustavo Hernandez (and on and on), champion maker-of-all-things, tinkerer extraordinaire, soul mate and ultimate partner in crime for so many good years at the WESW. Thanks to Angelica Gonzalez who took over from me, and now the amazing Jose Sandoval, born and raised on tinkering at the Fresno Science Workshop. Thanks to all the WESW staff: Araceli Ortiz, Aurora Torres, Darren Gertler, Emilyn Green, Fabiola Pizano, Nestor Orozco, Omar Vigil, and Sal Lua, who make it happen for so many kids. Thanks to City of Watsonville staff and admin: Tami Stolzenthaler, Nancy Lockwood, Bob Geyer, David Koch, Steve Palmisano, Carlos Palacios, Carol Thomas, Clara Cawaling, and all the many others. And to council members Oscar Rios, Manuel Bersamin, Daniel Dodge, Lowell Hurst, Nancy Bilicich, and Eduardo Montesino for keeping the fire alive. Thanks to other CSW directors: Dan Sudran, Rich Bolecek, Manuel Hernandez (here it is, after all these years!), José Sanchez, George Castro, as well as all their staff—for ongoing brilliance and inspiration. Thanks to my mentors past and present: John King, Phillip and Phyllis Morrison, Paul Doherty, Maurice Bazin, Modesto Tamez, and Dan Sudran—for knowing how to pass it on in just the right manner. Thanks to colleagues who offered editorial suggestions: Sherry Hsi, Bronwyn Bevan, and Frances Gabrielson. Thanks to Jocelyn Garcia for helping with photos, Emilyn Green, Sol McKinney and Sarah-Jayne Reilly for their photos, and thanks especially to Sonya Rosario Padron for rescuing a bunch of photos. Thanks to my wonderful partner Pamela for helping me through another book. And of course thanks to my dear parents Frances and Richard Gabrielson, who always wholeheartedly supported my tinkering, sometimes to the tune of dozens of rolls of sticky tape per year.