1. Though please, talk to your parents about those first two years. I’m pretty sure...

1. Cole, K. C. Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade, Boston 2009, p.148.

2. Frank’s Quotes on the Exploratorium website: http://www.exploratorium.edu/about/our_story/history/frank/articles/quotes/.

3. Conner, Clifford D. A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives and “Low Mechanicks,” Nation Books, New York, 2005, p. 282.

4. See Crawford, Mathew B, Shop Class as Soul Craft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Penguin Books, New York, 2009.

5. As I write this, the California Makers’ Network is piloting programs that bring tinkering activities to underrepresented youth, including a bunch of girls. One of the primary reasons they believe this is a good idea is that for these communities, tinkering often presents a welcoming door into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics educational and career paths.

1. Don’t tell anyone, but gravity also does this. The earth doesn’t need to touch you to pull you off the high dive and into the pool. You can also see this displayed with electrostatics: a rubbed balloon will attract your hair or a bunch of salt without a touch.

2. Neodymium magnets are 40 times stronger than the black ceramic ones. They are available both new and scrounged from old hard disk drives. These are also great fun and instructive, but they can be dangerous. They’ll smack together on your skin and give you a blood blister or break leaving a wicked-sharp edge.

3. If you are in China, mark the side pointing south, because in China a compass is called a “point south needle,” and since the compass phenomena was first discovered in China, they ought to know. (And by the way, once you know one direction, you can figure out the other three. Never Eat Stale Waffles, so they say, as they turn to the right.)

1. As my mentor-professor John King used to say, if schools were doing this already, and only this, we’d be busy organizing study groups to work on regimented book learning and problem sets Clearly one needs both to learn well. It’s an enigma as to why the school pendulum has swung so far in the direction of rote learning. Some say the pendulum is off its hanger.

2. See Alfie Kohn’s No Contest: The Case Against Competition Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1992, 2nd edition, for an excellent exposé on how little is gained and how much is lost by emphasizing the fight.

1. I won’t be talking about how to set up your program as an organization: nothing on procuring a space, hustling funding, governance, insurance and liability, getting in good with the local political leaders, and maintaining a board that will support you and keep you in line. This stuff is critically important as well, but is covered in many books on the care and feeding of grassroots organizations. Some of our specific information can be found on http://www.csw.org.

2. This is one way CSWs beat big-budget science museums: every community can have one, just as they have libraries and youth programs in art, music, and sports.

3. Some of the worst science museums I’ve visited, incidentally, have begun with plenty of funding and everything in place on opening day. They missed the mark because they were focusing inward to their fancy exhibits instead of looking outward to the communities they were supposed to serve.

4. A bit of caution is advised on donations of hazardous material such as lead-acid batteries: you and your program may incur a charge if you have to go to a special place to dispose of it when you’re done tinkering.

5. When two sounds are close in frequency, they superpose to create a third, much lower frequency called the beat frequency. The beat frequency sounds more like a texture or warble in the other two sounds than a separate tone. You can make it by whistling with a friend: have them whistle a single note, and then try to whistle the same one. As you approach your friend’s frequency, you’ll hear the beats.

6. This question of immediate gratification gets at a much deeper issue that fascinates me. I often sermonize to reckless students about how they are not likely to die soon, and so it would be best to have a plan, at least for the next few years, a vision or dream for the future. At the same time, I’ve studied the slightest bit of Buddhism, and one of the main points is that right here, right now is really all there is, and vastly more important than anything past or future! So are our rough, delinquent, life-on-the-edge, hell-for-leather, live-for-today students actually latent Buddhists underneath it all? I’m not sure, but I’m led once again to believe that I have many, many things to learn from them.

7. I wrote a book about this arrangement and others: Kinetic Contraptions: Build a Hovercraft, Airboat, and More with a Hobby Motor, Chicago Review Press, 2010.

1. Don’t be surprised if you open up one of these references and find your eyes crossing at the site of what appears to be a completely separate language: “transformative enculturation through legitimate peripheral situated participation in a practice community...” It may inspire you to reject it all outright. But also don’t forget the words of Kurt Lewin: “There’s nothing more practical than a good theory!” And know that whatever happens in a given educational situation, it’s following someone’s theories and beliefs, conscious or not. Thus, it’s better to think about it and make sure it makes sense. Then get back to the tinkering.

2. An irrelevant yet irresistible aside: there were no rubrics when I was young. I’m convinced the rapid rise of rubrics, with their carefully crafted columns and categories of characterization is in large part due to the strikingly splendid sound of the spoken syllables in the word itself. Say it three times quickly. Rubric, Rubric, Rubric. Fun, eh? Like kissing a trout...

1. Wait a minute, what the heck is Jello? Animal, vegetable, or mineral? My childhood buddy Brad said it was his favorite food. What did that mean for Brad’s metabolism?

2. As usual, it’s a bit more complicated. Vinegar has got a lot of water in it, and the acid takes the form of disassociated ions in the water. Baking soda also disassociates into ions when it hits the water and vinegar. Two of those ions react to create carbonic acid (H₂CO₃), which is unstable and deteriorates straightaway to give water (H₂O) and carbon dioxide (CO₂).

3. Fourteen what? Fourteen grams per mole of atoms. What’s a mole? A whole bunch of something, 6.022 x 10²³ to be exact, and that’s a monster of a big number; around six hundred thousand billion billions.

1. You may protest by saying that you can learn many unexpected and fascinating things just by keeping your eyes open and staying mindful of the surrounding universe. To this I reply that your mind is thus open with an ever-ready, curious question on anything. This is a truly sublime way to live, and perhaps a paradigm for lifelong learning. This supports my thesis here.

2. Jos Elstgeest wrote a very nice piece on good questions and answers called “The right question at the right time” in Primary Science: Taking the Plunge. Edited by Wynne Harlen. Oxford: Heine-mann Educational, 1985.

3. This is one reason that, with disastrous consequences, tinkering has so rarely found its way into official sets of learning standards. You can almost see the educrats wringing their hands: “With so many learning possibilities available when tinkering, how will we ever determine what the students are supposed to learn? And what will we do, heaven forbid, if they learn something—gasp—that was not among our goals for them??!! No, much safer to stick with the bucket theory of education, that is, the student’s brain is an empty bucket, and teachers should follow our step-by-step script in order to fill it with good, pure information.” Sigh.

1. It is troubling to find no direct mention of the ear in high school standards, an age when nearly every student is channeling many hours of music each day directly to their inner ears, much of it at dangerously high volume levels. Regardless of public health considerations, it is clear that sound and music are deeply significant to kids and thus are obvious topics for science class or tinkering.

2. The Exploratorium Institute for Inquiry has been working on a project that proposes to do just this with schools in Sonoma Valley, California. It is funded by the Department of Education and is meant to last through 2015. Another such effort here in the Monterey Bay area in the late ‘90s was called Language Acquisition in Science Education for Rural Schools (LASERS). Finally, the Australian Academy of Sciences has produced an extensive set of excellent teaching materials for primary schools called Primary Connections that uses experiential learning to link the sciences with literacy.

1. A large, slowly spinning turntable is a popular exhibit at the Exploratorium and other museums. You roll balls, disks and wheels onto it and watch their crazy trajectories. You can even put a small child on and see what happens; mine thought it was great fun.

1. The Exploratorium and Stanford Research Insitute have been doing research on these questions and others related to the broader educational movement around making and tinkering. Watch http://www.exploratorium.edu/cils for information regarding this research.