Tinkering

 I have been thinking about tinkering lately.  My advanced students are currently working on their passion projects (some call it genius hour) and I had to remind them that it's ok if their original project didn't work out, it's called tinkering.

So, what is tinkering?  It can be something simple like picking up an instrument and listening to the sounds of each string and what notes sound good together.  As you keep tinkering over time it turns into mastering the instrument and playing songs.  It could also continue on and add creativity with it as you create your own songs.  Tinkering can be with whatever your mind creates or wants to learn more of.  I was researching more about it after a Masters course I had taken which introduced tinkering to me in my classroom.  It's called  Invent To Learn by Sylvia Libow Martinez & Gary Stager, Ph.D.

After reading this book there were so many apps, websites, products that I wanted to tinker with myself and introduce the to my students. So I did just that. I picked one of the apps Sketchup for my students to tinker with. It was a total fail! I was so disappointed that my students didn't take right off with it. As I reflected on what went wrong I realized that I didn't prepare my students at all on how to tinker in the first place. I didn't teach them that struggling and exploring is good. I also didn't know much about the app as I was tinkering with it myself. So we paused and went on to do something else while I knew I needed to train myself in their so I can guide my students in their own tinkering.

As I was researching more about tinkering I came across this resource: What You Need to Know About Tinkering, Making and Engineering. This is a good guide for me as I prepare to guide my students with tinkering. I foolishly thought it would be so fun and easy but we live and learn.

One of my students is tinkering with a different 3D design app and along the way we are tinkering together. I've bought a wireless mouse for my student to create through the app. We've also discovered that an apple pencil would be nice to have too but right now we'll have to do without. It goes on my request list if I ever get a grant or something. This is how we learn, we scrape, we struggle, we explore in order to learn. Having ups and downs is normal, it's enlightening. If I want my students to continue to tinker then I need to model it for them as well.