Engaging your community through tinkering
How do we build capacity to engage and collaborate with communities outside our walls through tinkering and making? By offering the tinkering approach to learners and educators in communities and contexts outside our venues we can build genuine partnerships and study what learning through tinkering in such spaces might look like in the future.
In this workshop we will leave the comfortable walls of our own venues and take a trip to three different types of initiatives: projects in primary school settings (engaging students in deprived areas with low science capital); projects with social workers and underserved youths; activities in public spaces (parks, libraries and markets). Each time we will get first-hand experience with tinkering projects and see how the tinkering practice is embedded in each context through a hands-on activity. This will serve as a basis for discussion on the role and potential of tinkering and making in different communities with an emphasis on the unique existing culture and values of each place.
Session speakers
Since 2012, Sarah Funk works as a project manager at the Association ScienceCenter-Network in Vienna. We have organized tinkering activities in public spaces, such as parks, market squares and libraries, as well as in our pop-up science center “Knowledge°Room”. I would like to share our lessons learned with these open and sometimes very unpredictable (outdoor) settings, and encourage others to leave their “comfort zones” and be surprised how rewarding these experiences can be.
MIT Media Lab - Research Affiliate
San Francisco
United States
Sebastian is an educator and developer of learning experiences at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. In the Tinkering Studio, visitors become deeply engaged in an investigation, and create personally meaningful projects. A range of choices are available, collaboration is encouraged and a large assortment of materials, tools, and technologies are provided for learners to use as they tinker. Learn how this tinkering approach impacted students of a 2 year after-school program in an historically underserved school district.
Since 2018, Meie van Laar is head of Education and Research at NEMO Science Museum. As project manager of the Tinkering projects, She has developed tinkering activities for schools as well as for our regular visitors at our Makerspace at NEMO Science Museum. During this development at NEMO we found out that tinkering is easy accessible for everyone. Last year we focused on schools in deprived areas with students (and families) with a low science capital. We are now in the middle of the process of developping a teacher training, and helping schools to start tinkering at their own schools. We love to share with you our first results and our lessons learned.
