Tinkering
What is Tinkering?
Tinkering is about creating challenges, learning from failure and being able to explore and invent new things. All these experiences are hands-on learning. Children taking part of tinkering allows them to engage in an environment or activity that enables them to explore and test new ideas with materials and objects as desired. A purpose to tinkering is being resourceful, being able to use the materials available to recreate or create something out of the ordinary.
How to implement Tinkering in school?
Bevan, Petrich, and Wilkinson (2015) explain how tinkering can be bought into schools. There are research and experience in suggestions of guidelines in bringing tinkering into schools. Theses include:
Create environments for making.
Interleave fabrication and tinkering.
Provide multiple pathways.
Show that making is common practice.
Don’t equate making with tools alone.
For more detail on tinkering guidelines visit http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/dec14/vol72/num04/Tinkering-Is-Serious-Play.aspx#tinkering
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What Tinkering looks like
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| The first idea was not so successful. |
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| This is our final product and it worked most of the time. |
Feb 15, 2017
The marble experience is like the experiment I have done in
the course Concept Development of Science; these both were focused on a
constructionist perspective. However, this marble run experiment had limited
materials/manipulative that were used to make a marble course. With limited
materials, its supports individuals and the group to become more open-minded
and think outside of the box, coming up with unlimited solutions and tests to
make a successful marble course. With such experience, it allowed every
individual to work for hands on and as a team to come up with something that
would smoothly run a marble through to the final pit. Limited materials, with
many minds it allowed myself and other within the group to develop our own
learning experiences through the trial and errors - during the process of
creating and altering where each material should be placed for a marble to run.
Overall, this experience was a way for us to seek examples of how to
incorporate activities like these in classrooms and watch how children can
learn and build on their own experiences and knowledge.
After the workshop, we worked on a reflection based on
Learning and Playing Through Constructivism.
We focused on discussing:
What? - What was the marble run purpose, what did we do,
what outcomes were there?
So What? - What did we learn, how did we work through the
process, what did we find?
Now What? - what can we do next, how can we
extend this activity, what to consider? 
