Tinkering: Hands-On Learning for All
What is tinkering? “It’s fooling around directly with phenomena, with tools and materials. It’s thinking with your hands and learning through doing. It’s slowing down and getting curious about the mechanics and mysteries of everyday stuff around you. It’s whimsical, enjoyable, fraught with dead ends, frustrating, and, ultimately, about inquiry.” (Wilkinson & Petrich, The Art of Tinkering, 2014)
Tinkering is a powerful, hands-on approach to STEAM education that fosters creativity, problem-solving, and inclusion. By experimenting, making, and exploring, learners of all ages develop critical thinking skills in an engaging, accessible way.
Tinkering means to fiddle with or play around with something. And indeed, tinkering involves one’s intellect as much as one’s dexterity. Tinkerers feel the urge to challenge themselves, individually or as a group, as they discover that it is possible to think with their hands. Developed by the San Francisco Exploratorium in the early 2000s,
Across Europe, several projects are bringing Tinkering to schools, adult education, and libraries, making learning more interactive and inclusive. During this time, the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci (Milan, Italy) has played a leading role in Europe. Growing interest in tinkering led to a series of projects financed by the European Union’s Erasmus+ programme, some of them with TRACES as a partner.
Between 2019 and 2022, the third Tinkering EU project, named “Tinkering EU: Addressing the Adults” sought to transfer the benefits and potential of tinkering to an adult public, with the objective of fostering socio-educational and personal development and civic and social engagement. The project promoted exposure to and training in science and technology, the development of 21st century skills to consolidate people’s professional positions and cultivate a greater awareness of citizenship and engagement in society, while increasing science capital to counter social exclusion and the lack of participation in community life. This project received various Italian and European accolades.
The Museum is currently (2023-2025) involved in the EU’s fourth tinkering project, “Tinkerlib”, which revolves around two different complementary approaches embodied by the two types of institutions that form the consortium (museums/science centres and libraries). These two approaches are tinkering and storytelling, the latter seen as the set of linguistic and expressive competences. The purpose of this project is to spark a change in organisations that concern themselves with informal learning, so they may become spaces for more equitable and inclusive learning, where adults who have traditionally found themselves excluded may develop and strengthen their 21st century skills with the mediation of educators and facilitators, who are in turn involved in training, empowerment and capacity building activities.
The uniqueness of the Tinkering activities lies in its innovative methodology.
The pedagogy of Tinkering addresses people of all backgrounds and walks of life, and is characterized by: the active engagement with materials and activity, the intentionality of action and the conscious desire to learn how to learn. All this is found in activities as simple (or as complex) as putting objects together or apart, making machines moving, flying, designing, floating, exploring materials, mechanical elements or electricity to create original artefacts, sewing circuits together to make jewels, constructing ever lasting chain reactions.
Tinkering has been devised by the Tinkering Studio of the Exploratorium of San Francisco USA and is becoming a worldwide philosophy and practice. The Tinkering Studio programme follows six main strands of work – research and development, the Tinkering Studio itself, collaborations, public events, publications, professional development – that inform and inspire the design of all activities in order to fuel creativity, generate new ideas and solutions, and inspire others to start tinkering at home or in their own institutions.
🔗 More info: https://www.museoscienza.org/en/education/tinkering 🚀
🔗 More info: tinkering.exploratorium.edu 🚀
