 Hi, I'm Karen Wilkinson and I direct the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. I'm excited to be part of the K-12 online conference this year and wanted to extend a special thanks to Susan Van Gelder for the invitation to talk with you. Susan and I go way back to an early NSF project that we participated in called PI, Playful Invention and Exploration. And I've been thinking about STEM and STEAM, rich learning opportunities ever since. Today is a nice occasion for me to kind of reflect back on that time and also think about the relevance in the work that I do today out of the Tinkering Studio. So I'll get keynote started and we'll get going. So for my talk today and in thinking about the possibilities for STEM rich learning, I'm really going to emphasize making, tinkering and design and design thinking. Making really makes a lot of sense for me in museums personally. And I actually feel the same way about tinkering and design. And I think they even make a lot of sense in schools or at least I'd like to imagine a case where they did. Before coming to the Exploratorium, I was really fortunate enough to work at a museum that had a partnership with a K6 school, the Science Museum of Minnesota. So I got to work really closely both in a formal and informal educational setting and that really shaped the way I think about the possibilities for education. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the work at the Exploratorium since making and tinkering and design are really a part of what we do in the tinkering studio there. And although I do see a difference between those words, there are some kind of subtle nuances and less so. But for today, I think you can think of them interchangeably as I use them. I probably will default back to tinkering quite a bit. I'm particularly fond of that one being that we just published a book earlier this year called The Art of Tinkering that really focused on the artist, scientist, and educators that have come in residence with us and done things with us in the tinkering studio. But we have this dedicated space on the floor of the Exploratorium where the goal is really about getting people to slow down and offer them an opportunity to interact with scientific and artistic phenomena and really author an idea. We're really interested in developing agency with your interactions with these things and the opportunity to really think with your hands and engage with materials. So the further you move into the tinkering studio space, the more you're able to do this in a deeper and richer way in terms of working with looser parts and more variables. I will want to point out up in that upper right hand image that there's the shop, the machine shop of the Exploratorium. It's a space that really is about the heart of the place and how I was really first introduced to tinkering after arriving there. You have exhibit developers that are in the pursuit of creating exhibits that are going to be out on the floor for visitors and I got to see them really focusing on engaging very directly with this phenomena and that was really the driving force behind our work with the tinkering studio. We wanted to give visitors an opportunity to have that kind of direct experience and closely or as closely match it to that developmental process as we could in a workshop setting. So at the museum we really see STEM as a means, not an end, and we're really trying to keep the focus strongly on the phenomena or the driving ideas and then really trying to work with and mind them to their fullest potential. So another thing you see a lot in the work here is really disciplinary boundaries get blurred. They automatically do that and we really feel like when it comes to making and tinkering this is a strength of that work. To us tinkering really is a serious endeavor and a valid way to go about investigating the world and I think more than anything it's a mindset but it also gives you this kind of valuable way to really draw heavily on those 21st century skills and competencies that we're hearing so much about in educational circles. In student-centered or maker-centered learning you're engaging in developing those skills naturally as a part of whatever it is that you're doing involving kind of problem-solving communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, all those things but in a way that's really authentic to the student and the projects at hand. This way of approaching I think is, approaching it is really, it's a game-changer in my mind if we can figure out the right ways to do it and I'm not saying we always do get it right in museums and in classrooms I feel like we're all going to be more engaged. The students and the adults in the scenario whether it's teachers or parents or administrators or visitors or whatever I feel like it's highly motivational this kind of work and the engagement is really apparent and I think I'm not going to really emphasize in my talk so much the work at the Exploratorium. What I'd like to do is zoom up a little and consider making kind of from the 30,000 foot level and I think both for informal and formal educational settings I'm particularly interested in kind of the promises and possibilities of maker-centered learning and see it as this potentially incredible unifier for schools and out-of-school learning and I think we each have a lot to offer one another in terms of this dialogue and development and I think with the interest in the maker movement one thing to really consider is that it really draws on a really rich tradition of thinkers who emphasize the importance of playful and direct modes of inquiry. Educators like John Dewey and Maria Montessori and Larisse Maliguzzi but for me particularly this connection to Seymour Papert is a strong one because it was his idea to kind of twist the word constructivist into constructionist philosophy through his work with Piaget as a student but by really saying it's more than just knowledge being transmitted from teacher to learner as educators we really know this that it's actively constructed in the mind of the learner but his assertion was it went a little bit further than that and saying that when you're really actively involved in constructing a physical object having an idea and bringing that idea into a physical or digital form something tangible that's when something really profound happens and I think this type of knowledge or experience is often more durable than kind of traditional or rote ways of learning and I think now more than ever to be able to come up with ideas based on interacting with stuff direct experience with materials kind of posing problems based on what you see happening and then going about constructing solutions to those problems I think it's a really exciting proposition and I think you know Papert's work and then also someone who worked really closely with Seymour is Mitch Resnick at the Media Lab and he has a lovely quote that I really like to use where it talks about really students being confronted with kind of having to come up with creative solutions to unexpected problems so you know it's not just about how much you know or what you know but really on your ability to think and act creatively that's what we're really going to be faced with in terms of you know development of career based work but I would also argue just sort of lifelong humanistic based work. I think having learner centered maker centered education could really go a long way in helping us get at some of these 21st century skills. I think this call for thinking and acting creatively is kind of one of the key components of maker centered education because it involves this active doing you know this we talk about it in the tinkering studio is thinking with your hands but it involves making stuff but beyond that it is about making stuff but I think that's where some people stop and I think for us it's really about making selves this idea of building confidence and competence and habits of iteration kind of making community and really emphasizing the importance of citizenship and collaboration. These are really our kind of at what's at the heart of the very best education and I think this development of self-efficacy and agency are really really special to the making and tinkering work as I see it. These 21st century skills and competencies that really draw on these things like the critical thinking communication cut across all disciplines and cultures and age levels and interests. It really is about seeing lots of different divergent thinking happening. It's a real strength and I think making and certainly tinkering often get dismissed as you know it's just for fun or play but it's something that we take really seriously as a learning endeavor and what people are missing is that it is that playful disposition and curiosity that or curious inquiring that's required in making and tinkering that make that connection to those 21st century skills so strong. So what I'd like to do next is just play a clip of a tinkering studio activity. It's one of our core activities that we use in training in a lot of our new facilitators and it's one that's actually pretty common to school curricula as well. We call it circuit boards but it's about batteries and bulbs and hooking things up. It's not very long. It's about two minutes and 30 seconds and what I'd like to do is just play it and I won't I won't narrate over it. I'll just let you watch it kind of take it in and then come back and talk to you again on the other side. So that was circuit boards. Nothing radically new here really it's you know in fact it actually is it was based on batteries and bulbs curricula produced in the sixties by the elementary science study. We draw a lot of inspiration from their work and if you aren't familiar with it I highly encourage you to look into ESS because they did some really incredible work. But what is new is the way we chose to present this work in the tinkering studio so that it's more open ended, has looser parts and more variables and the learners are really following what they're curious about. We did a pilot study looking at lots and lots and lots of video of people interacting in the space and the interesting thing about this pilot study was it was really intended as an opportunity for our tinkering studio staff to work with our visitor research and evaluation group. So it was a chance to work practitioners and researchers side by side and really come to develop a way of talking about this work, a shared language that made sense to both groups to really talk about and distill the types of learning that we saw happening and the dimensions of those. We ended up calling them learning dimensions and that there were, excuse me, four different categories that we ended up with engagement, intentionality and initiative, social scaffolding and the development of understanding. And those broke down in different ways but the interesting thing for us is that we've been able to use this framework as a tool in our professional development work to be able to reflect in the moment as you're going through but also step back and reflect with a group of other educators about the work that we see happening. And it's been a really invaluable experience for our team to really hone in on the ways of understanding this work, being able to facilitate more towards goals that we have for doing the work and then also sharing it more broadly. We had a workshop in September of this year where we had a number of Bay Area teachers who participated and they're very excited in actually taking this back and using the framework to look at as developing a metric for their work in the classroom as well. If you would like more information on this I can point you to two sources. One is in publication now. We wrote about it specifically in Design Make Play. It's Margaret Honey's book but ours was in chapter five. It looks like fun but are they learning? And then also do out later in December actually in science education. Bronwyn and Mike and I wrote an article with Josh from the Visitor Research and Evaluation Group. Really kind of diving in pretty deeply. It's an academic paper. It's 20 plus pages so it's not a particularly easy read but it actually goes into great detail about this work. And it can get complex really fast in terms of you know that that's really the natural tendency that people have to go in. They start with something and quickly one one idea leads to the next leads to the next leads to the next and you can literally end up finding you know a 10 year old wiring a double pole double throw switch something that I wasn't introduced to until I was the collegiate level and I'm not going to pretend that all of the people that enter into the space come away with deep understandings about a double pole double throw because they may not even choose to pick that piece up but what I do really care a lot about is that learners are able to choose how to engage with this stuff and then move through it in a way that's based on their own interest. So I think that is what connects I feel this core activity to the work of the maker movement and that is the big what's new. I think in all of this work in this Makered centered educational field what is new is the excitement that Make Magazine has generated. It really started with the publication of the magazine back in 05 and then Maker Faire started in 2006 and they have grown yearly. Interestingly the many Maker Faires are where you see the most growth and I find them to be completely charming where they're community based sometimes even school based festivals and are you know a way of involving the community and looking at making and tinkering that I particularly love. In my 20 plus years in education I've never seen something that has ignited excitement from so many different places and you know it started in popular press you had Wired Scientific American kind of talking about this this maker movement this growing movement and they really emphasized kind of on the innovation and entrepreneurial side of things and you had books come out like Chris Anderson's book that asserted that the new Industrial Revolution was making we even had a Maker Faire at the White House this year and I think as all of these things are growing in in popular culture you had this back end of education that was really thinking about this so what started with Fab Lab out of MIT you also have agency by design a new project that is out of project zero at Harvard that's really looking at and caring very deeply about Maker Center education and kind of really zeroing in on what's going on there in terms of the learning and then you had people like us with the art of tinkering and invent to learn design make play more of an interest in the educational aspect of things museums were really really rising to the occasion museums and libraries creating makerspaces and tinkering studios where people the general public was coming in and engaging in a different type of activity and you've also seen it in schools there have been many many schools and whole districts that are interested in this idea making it happen both in separate spaces within a school but also in individual classrooms so I think you know it's an interesting thing as as we gain a global perspective and the world is seemingly becoming smaller there's a funny paradox that kind of individually the worlds that we're engaged in become more numerous and complex so I think we need a structure within museums and schools that align with this paradox instead of ignoring it or even rejecting it outright a structure that really seeks to establish this broader viewpoint of what disciplines could be what learning looks like and things like that I I was introduced to this graphic years ago now but I it had a profound impact on me and it was based on Reed Stevens work looking at lifelong and life-wide learning and if you take a look at the the the graphic the blue part is what I focused on but actually from a school perspective you should look at the orange but anyway in terms of waking hours 16 waking hours of any person's day kind of looking from childhood to adulthood in retirement the orange represents time spent in formal schooling and the blue is in informal learning environments and what I found most interesting about this is the possibilities for those areas to connect and interweave really drawing on each other really thinking about there's a lot of blue and how how can those experiences within school reflecting connect to this experiences outside of school and vice versa so really thinking about going beyond what we think of as traditional schooling and and reimagine what education in this broader context could look like so this idea of kind of seeing the maker movement and and what makes it so special and how we connect could be this very notion kind of thinking of this expansive view of disciplines and makers in learning and let's really ask ourselves what is it that we're trying to offer to students or in our case visitors or even co-workers colleagues that you work with I believe there's something fundamentally human about making and tinkering and at its core it's really about relationships and educational endeavor and it's highly collaborative and I think having people coming to see themselves as relating to science to art to technology engineering and math coming to see learning anew or at least challenging some some assumptions of what counts for learning I think we really need to consider where where do we spend our attention how do we spend our attention what and what are we doing with this time both in and out of school there's a lot of conversation in museums about the desire to have this informed citizenry and a familiarity and comfort with stem should really be part of that goal to us it's about students who are able to think for themselves and learn how they learn best and feel a connection or a relationship with stem that hopefully has been enhanced by their time at museums and think of what this could mean for their time in schools as well we jokingly say around the tinkering studio that we're tinkering with tinkering and that really is our part of the investigation and thinking about you know this process in a really new way coming coming to see learning anew and really appreciating you know what the full potential for what making and learning could be I mean it's easier for me to talk about what what it isn't sometimes but I would say tinkering as a way of learning it isn't passive it's not done in isolation and it's not you know as I've said before a transmission model it's a really active pursuit trying things out doing things and building and constructing knowledge it's infinitely social and it means going out into the world kind of seeking opportunities for relevance within your school within your community within your museum but also slowing things down really allowing for time this you know and I I I'm fully aware of how difficult that that can be both in schools and in museums but it's something that's really pretty essential because making and tinkering is varied in time and place so maybe it's school but beyond school and it can occur in kind of these hybrid formats these environments that take advantage of both informal and formal learning I think it's a really rich perspective on learning that it's worth trying to figure out how to make it visible both to kind of parents in school audiences and museum and educational audiences just kind of even at large I think the emphasis being and the focus being on learning that's emerging this kind of how to hold focus on those promises and possibilities so that's the thing I would ask you to consider for your class or your school or your institution when it comes to making and tinkering are you keeping kind of the long term and short term goals in mind and really giving yourself permission to make some mistakes I think and and time I guess time to explore these ideas and allow allow them to percolate I think you know it's potentially a new process and I think having a chance or acknowledging that mistakes are going to happen you know and that maybe a classroom or your space isn't going to look exactly the way people may imagine it should look that it can be messy at times and chaotic and noisy I think there is some some risk to what what you're working with so definite time and care needs to be given to some safety but but I think not not doing it is is not the choice I guess I think for all of us to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable maybe not not doing the driving all the time and that some of this side-by-side learning or really even learning from the students is going to happen we were joking the other day about this idea of you know rejecting this notion of expert or expertise and really that we should be be wanting to cultivate flex expertise in terms of being more flexible in ways of thinking about how we learn something and then how we share so this one of the lovely parts about making and tinkering is that you have this movement from learner to teacher to back to learner to teacher and it just seamlessly goes back and forth that's not to say it's not difficult but finding yourself in situations where you are continually learning I I think is what has sustained my interest in it in you know over all these years one of the things that that working closely with makers and tinkers has really taught me is this idea that it's not just about focusing strictly on the content and it really really concentrating on developing though that tinkerers disposition and the skills needed to manipulate that content this is a lovely quote from the folks in the Lincoln at the Lincoln Center but it's essentially saying when all we do is focus on those on the content and not the skills to manipulate content it's that manipulating the content that I see as tinkering they suggest we're not producing scientists or artists or investigators for the 21st century if we merely cram kids full a lot of what and leave them utterly unready for what if so really if there's anything that I leave you with today it's this idea of what if like so what if we considered things in in terms of education a little bit differently really took this idea of personalized learning to heart makers-centered education is personalized and this dispositional approach that I've mentioned so much this tinkerers disposition I also think trying to see things in the broadest possible dimension thinking of it in terms that could be in terms of disciplines or contents and topics but also connections both in and out of school looking for opportunities to make things more relevant and have a richer more inclusive discussion even even seeing museums and schools as the way to make the idea of who's a maker more more broad and more inclusive I think trying to figure out ways of making all of our work more visible to the general public so people really understand what it is we're after and come to see it as a community-based endeavor not just a school one or in a museum but really think of this collectively and also that this recognition that learning isn't linear it's not it's not fixed or terminal you don't learn something and then you're done it's really a part of a lifelong process and I think also kind of hammering home this real inclusion or need for an inclusion in the arts I'm passionate about STEM but I really do believe the arts need to be a part of it I think that this this example with Grace Kim is a perfect one she's a user interface designer by day and an incredible passionate tinkerer by night working with conductive thread and LEDs and kind of Scandinavian felting techniques that she read about but I feel like it's this it's this idea that someone can come to a learning occasion in a really personal way and and make real inroads and I'll I'll end lastly with this this funny quote by Will I am that's basically saying you know back in the day people wanted to be everything from a musician to an actor an athlete but now he sees it as people are really going to want to be makers and I see that too it's really connecting with a desire to create and investigate from a really personal place and I think figuring out ways to offer opportunities for this in every educational setting imaginable is the challenge that's ahead and one that I'm really looking forward to and I hope you are too I'll leave you with one last thing so this we're offering a MOOC again this summer we did it last summer for the first time and really learned a lot and are excited to offer the opportunity once again so it's through Coursera and it's called tinkering fundamentals occurred instructionist approach to STEM learning it's open to anyone with an interest in tinkering and it runs for six weeks starting on July 22nd and if you don't have a dedicated full six weeks that you can work on it don't worry I encourage you to join anyway and do it at your own pace it's not a requirement that that you do the whole thing and I think there are real gems and tidbits that you might be interested in along the way we discussed the the learning framework that I mentioned briefly here today and there are shared readings and some other video clips kind of of us talking more in depth about the process of tinkering in the tinkering studio so I hope I hope you'll consider joining me for that and yeah I look forward to continuing this conversation in that way if you do all right thank you