Brass Bound Bulletin #10: Let the Kid Make a Mess!

Why Tinkering Is the Best STEAM Teacher

This story is a bit of family lore. A legend, if you will...

It's the 1950s. My grandfather, Ed coming home from work. As he is walking into the living room he spies a... concerning scene. My mother Linda, a child herself at the time is sitting on the carport of their house surrounded by parts... of the brand new television the family had just gotten. Linda froze. To his credit, Ed didn't freak out. He surveyed the situation and calmly asked calmly "Can you put it back together?" Linda looked around at the parts and replied "I think so" and Ed left her to it. She got the parts put back correctly and the set worked like it did before. My mother wasn't malicious. She wasn't trying to break anything. Linda was CURIOUS! At the time television was still a relatively new technology. She wanted to know how it worked. That curiosity, that willingness to make a mess is the ESSENCE of STEAM. Tinkering is (in my humble opinion) the best way to learn... anything and the messier the better!

Tinkering, like STEAM as a whole is kind of a mashup of things. Just as STEAM encompasses all of Science, Technology Engineering, Art, and Math tinkering mashes up all of that with PLAY! Tinkering isn't about following the instructions. It's about "how does this thing work?" "Can I take it apart and find out?" "Can I get it back together again?" When you're tinkering you answer all of those questions (but sometimes the answer to that last one is "no" and you need to be ok with that.) When I was a kid I knew everything about my bicycle. I didn't read the manuals. I stripped it down to the ball bearings and rebuilt it when it needed to be fixed. But in the end I knew every part of that bike and how it was supposed to feel. Was it work? Yeah. Was it fun? HECK YEAH! Every great inventor who ever lived started out tinkering. Ford, Tesla, Wright. All tinkers and ALL went on to change the world through invention.

Some of my favorite exercises to do with my students involve tinkering. I'll give my students a pile of random things and something to make out of it. When they ask "how do I do that" my answer is always the same. "That's for you to decide." While they are building though it's cool to watch the transformation. The mess of parts fall into place. Students are practicing fine motor skills cutting and gluing, breaking and rebuilding. They are learning spatial reasoning because they are having to think three dimensionally. Resilience is built in because making mistakes are too. You broke a piece you needed? Can you fix it or do you need to find something else to do that job? Failure is LEARNING. And if there is one thing the Fab Lab and Maker movement have shown us it's that making and tinkering boosts persistence and self efficacy more than giving step by step instructions.

As I mentioned before, tinkering touches all the "realms" of STEAM. You've got figuring out how something works (Science,) repurposing parts (Technology,) structural problem solving (Engineering,) creativity and aesthetic choices (Art,) and measuring, counting or balancing (Math.) Most of the time you're not even aware of it because you're having fun!

I often joke that being a STEM teacher means I am a collector of random... stuff. My classroom certainly shows it. I have random things all around and the workshop? Don't get me (or especially my wife) started. You don't have to turn your house into a trash heap though. You can encourage tinkering with a few simple steps. Here are a few tips.

1. Get a big bin and put "interesting junk" in it. Wire scraps, bits of cloth, broken electronics, nuts and bolts, rubber bands... stuff like that to get them started.

2. Make sure it's ok to break whatever you provide. Breaking things and tinkering go hand in hand. Breaking is just accidental modification.

3. Instead of warning your kids to be careful try reframing the question. "What are you trying to figure out" works well. The destination isn't the point. To quote Shepherd Book "... how you get there is the worthier part."

4. This one's a bonus. LED's, a battery pack and a multimeter don't have to be expensive. And I don't even want to think about how many careers in electrical engineering those things launched. Just saying...

Here's a couple of cautionary tales for parents as well...

• Resist the urge to "fix it," "tidy it up," or steer it to something "productive." The mess is the point. So is breaking things and productive is overrated.

• Tinkering can sometimes have an element of chaos and the line between chaos and learning can be thin. You only really see it when your kids are trying to explain where they are headed with an idea.

There it is! Tinkering is a great thing to encourage. It's essentially thinking with your hands. It's where the journey is more important than the destination and where failure is just another way of saying "learning." Try it out, give your kid a box of random stuff and see what they can make of it! What's the most ambitious/ disastrous thing your kid (or students) have made while tinkering? Leave a comment!

Until next time!

Finnigan Cogwheel

Head Tinker, Cogwheel STEAM Workshop