This is an interesting time for the Tinkering School staff because the curriculum for each session is still fluid and depends in large part on what materials are available. Working out the curriculum each year is an interesting, and still evolving process. One of the things that we learned last year is that the students can tell if you are following a recipe or if we are operating off the map in uncharted territory. And, naturally, it’s the latter that is more engaging and more memorable.

Uncharted territories are tough to plan for, as it turns out. Take for example the row-carts from last year. I got the notion for the carts (I’m not sure where ideas come from, even after all these years of having them) and made a couple of preliminary sketches to get a feel for the kinds of engineering problems we might encounter. We purchased materials against the vague parts-list that I made after pondering my sketches, and then hoped for the best. This is typical for most of our projects - I get ideas, Robyn and Julie help me figure which are good and which are likely cut down our student population, we go shopping or salvaging, and then we… hope for the best.

Last year, with the younger kids, we made cardboard boats. I announced in the morning that we were going to make boats and then paddle them around in the harbor, to which the kids started yelling “We’re going to drown!” That nervous tension kept them focussed during the whole construction phase. There was a lot of “I don’t think that’s going to hold our weight,” and “Let’s make the sides a little higher so that we don’t splash water in when we are paddling.” Those are observations that imply that they are thinking about what they are building. Whereas, during the construction of the guitars - a project based on an article in Make magazine - they had a tendency to do the tasks without any deep consideration of why they were doing it.

Parents often email to ask what projects their children will be doing during the week, and it’s always a little awkward to have to tell them that we don’t share that information. In point of fact, we often don’t know until almost the night before, what project we are going to do on a given day. We always try to structure the projects so that the topics naturally weave together, building on the skills learned earlier, and reinforcing the concepts that we are trying to learn. As a result, if one project goes slightly awry, the project that it was leading to begins to come into question. So we adapt the plan on the fly, sometimes inventing new projects as we go.

Interestingly, this also part of what makes Tinkering School so exciting for us to do. Not knowing if an idea is going to work or not, makes us as much a participant as the students are. We’re all vested in seeing it work out, and that makes us that much more committed to figuring out the solutions to all the unforeseen problems (and believe me, the sketches leave a lot of detail out).