Filed under: pedagogy
Note: Willi Paul of PlanetShifter.com recently interviewed me via email, and it provided an opportunity to gather some thoughts about Tinkering School and how it operates. This is an excerpt from that interview.
Please describe how you would advise us as to your work in Kit-based learning?
We have a term that we use to describe what we look for in a kit-based experience; “projectory”. A simple mashup of the notions of “project” and “trajectory”, projectory is a project that leaves the child on a trajectory that extends the experience beyond the end of the project.
For example, suppose that the project is to build a rope-ladder using recycled materials – there could be elements of rope-making (perhaps from plastic grocery bags), knot-tying, and rung-finding – a simple idea really, but one that only leads to others. Somewhere along the process of making the rope-ladder, the tinkerer will realize that they are building a ladder into a tree – but then what? “I’m going to be sitting up in a tree, I should have a seat…” The ladder provokes ideas, the future expands and unfolds in the child’s mind, taking them beyond the contents of the kit and the initial definition of the project.
Now, having just completed the 2009 season of Tinkering School I look back at this interview and see that I still haven’t fully described what we mean by projectory because I have left out the notion of “escape velocity”. The escape velocity of a project is a measure of the participants engagement and the resistance that the project offers to further exploration after it is built. A perfect project is one that has very high engagement (which you can measure by how easily distracted they are during the project) and very low resistance to further exploration.
Joshua’s Toothbrush Boat
By example, electric toothbrush boats are one of the only projects that we have repeated at Tinkering School specifically because it exhibits amazingly high engagement and very low resistance to further exploration. It is quite common to see kids spend more time working on their boats after they get them “done” than they did getting them to that state. Contrast this with the common experience of building a boxed Lego kit with a child – typically there is a moment of joy at the completion of the instructions, followed by a period of play where the finished kit quickly fades out of the limelight.
The importance of these two criteria cannot be understated, in fact they are both required if there is any hope that the child will internalize the concepts that are explored – which must be the goal of creating a learning experience.
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Gever,
I saw your video – 5 dangerous things…which got me to looking at your website.
AND… it made me wonder if you were familiar with Eric Hoffer, a famous author and philosopher… and Longshoreman! You may have read his book “The True Believer” back in college.
In one of his other books:
“The Ordeal of Change”
he has a chapter entitled: “The Playful Mood”
Hoffer says on page 91 – “Men never philosophize or tinker more freely than when they know that their speculation or tinkering leads to no weighty results. We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys. In the Occident the first machines were mechanical toys, and such crucial instruments as the telescope and microscope were first conceived as playthings. Almost all civilizations display a singular ingenuity in toy making…”
Then, two thirds of the way down on page 92, he says________.
Well, I won’t go on, but if you haven’t read what he says in the rest of that chapter, you might want to.
Comment by Steve 11.03.09 @ 10:06 pmWell, Steve, you have surprised me with a book that I have not come across. And the thing of it is, my father was a longshoreman for a period of his nautical career… Needless to say, I think that Hoffer got it right – the wandering mind hides a powerful mechanism of discovery, and while focus is useful, it is the enemy of serendipity.
Comment by gever 11.03.09 @ 11:41 pmLeave a comment
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