Ryan Jenkins's Blog

Since moving to Freiburg, I’ve been on the look out for local crafts and traditions that can be inspirations for new STEAM projects. Over the last several years I’ve worked on tinkering takes on cuckoo clocks, sound organs, St. Martin’s Day lanterns and advent calendar windows. One of the local traditions that I’ve been thinking about for a while is the fasnet (carnival) celebration with masks, costumes and unique musical instruments.

A couple years ago during one of the artist visits during the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre’s ongoing Automata Global Tinkering Workshop online sessions we virtually toured Aaron Kramer’s studio in Los Angeles. He shared an amazing traveling tinkering kit for building automata on the road that I have been thinking about ever since. Inspired by his idea, recently I had the chance to set up a small tinkering kit to continue both my experiments with early childhood tinkering with my three year old son...

As a way to finish up the intensive prototyping for a new cars and ramps workshop and gallery environment at OliOli children’s museum in Dubai, I made another test of the materials and prompts with local families at Spielmobil play action events here in Freiburg last week. It was really useful to check the durability of the workshop elements and test out how the interaction worked in terms of the learning goals and values for the activity.

Last month I had the chance to present at the local chapter of Creative Mornings at the Carl-Schurz-Haus library space. This series of talks takes place around the worl...

Last weekend I hosted the fourth tinkering workshop for local kids and families at the Carl Schurz Haus, the American and German cultural center in Freiburg. As usual, ...

Last week educator Julia Kreß and I hosted the second Freiburg Maker Educator Meetup (MEM), a chance for local artists, teachers and tinkerers to come together and shar...

I’ve been continuing lots of tinkering experiments with my three and a half year old son and reflecting on the ways that we’ve been engaging with materials, art/science phenomenon, imagination and storytelling. Its been amazing to get to observe his process to approach these projects and really fun to faciliate his interactions with physical and digital objects. I wanted to share a couple of recent observations and ideas around early childhood tinkering.

I felt super sad to learn that artist and tinkerer Moxie Lieberman passed away last week. She worked with us on and off at the Tinkering Studio over the years and you couldn’t find a kinder, funnier or more generous collaborator. I learned so much from her approach to needle felting and some of the workshops that we created together at the Exploratorium are among my favorite memories there.