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Tinkering: Kids Learn by Making Stuff
How can you consistently pull off hands-on tinkering with kids? How do you deal with questions that you can't answer? How do you know if tinkering kids are learning anything or not? Is there a line between fooling around with real stuff and learning?
The idea of learning through tinkering is not so radical. From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff.
Make: Tinkering (Kids Learn by Making Stuff) lets you discover how, why--and even what it is--to tinker and tinker well. Author Curt Gabrielson draws on more than 20 years of experience doing hands-on science to facilitate tinkering: learning science while fooling around with real things.
This book shows you how to make:
A drum set from plastic bottles, tape, and shrink-wrap
Magnetic toys that dance, sway, and amaze
Catapults, ball launchers, and table-top basketball
A battery-powered magic wand and a steadiness game (don't touch the sides!)
Chemical reactions with household items
Models of bones and tendons that work like real arms and ankles
Spin art machine and a hovercraft from a paper plate!
Lifelong learners hungry for their next genuine experience
The idea of learning through tinkering is not so radical. From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff.
Make: Tinkering (Kids Learn by Making Stuff) lets you discover how, why--and even what it is--to tinker and tinker well. Author Curt Gabrielson draws on more than 20 years of experience doing hands-on science to facilitate tinkering: learning science while fooling around with real things.
This book shows you how to make:
A drum set from plastic bottles, tape, and shrink-wrap
Magnetic toys that dance, sway, and amaze
Catapults, ball launchers, and table-top basketball
A battery-powered magic wand and a steadiness game (don't touch the sides!)
Chemical reactions with household items
Models of bones and tendons that work like real arms and ankles
Spin art machine and a hovercraft from a paper plate!
Lifelong learners hungry for their next genuine experience
213 pages, Paperback
First published August 22, 2013
20 people are currently reading
168 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 19, 2014
One of the golden aspects of teaching with tinkering is that you never know what your students will learnthis hit one of the things I was thinking about lately: who are we to determine what kids should learn, and write it down in simple bullet points then assess kids on this learning objectives...how dare we, what kids learn is more wide and meaningful than that.
I really really enjoyed reading this book, and I will write a review about it soon. Now i am just saying that this book is really helpful for any teacher / educator who wants to run tinkering workshops or merge tinkering with classroom activities. The author did great job in providing the examples and taking about how to practise tinkering like how to prepare the session, types of projects and how to facilitate it , gathering the materials and the most interesting part for me was his taking about how to handle kids questions and answers, I fall in love with this chapter and also how to assess students learning although he didn't talk much about the assessment part.
If you aren't convinced about tinkering as a way of learning, this book isn't for you i guess. He didn't do much effort in this debate.
Again, I loved this book :)
One of my favorite quotes from the book is:
“The value of the student’s question is supreme. The best initial response to a question is not to answer it, per se, but to validate it, protect it, support it, and make a
space for it. Like a blossom just emerging, a question is vulnerable and delicate. A
direct answer can extinguish a question if you’re not careful. But if you nourish the
blossom, it will grow and give fruit in the form of insight as well as more questions.
In short, a question needs to be nurtured more than answered. It should be given
center stage, admired, relished, embraced, and sustained.”
June 23, 2015
I highly recommend this one for the teachers out there, and all the parents too. A lot of the content is from a teacher in Watsonville, so you could call this a local book! It is chock full of very simple projects to get kids curious and to get them making stuff! I like that the pictures aren't highly produced and perfect, the examples are often quite klugey. This gives you confidence to build your own and not worry that it doesn't look like the instructions. Also, its not specifically about making sure kids learn particular scientific concepts, it is about them getting their hands busy and building. However, the projects aren't pointless 'crafts'!
Included for the parents and instructors is some, but not a lot, of talk about why tinkering and goofing around building stuff is so important for kids of all types. That part is definitely worth reading too.
Included for the parents and instructors is some, but not a lot, of talk about why tinkering and goofing around building stuff is so important for kids of all types. That part is definitely worth reading too.
April 10, 2015
This book appealed to me right from the get go. Curt's mix of examples, experiences and humor made this an enjoyably informative read. His writing style captured the playful spirit that nearly always accompanies a quality tinkering session.
The book is written with alternating chapter themes. The first chapter, and every other chapter that follows, describes a topic in which tinkering can occur. Examples include sound, magnetism, mechanics, circuits, chemistry, biology, and engineering with motors. If you are looking for ideas that could immediately find their way into your classroom, then look no further.
Curt provides material lists, tools to have, and pictures for nearly every step of the builds that are shown. Sometimes the text indicates a specific colored part to reference in the pictures, but the images are all black and white. Still, it isn't too difficult to determine what part he's talking about. (And the lack of color images may not be a concern in the digital versions of this book.)
Most importantly, Curt shares the types of conversation and questions that should be asked to help drive students deeper into the experience. Prompting the kids to discover concepts, to explain how they came to their conclusions, or to ask and answer their own personal questions with the materials in front of them are his goals. Curt promotes dialogues between student and teacher that go way beyond superficial discussions of fact and recollection.
The even chapters are dedicated to more of the "art and science" of using tinkering in a classroom setting. Themes for these chapters include tinkering and the learning process, good tinkering sessions, logistics, learning community and differentiated learning, questions and answers, and standards and assessments. If the odd chapters are all about what to do with your hands, these chapters are all about what to do with your mind. The even chapters unpack the reasons behind the learning decisions he made in the odd chapters.
Don't expect heavy doses of theory in these even chapters, because as Curt explains early on, the heavy research work he leaves to the academics. He prefers to deal with the "boots on the ground" practice-based evidence he's collected that supports "hands-on/minds-on", "get dirty" learning that kids need. It is analogous to the science history he shares that credits the craftsmen working in the guilds of the Enlightenment as being the source of practical knowledge that the famous thinkers of that time would then weave into theory. And if it is learning theory pertaining to tinkering that you do want, you can find sprinkles of it in the stories Curt shares from his mentors. Additionally, more research paper styled sources are in the first appendix of the book.
So much of this book resonated with me and my own observations regarding how students grow as both independent and collaborative learners in the tinkering sessions I've designed for them. But even if you have never run such a session, this book explains everything you need to make one happen. Curt's friendly, funny, and passionate story-telling style will fill you with the confidence you need to dive into the ways of tinkering. And if you needed a short primer or are short on time, I'd recommend reading the chapters on magnetism, learning, circuits, and questioning as your "must-read" chapters. I found plenty of treasure in these brief chapters.
No matter the tinkering level you possess as a teacher, or administrator, you can't help but be convinced that "mucking around with stuff" type learning that students go through will help them to forge new connections to the tinkerable world around them.
The book is written with alternating chapter themes. The first chapter, and every other chapter that follows, describes a topic in which tinkering can occur. Examples include sound, magnetism, mechanics, circuits, chemistry, biology, and engineering with motors. If you are looking for ideas that could immediately find their way into your classroom, then look no further.
Curt provides material lists, tools to have, and pictures for nearly every step of the builds that are shown. Sometimes the text indicates a specific colored part to reference in the pictures, but the images are all black and white. Still, it isn't too difficult to determine what part he's talking about. (And the lack of color images may not be a concern in the digital versions of this book.)
Most importantly, Curt shares the types of conversation and questions that should be asked to help drive students deeper into the experience. Prompting the kids to discover concepts, to explain how they came to their conclusions, or to ask and answer their own personal questions with the materials in front of them are his goals. Curt promotes dialogues between student and teacher that go way beyond superficial discussions of fact and recollection.
The even chapters are dedicated to more of the "art and science" of using tinkering in a classroom setting. Themes for these chapters include tinkering and the learning process, good tinkering sessions, logistics, learning community and differentiated learning, questions and answers, and standards and assessments. If the odd chapters are all about what to do with your hands, these chapters are all about what to do with your mind. The even chapters unpack the reasons behind the learning decisions he made in the odd chapters.
Don't expect heavy doses of theory in these even chapters, because as Curt explains early on, the heavy research work he leaves to the academics. He prefers to deal with the "boots on the ground" practice-based evidence he's collected that supports "hands-on/minds-on", "get dirty" learning that kids need. It is analogous to the science history he shares that credits the craftsmen working in the guilds of the Enlightenment as being the source of practical knowledge that the famous thinkers of that time would then weave into theory. And if it is learning theory pertaining to tinkering that you do want, you can find sprinkles of it in the stories Curt shares from his mentors. Additionally, more research paper styled sources are in the first appendix of the book.
So much of this book resonated with me and my own observations regarding how students grow as both independent and collaborative learners in the tinkering sessions I've designed for them. But even if you have never run such a session, this book explains everything you need to make one happen. Curt's friendly, funny, and passionate story-telling style will fill you with the confidence you need to dive into the ways of tinkering. And if you needed a short primer or are short on time, I'd recommend reading the chapters on magnetism, learning, circuits, and questioning as your "must-read" chapters. I found plenty of treasure in these brief chapters.
No matter the tinkering level you possess as a teacher, or administrator, you can't help but be convinced that "mucking around with stuff" type learning that students go through will help them to forge new connections to the tinkerable world around them.
August 3, 2017
Very basic arts and crafts type stuff. Could be much better.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews