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You can call it hacking, or you can call it tinkering, but it’s the way most programmers learn to program. By modifying code others have written, you can learn an incredible amount. Programming, like life, is rarely done starting with a flowchart!

Sylvia

Working with their teachers, parents, grandparents, neighbors, and/or friends, teams are encouraged to think outside the box and show us how they can make our activities BIGGER. From creating a PVC Kayak, to a giant sized catapult, the possibilities are endless.

Design Squad Nation co-hosts Judy Lee and Adam Vollmer invite kids to participate in the contest.

Detailed contest information here. Note: The Contest is open to legal residents of the fifty United States and the District of Columbia, except Arizona. Not sure why that is, but that’s what it says…

Sylvia

via Elliot Washor: Making Their Way: Creating a Generation of “Thinkerers”.

Elliot Washor of the Big Picture Schools writes about a Maker’s Faire – a time and place outside of school dedicated to bringing together the factors that make learning really happen – time, materials, personal interest, a helpful community, and taking risks.

Be sure to read this article! Making Their Way: Creating a Generation of “Thinkerers”.

Related articles from the Generation YES blog:

• Tinkering and creativity
• Tinkering and technology
• Tinkering and the grades question

Sylvia

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Yet, even as girls open new gender gaps by outpacing their male peers in most subjects, men still receive roughly 77 percent of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering and 85 percent of those in computer science. Why aren’t girls choosing to enter these critical fields of the future?

There are several familiar explanations: Girls lack sufficient female role models in computer science and engineering; girls prefer sciences that are clearly connected to helping others; girls are turned off by the “isolated geek” stereotype that dominates their view of computer science and engineering.

Here’s another explanation: Girls don’t tinker.

Be sure to read the rest of the article…Teaching Girls to Tinker

My Tinkering Towards Technology Fluency session at Educon 2.2 went very well. I’m waiting to hear if the recording glitches were solved or if it’s lost to eternity! (Don’t bother clicking on the Elluminate link on the session page, it just says the session is over.) I have heard, though, that they are working on putting up the links.

It was a great conversation. So many people participated and shared some really great ideas and stories. I will post some resources from the conversation soon.

Sylvia

In this 4 minute video, Gever Tulley talks about his Tinkering School. This is a subject I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, especially in regards to technology. My post a few months ago, Technology Literacy and Sustained Tinkering Time was about how looking at technology through the lens of tinkering makes more sense than approaching it through checklists and skill acquisition charts.

But I think this TED talk is nice because it shows kids doing things, and he talks about what is necessary to facilitate this kind of learning — time, materials, and openness to the serendipity of both success and failure. Time is such a key element. Time to think, time to change your mind, and time to work through frustration.

In the comment page for the video, there is a a lively discussion of how computers fit into this world of “stuff” for kids to mess around with. Some people look at computers (and video games) as taking children out of the “real world” of making things with hammers and nails, but I know that computers are not in opposition to children tinkering. Children, especially with open-ended, creative software tools can flow seamlessly between creating virtual and real things that have meaning to them.

This fits in perfectly with my work next week at the Constructing Modern Knowledge summer institute. I’m looking forward to 4 days of tinkering with all the cool materials and software we bring in. According to Gary Stager, who leads the institute, teachers often see student frustration as a failure, and want to “help” students through it as quickly as possible. He says that teachers simply need to fine tune their reactions to differentiate between “mouth up” and “mouth down” frustration. No one wants to just leave a student stuck forever in an endless loop of problems. But to rescue them too soon means they never develop the problem solving skills they need. At CMK, the teachers learn that lesson by going through it themselves, tackling complex projects that have natural cycles of success, frustration, and more success.

Here’s a video from CMK last year, made during the event by one of the participants, that shows some of this in action.

By the way, there are a few places left, so sign up and come on down. What better way to spend a week than going to technology tinkering school!

Sylvia

“Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it,” said Bill Heil, a graduate from Harvard Business School who carried out the work.

That quote alone got me thinking. Since when does everyone have to love the same thing instantly and do things in exactly the same way. Oh, right — school.

A couple of months ago I wrote two posts on the subject of tinkering that have probably gotten me the most (offline) comments of anything I’ve written. Technology Literacy and Sustained Tinkering Time and Tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a Digital Age.

Part of the magic of tinkering is that everyone does not do the same thing, that people can easily pick up tools and materials (digital or otherwise) and quickly do something that is personally engaging.

Hurray for Twitter for making it so easy to try out, so easy to decide if it’s right (or wrong) for you. Hurray for a world where you can twitter about lunch and twitter to save your country.

Are there parallels to learning?

In some ways, yes… especially for technology, making simple tools available means people (students and teachers) can try them out and find immediate uses. Or discard them quickly. They have a low barrier to entry. Twitter fits this bill nicely.

In some ways, no… education is about asking youth to find their passion and make meaning of the world, without making them hate it. Even if it takes effort to push them into it, even if it takes a caring, persistent adult to show a youth that that passion does indeed exist. Tools that offer a high ceiling, a potential to go further than you ever thought possible, to create, to creep into complexity, to explore a craft deeply, meet this need. That’s not Twitter, nor most of the Web 2.0 world.

Tools that offer both are indeed extremely rare and valuable.

Sylvia