Tinkering Tweens : the possibilities are formitable

For a full year, we have held a weekly tech session for young teens - mostly eighth grade boys. We played with Little Bits, Legos, MaKey MaKey, soldering, construction projects, programming challenges, and more. Though we regret girls haven't participated, we have some plans to grow in a more inclusive direction.
More about that in another post.

What we DID accomplish by holding weekly sessions, was an experiment in content and form. We tried a variety of skill-building sessions, physical and intellectual challenges and learned a lot about what we can and cannot do in an after school setting at the public library.

Today, we did a "dress rehearsal" for the Open House we are planning for next Tuesday afternoon at 3:30 p.m. - to which we hope many kids and adults come!

Learning how things work is, ultimately more important to us then magically assembling things that fly, move, interact, etc. It's super seductive to merely assemble cool stuff, but we feel it is a deeper experience to look under the hood and explore how and why.

We have some ways to go with the tinkering concept, but we are learning a tremendous amount from our snazzy eighth graders and we will miss them when they move on into the bigger pool that is high school tech classes next year!

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Makey Makey Floor Piano

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LIBRARY AS MAKERSPACE

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