Courtesy: Exploratorium

In step with the popularity and growing momentum of Maker Faire, the “maker movement” is going global with the help of the Exploratorium museum’s Global Studios.

After 40 plus years of work in this field, the Exploratorium, which is based in San Francisco, is stepping up its involvement in hands-on, informal science and technology education by working with groups across the world to spread and grow the movement. In addition to participating in all the Maker Faire events, bringing mini Tinkering Studios™ where visitors can experiment with the activities freely, the museum has also been called on to teach these ideas in far-reaching spots like Saudi Arabia and Italy.

“Tinkering is not something we invented or anyone invented,” said Luigi Anzivino, scientific content developer for the Tinkering Studio in the museum. “I think it’s a fundamental way that human beings have of being in the world. There’s nothing that we’ve discovered about this. So, it belongs to everyone. All we are trying to do is reveal that and allow people to let that come to the surface.”

The group’s goal is to leave a lasting impression on the sites they visit — what they call a tinkering disposition. “A tinkering disposition is something that tells you that the world is knowable; you can find out something about the world by yourself and you don’t have to be an expert in any one discipline to start,” Anzivino said. “You can just begin by doing something and then it’s a practice.”

Giving a child the chance to illustrate what she knows in three dimensions connects the abstract concept to its real-life application. But, in the Tinkering Studio, Luigi and his staff don’t have to connect what a child makes to formal school learning. “The content is the thing that the kids are making, there’s no separation,” Anzivino said. “We know that they are becoming more sophisticated in their thinking because the things that they’re making become more sophisticated and complex.”

Educators from around the world have asked Anizvino and his staff to facilitate similar learning experiences and to set up parallel tinkering studios. Anzivino has noticed an interesting phenomenon: it’s challenging to get even the most ardent “tinkering” enthusiasts to stop “teaching” and let a student explore. And a whole other challenge to see the value in “content” disconnected from a specific academic goal.

Sparking an interest in science, engineering and design is increasingly a priority for educators, museums and even governments around the world. “We think it really unlocks potential in individuals, potential in society, potential in terms of advancing science, technology, art, all of those things,” said Silva Raker, director of Global Studios. For her, the project is finding pockets of interest in this work anywhere it exists and helping to nurture people who want to see it grow.

The Exploratorium has a long track record of cultivating a national network of inquiry-based educators through the Institute for Inquiry which trains teachers in the learning techniques used to make science fun at the museum. “Frank Oppenheimer [the museum’s founder] believed that one of the great ways to scale the impact of the Exploratorium was to work with teachers because over the course of their careers they’ll interact with many thousands of kids,” Raker said.

They’re also cultivating networks of educators around the nation interested in this work and supporting them to become facilitators of inquiry-based learning. This work mirrors what will come out of Global Studios – where educators approach the Exploratorium for help designing, setting up and putting into practice Tinkering Studios or other exhibits.

Anzivino went through years of training to become a neuroscientist before he found the Exploratorium. He says his traditional schooling helped him to fully appreciate what inquiry-based learning and tinkering can mean to kids. “It offers an opportunity to decide for yourself what it is you are interested in learning,” he said. “And to be validated in your own path toward finding the answer, even if it goes nowhere, even if it’s full of false starts and avenues that go nowhere.” And that, in and of itself, is a little radical.

What does the do-it-yourself movement have anything to do with school? This episode of the Infinite Thinking Machine features examples of how tinkering is starting to infiltrate the educational landscape, as with schools like Brightworks in San Francisco and in Maker Spaces around the country, where anyone can design and build anything they imagine.

In this episode, ITM creators challenge teachers to create a cool infographic depicting how to spend the ultimate summer vacation. Deadline is June 8. Here’s more information.

MythBusters host Adam Savage has a thing or two to say about the importance of tinkering — even if that means it gets messy.

“If you don’t get a chance to fail, if you don’t get a chance to try things and not get them right the first time, and you keep on doing it until you do get that specific kind of success, then you become so risk-averse that you in fact get an allergy to trying new things. And that is the worst thing we can do to kids.”

At Maker Faire last weekend, Savage spoke about how the “maker culture” is the engine that will fuel kids’ love for — and excelling in — math and science.

Here’s to that maker spirit!

[Produced by Joanne Elgart Jennings and Matthew Williams. Photos in the video by Patrick Giblin.]

There are a number of kits available that make such projects relatively easy and accessible. Arduino, for example, offers a fairly simple hardware and software platform for people to get started.

But even with the simplicity of Arduino, there’s still a rather huge barrier to entry when it comes to working with hardware and software at this level — particularly for those with no engineering

background. Despite the openness of platforms like Arduino, the idea of wiring, soldering, and programming can be overwhelming.

As the electronics we use in our daily lives get more complicated, this turning away — in frustration, ignorance, or fear — is increasingly troublesome. We rely more on the very devices that are becoming like “black boxes”: impenetrable. We don’t understand what goes on “under the hood” of many of the objects that are most important to our lives (our cars, our smartphones).

As an antidote, the Maker Movement — led by the people behind the Maker Faire — and its call for hands-on experimentation is working to encourage the general public to start making things by hand, as are platforms like Arduino.

A newcomer to the movement is littleBits, a library of pre-assembled circuit boards that snap together with tiny magnets. There’s no soldering, no wiring and no programming required. The circuit boards in a littleBits kit have unique functions — a power component, a pressure sensor, a button, for example — that can simply be snapped together.

Founder Ayah Bdeir, who’s just been named a 2012 TED Fellow, told me that she wanted to break down some of the concepts behind building electronics — things like electricity and interaction — and instead focus on a “simple, playful building box.” She said that she wanted littleBits to be able to “enable people with little expertise in the field to be able to speak the language.”

An artist and an engineer, Bdeir worked on a similar project to littleBits during her tenure at MIT Media Lab but realized after working with other artists and designers with no experience in electronics but with a desire to build complex electronic installations that these people didn’t want to learn about schematics. They just wanted to “make it work.”

But with an easy way to make these sorts of projects work, littleBits also provides a great on-ramp for people who might otherwise be too intimidated to learn more about tinkering. And by creating such simple and easy-to-use tools, littleBits may be empowering a whole new group of people to realize that they can actually make, build, and use these tools in their creative endeavors.

It’s much like using Popsicle sticks and pipe cleaners to teach kids how to build on a small, easy scale. Except these little magnetic circuits fast-forward building to the 21st century.

The Smithsonian Institution

Last week, as part of the Imagine Cup award ceremony, Hal Plotkin, the Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education, praised Microsoft for its commitment to STEM education with its hosting of the global student technology competition. Plotkin encouraged other companies to step up and invest in these sorts of endeavors. As the projects submitted to the Imagine Cup must tackle the UN’s Millennium Goals – poverty, hunger, disease, infant mortality, environmental destruction, and so on – it’s not just good for the U.S. education system, it’s good for the world.

Microsoft is not the only corporation involved in promoting STEM education.  Earlier this year, MindShift profiled the Change the Equation non-profit, through which companies like ExxonMobil, Dell and Lockheed Martin have supported science and technology education. Intel says it’s spent over $1 billion on education projects. And just last week, Google announced the winners of its first online global science fair, just one of the many programs that the search engine giant has undertaken to help encourage budding scientists, engineers, and programmers.

Corporate sponsorship and funding is seen as necessary to help boost the programs that oftentimes schools can’t afford. That seems to be particularly true when it comes to student competitions and science fairs, as these sorts of “extracurricular” projects are often on the chopping block when schools look to streamline their budgets.

But what are the implications of having students engaged in corporate-sponsored science? In the case of both the Imagine Cup and the Google Science Fair, participating students were required to use Microsoft and Google products respectively in their projects. Of course, students don’t often have a choice when it comes to the technology they get to use in the classroom. If your school has Windows computers, you use Windows; if your school runs Macs, you use Macs.

Corporate-sponsored activities aren’t anything new in education, and they certainly aren’t restricted to science fairs. One need only look at sports to see how marketing and sponsorship “plays out” — for better or worse.

Technology corporations do have a vested interest in helping support STEM education as it means a good supply of skilled workers in the future. But it’s easy to see companies’ involvement as marketing efforts — producing future customers, not just future employees.

How then do schools distinguish STEM-as-marketing from STEM-as education? And do they need to? How do we both welcome and scrutinize these corporate efforts? What are our alternatives?

One may be the “maker movement,” as exemplified by Make magazine and the Maker Faire. The DIY, hands-on exploration encouraged by the maker movement may be just the thing to get kids encouraged in science and technology. Not only does the maker movement encourage creativity and innovation, but it’s also breaking down the walls of the schoolroom, making it clear to students that science isn’t something that happens in the lab or in the classroom. It can happen in your backyard or in your garage. And it can happen without major investment from big companies.

“The most important educational resource is the student,” he says.