Bringing Tinkering to School – Ideas for Activities

Tinkering creates a bridging point between a learner’s personal interests and experiences and a broad range of possible learning outcomes. It offers valuable opportunities to engage all students in STEM and fosters a more inclusive STEM education. In this way, it is very much aligned with a Science Capital Teaching Approach: fundamentally, it is a highly personalised pedagogy, which allows the learner to follow their own interests and set their own goals.

This resource has been designed to help teachers integrate the Tinkering approach and the Science Capital framework in their practice aiming to implement a more inclusive science learning. It is divided in two parts. The first part gives an overview of the Tinkering approach and of Science Capital, and is a shorter version of the resource “Tinkering and Science Capital: Ideas and Perspectives” produced by the project (the whole version can be found at: http://www.museoscienza.org/tinkering-eu2/resources.asp).

The second part lists the Tinkering activities that have been identified by the partners and tested at the museums with the students of the schools that were involved in the project. The activities are selected among the ones designed by the first European project dedicated to Tinkering and the ones designed by the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium of San Francisco.