✏️ #MarkMakingMay Recap 🖍
Earlier this month, we introduced the idea of #MarkMakingMay – a month-long invitation to explore things that make marks and to share these experiments online. Now that it’s the last week of May we want to take a moment to reflect, and to invite you to contribute to our growing gallery of mark making experiments.
Each week we shared a new prompt and some inspiring examples:
Week 1: make a mark with something that moves
Week 2: make a machine that moves in a funny way, add a marker to make that movement visible
Week 3: explore making marks with code, try something new or share your favorite examples
Week 4: reflect on mark making experiments that were shared in weeks 1-3, what do you notice? What do you want to try in the future?
You can take a look at this padlet gallery to see some of the experiments that have emerged so far:
One of my favorite moments this month was tracing a path of inspiration from the Tinkering Studio’s nature bots activity, to Cate Heroman’s take on nature bots during a PD session to my own experiments turning nature bots into mark making machines by adding water.
What did you notice as you browsed? We loved the wide variety of materials used (stand mixers, water droplets, Scratch sprites, phosphorescent vinyl) and the creative methods people tried as they constructed their mark makers (classroom doors and cardboard automata as mark makers, making DIY LEGO battery packs, powering scribbling machines with sunlight).
Did any of these prompts or examples spark your curiosity? We want to hear from you, even after Mark Making May is over. You can respond to any of the prompts we shared earlier this month, or do your own thing. You can share an idea you have, an example you love that someone else has created (don’t forget to credit them), or something that you’ve made. Share on social media and use the hashtag #MarkMakingMay or post directly to the padlet we shared above by clicking on the pink “+” button in the bottom right corner of the page.
We hope that Mark Making May generates some new ideas for you, it certainly has for our team and we’re excited to test these ideas out with our partners at the Denver Public Library ideaLABs this summer. Thanks for tuning into this experiment in collaborative, virtual brainstorming.
Tinkering Together is a monthly newsletter crafted by a community of educators and researchers sharing explorations in designing and facilitating computational tinkering experiences that strive towards equity and joy. This newsletter was edited by: Celeste Moreno (Creative Communities Group, CU Boulder).