Celebrating, Reflecting, and Tinkering
In this newsletter, you’ll find a poll, an activity prompt we love, notes on an equity-oriented zine, recent blog posts, and exciting upcoming events.
As our Facilitating Computational Tinkering project team works towards designing resources to support educators and learners in exploring computational tinkering, we’d like to learn more about the types of resources you find helpful.
Have a different idea? Let us know in the comments.
Last month, Ricarose and I (Celeste) visited our project partners at the Lifelong Kindergarten (LLK) Group at MIT. While there, we facilitated a virtual tinkering session with educational partners from global community-based organizations located in Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, India, and throughout the US to explore the possibilities of a new coding app that the LLK group is developing. We offered this prompt as a starting point for our tinkering session:
“Celebrating and Remembering – Around the world, many cultures have traditions that celebrate loved ones. We’ll create projects to celebrate and remember people, places, or objects that have special meaning to us.”
The theme “celebrating and remembering” is inspired by cultural traditions in our families and traditions we see in the communities we work with, such as Día de los Muertos. We are constantly striving towards mindfully connecting with the communities we work with around relevant and meaningful topics. Additionally, the feeling of wanting to celebrate loved ones and special places has the potential to be relevant beyond our local partner communities.
We were touched by the emotion and personal and cultural connections participants brought into their projects. We saw family photos brought to life, remembrances of loved ones, animated altars, celebrations of favorite taco shops, and more.
We’re curious about what it would look like to explore the theme “celebrating and remembering” further. What would it look like if you brought this prompt to your context? What activities or materials might you pair with this prompt? Ronni from the Creative Communities group is working with partners at the Denver Public Library to host a workshop related to this theme. Inspired by the artist Mar Lee, participants will print pictures of loved ones onto a quilt square and embellish them with embroidery and soft circuit elements like LED lights. Stay tuned for our blog post about the workshop!
In addition to this tinkering session, Ricarose and I also facilitated a zine activity with LLK. Together, we worked through a version of a zine that our Creative Communities research group first presented at the Clubhouse Network Annual Conference. This zine is grounded in our group’s research and aims to support educators in surfacing their ideas about equity and in reflecting on how that shows up in practice. In a blog post from Ricarose about our experience at the conference, Ricarose says, “Rather than presenting our research and giving questions to discuss in small groups, we wanted to create a resource that captured some of the spirit of creativity and joy that we feel whenever we are with Clubhouse coordinators.”
This will be the first in a series of equity-oriented zines designed for practitioners and educators in out-of-school settings. In this blog post you can see a sneak peek and learn more about our experience at the Clubhouse Network Annual Conference.
On Our Radar – Here are some other things that we’re excited about:
Winter at the Exploratorium means it's time for Glow, a collection of luminous sculptures that invite you to connect to, reflect on, and interact with light. The Tinkering Studio will be facilitating a light and shadow workshop during an After Dark event celebrating light science. We'll be creating shadow remixes with digital tools, including the new coding app that the Lifelong Kindergarten group is developing. If you want to join the R&D, you can try out this web app for remixing shadows digitally!
Ricarose and Celeste wrote a blog post for the Connected Learning Alliance introducing their new Family Creative Learning facilitation guide.
Celeste explored the theme “Celebrating and Remembering” through crafting “nichos” (mini altars, or shadow boxes) with paper circuits and shared her process on the Chibitronics blog
Celeste is collecting contact information for “maker educators” who want to stay in contact as the social media landscape shifts. If you’d like to share your contact information and connect with others with similar interests, consider filling out this survey.
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).