The Tinkering School
“Is an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids learn how to build things. It’s for children aged 8 to 17. The Tinkering School provides a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles. They strive to create a School where they all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.
Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilised. The Tinkering School is taught primarily by Gever Tulley, assisted by his indispensable wife Julie Spiegler and the inimitable Robyn Orr. By trade, he is a Senior Computer Scientist, writer, and practicing sculptor.
Julie is professional Playground Monitor (they both teach paragliding at the Advanced Paragliding School), and Robyn’s secret identity is still kept secret but she only uses her super-organisational skills for good and the Tinkering School. He started the Tinkering School because it’s the kind of thing he would have liked to have been able to go to himself.
When asked recently in an interview, “What motivates children to learn, explore, and wonder?” Gever said, “curiosity is more than a simple chemical response in the brain. Curiosity has aspects of play that are also key to understanding it as both a phenomenon and a characteristic of people.
If we are curious about something it is often in part because we are having fun. Curiosity is itself a playful endeavor – we are exploring unknown territory purely for the sake of understanding, the pleasure of knowing, and the thrill of discovery. When we are curious, the world is more of a puzzle than a problem. Problems are difficult, puzzles are fun.”
Rounding out the interview ‘Curiosity – Interview with a New Teacher’ the question is posed, “What advice would you give a new teacher concerned about fostering curiosity in his students? Gever’s response is, “Be brave. Defend children’s rights to spend time figuring things out, fooling around with things, and to follow their curiosity wherever it might lead.
He goes on to say, “create a haven for the curious child, reduce unnecessary external measurement of progress or quality of work in the long run, a powerful curiosity is more valuable than a test score.”
RELATED
1. Website
