Lights and Rollers at Universum

Last week I was at Universum in Bremen, Germany to lead a tinkering professional development workshop with the education and exhibit development staff there.

As a little “ice cube” at the beginning of the workshop I tried a new experiment inspired by this magnetic googly eyes project by Evil Mad Scientist Labs. I prepared googly eyes with the magnetic tape on the back and sent the workshop participants out on the museum floor to try to find as many funny places to stick them as they could. We used a padlet page to collect the results. It was a really fun way to playfully get in the tinkering mindset for the workshop.

On request from the team there I set up a light play activity for the first half of the day. I didn’t have my normal set of lights and screens as they are still in California so I had a improvise a new solution for these elements. One new design that I really like are the lights that I made for this workshop which are sort of a middle ground between loose flashlights and the more elaborate lights we used in the Tinkering Studio.

I mounted the flexible hose in a piece of wood, drilled a hole in the top part and then dremeled a little notch up top so that the flashlight could fit snugly. I unscrewed the top of the mini flashlight, took out the lens to make it a point source light and used a zip-tie to fasten everything together. The lights are simple but study and flexible in the light play activity.

For the screens I collected spare cardboard boxes and added tracing paper to the front. They were a little bit rough but I think that added to the scrappy tinkering feeling.

During the light play activity we started with three exploration stations for the participants to explore color, reflection and refraction. This gave the group the chance to get comfortable with the materials before building their own scenes.

The prompt for the light play building was to add motion and emotion so each participant got a motor and the suggestion to make a scene that depicts an feeling.

The group worked for about an hour on their light play vignettes and the final installation was really stunning.

In the afternoon we focused on ramps and rollers. This activity is something that I’m currently developing and Universum has a little station on the floor as well. It was a little bit of a different experience to try this project that in many ways is still in prototype form.

We tried two prompts, the first was to build a sound machine and the second was to make something that doesn’t roll on its own go down the track. After the activity we discussed the two prompts along with the materials, environments and theme for this tinkering exploration. I’m excited to use some of the feedback from the group to “plus” future iterations of the project.

It was a great workshop with the team at the museum and I’m looking forward to seeing how they continue to develop tinkering at the science center. In the next post, I’ll share some impressions of two special exhibitions at Universum that have lots of opportunities to making, playing exploring and inventing.