Creative Learning Festival in Milan
The Creative Learning Festival at Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan brought together an amazing collection of people and projects exploring new ways to play with art, science and technology. It was so great to reconnect with inspiring colleagues and frequent collaborators like Mike Petrich and Karen Wilkinson, Gever Tulley, Amos Blanton, Sasha Pas and Tim Hunkin. As well I really appreciated getting to meet in-person some artists and tinkerers that I’ve been following from afar like author Toshio Iwai, digital artist Marcela Rapallo and Forest of Imagination educators and designers Andrew Amondson and Penny Hay.
The two day program was packed full of inspiring talks and hands-on workshops and attended by hundreds of participants from all over the world. I was especially interested to explore more how the great Italian thinkers, writers and educators Gianni Rodari, Bruno Munari, Maria Montessori and Loris Malaguzzi have influenced the world of creative learning. And as a personal milestone, this was the first time that I led my tinkering workshops completely in Italian (of course with a bit of help from the museum team).
For the first morning I led a workshop about tinkering with three to five year olds. The participants got to try two activities designed for young learners, roly-roly rollers and giant cardboard angled mirrors. We held the workshop in the new PLAYLAB space at the museum at it was so fun to see all of the educators on the floor gleefully testing out these quirky homemade robots.
And Nicole Catrett, artist, designer and Wonderful Idea Co. co-founder, joined us virtually to share about her process developing a pom-pom machine with the Dandelion Nursery School in Berkeley, California. It was really inspiring to see how she built suprises into the machine and stayed open to following the kids ideas and experiments. It was also important to reflect about how much storytelling and imagination plays into these experiences.
The group reflected on ways that they might think differently about their practice working with students and learners and we thought together about possible next steps.
In other spaces during the day Mike, Karen and Sebastian led a shadow remix workshop, Gever and Luigi gave a talk about the “5 dangerous things every school should measure”, Amos and team built solar powered spinners and Marcela teamed up with Sasha and the Playtronica crew for a immersive light and sound installation. There were many opportunities to reunite with old friends and connect with like-minded educators.
On day two I moved into the Leonardo Da Vinci laboratory for a series of workshops centered around storytelling with crank slider automata. For the first workshop with educators we got inspired by the amazing book I Viaggi di Giovannino Perdigiorno to create our own animated world. We took inspiration from the quote by Edith Ackermann, “I like to think of play as the art of world making, and that play is about inventing invented realities. It is about creating a world, physical or virtual, inhabiting that world, and then eventually becoming inhabited by it.”
We looked at the sections of Giovannino Perdigiorno with themes like the people made of bubbles, the planet of chocolate and the world without sleep and brainstormed our own ideas for invented world. Then the group spent about an hour making playful mechanisms, sharing ideas with each other and telling stories using automata. At the end we discussed the ways that we could connect imagination and storytelling with hands-on explorations of physical materials.
Also on day two I got to peek into an amazing workshop with children’s author Toshio Iwai who led a cardboard construction based on his “house with 100 stories” series of books and also see Tim Hunkin lead participants in making homemade speakers out of chip bags. All around the museum there were deep conversations and excited sharing of ideas.
The afternoon of the second day also was special because we invited in kids and families from the public to dive into the world of tinkering and creative learning. I led two more sessions of building cardboard automata and was again impressed by the ambitious ideas and innovative designs.
It’s always inspiring to get the chance to meet artists, tinkerers and educators in person to share ideas and prototypes. I really feel lucky to have had the chance to take part in this mini reunion with my old Tinkering Studio colleagues and continue to grow the worldwide collective of advocates for creative learning experiences.