Chair Marble Machines School Library Takeover
Last week I had a really fun mini-residency as part of the European book tour for “The Tinkering Workshop” at the International School of Prague! It was a fun day full of visits to robotics classes, making rainbow LEDs for the LGBTQ+ ally week and talking tinkering with parents and staff.
In one of the most exciting elements of the residency, we set up a chair marble machine workshop for the entire third grade class (about 70 students) in the school library. The team put together a bunch of building materials like tubes, long strips of cardboard, paper cups, funnels and recycled containers. Luckily all of the shelves in the space were on sturdy castors so they could be easily moved in and out which gave us a big space in the middle of the room. We had about 35 of some pretty standard fabric covered chairs where the groups could work in pairs on their projects.
The idea of 70 kids all working on the marble machines project at the same time in the library space felt a bit intimidating but as soon as they all started working there was a buzzing focused energy in the space. The time flew by and many of the teachers were impressed by the challenges that the students set for themselves and the explorations that they tried.
After about 45 minutes of working we finished up out explorations and some of the teachers looked around nervously at the scale of the mess around the space. But in the time it took for one song to play over the bluetooth speaker, the group had cleaned up the entire library and were ready for a last reflection.
And even though there was only a couple minutes left, I thought it was important to go around and have the students share one word to describe there experiences “popcorn style”. It was pretty incredible to hear the ways that they described opposite feelings like fun/frustration or exciting/stressful. And there were some pretty distressed and passionate comments about not sharing materials or getting enough time to work which shows that even in a short experience, tinkering can elicit a strong emotional response. We ended with a giant high-five attack and lots of excited kids chattering about what they constructed.
This large-scale activation shows the potential for a giant community tinkering project in a shared school space and how that could lead to dramatic effects for both the students and the teachers. The educators guide for “The Tinkering Workshop” shares some different formats for adapting projects and prompts in school settings. It would be wonderful to see more and more immersive celebrations of tinkering taking place in libraries, classrooms, gyms and playgrounds at schools around the world.
