Musical Windmills in Milan Creative Learning Festival 2026
A couple of weeks ago I joined educators and learning designers at the Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci in Milan for a meet up to reconnect after last year’s creative learning festival and create experiences together that can inform our next full conference.
It was a great experience for me to be back in the epic Cenacolo room at the museum where we first shared Tinkering Studio approach with the staff back in 2012. There something so fun about being in this 18th century Baroque environment while we get our hands on real materials and play with scientific phenomenon.
The workshop also gave me the chance to share a project that I’ve been working on adding rhythms and music to windmill explorations. This direction was inspired by a participants investigation at the prototyping workshop this summer with the YiPai group in Zigong, China. It’s another example of how tinkering activities grow and evolve when they are shared openly with others.
On Friday I tried the project of encouraging participants to build a windmill and then add spinning wires with washers, strings with bells and other types of strikers for a wide variety of real instruments and improvised sound makers. And the next day we invited some local teachers in to try their hand at the workshop.
I was really happy that there seemed to be something really compelling about the experience and that the process of adding sound really gave learners a reason to tinker with the windspeed, symmetry of motion and design of the blades. The added sensory element gave a quick audio feedback about how the machine was working according to the expectations of participants.
Throughout the day there were other inspiring workshops and discussions like a flower dissection led by Beba Restrelli, a AI coding workshop from Carmelo and Jenny of the Scratch team a playful ‘don’t press this button’ project from Luigi and many more interactive projects. Thanks so much to Mike Petrich and Karen Wilkinson of the Fiddlehead Foundation for putting on this event and bravo to Maria Xanthoudaki and the team at MUST for all the hard work to make the meeting happen. Looking forward to the next step in this creative learning journey in October 2027!