Ideas for a Train Tinkering Kit

A couple years ago during one of the artist visits during the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre’s ongoing Automata Global Tinkering Workshop online sessions we virtually toured Aaron Kramer’s studio in Los Angeles. He shared an amazing traveling tinkering kit for building automata on the road that I have been thinking about ever since. Inspired by his idea, recently I had the chance to set up a small tinkering kit to continue both my experiments with early childhood tinkering with my three year old son as well as go further in experiments with tinkering by train over the years. Here’s a quick write up of the experience.

For the kit I put together a couple of magazines with interesting photos, sheets of colored construction paper, googly eyes of different shapes, small scissors, masking tape, a glue stick, toilet paper tubes and mirrored cardstock. It wasn’t as portable as Aaron’s tennis ball canister kit but everything except the magazines fit into a little pouch with room to spare. While I had some ideas about what ‘projects’ this kit could inspire, I also left things intentionally vague so that we could also uncover new possibilities with the materials.

Some of the explorations that we tried during the over five hour train trip included searching for kaleidoscopic opportunities using a hinged mirror set up, adding googly eyes to images in the magazines and creating toilet paper tube characters. Everything was pretty managable and I think there’s still a lot of other possibilities for projects using only these materials. I will keep exploring with these ideas and I’m curious to know if anyone else has developed kits or packs for tinkering on the go. Please share the ideas and tinker on!