Tinker Time

Tinker Time is a drop-in based time, during lunch and after school, when students can freely work on the projects of their choice. The only requirement is that students fill out a simple “Think Sheet” to indicate that they have *some* intent. Students are allowed to bring in iPads and do Minecraft. 3rd-5th graders may eat their lunches in the room. All lunch trash must be disposed of outside of the room. Clean-up time is 10 minutes before the end of lunch.

We do not do any guided projects. This is a time for students to follow their own stars.

Students augmenting their safety glasses
during a Tinker Time session.

We limit maximum room occupancy to the number of available chairs. Because the little ones require more attention, kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grades are allotted one day per week and have sign-up sheets. K and 1 have sheets with slots divided equally between classrooms. The teachers fill them out and I pick the sheets up before lunch. 2nd grade signs up on their own sheet, which is posted on the playground side of CREATE during morning recess. K-2nd must eat before coming to Tinker Time. When we first started the program, students would throw their lunches into the trash so they could get to CREATE quicker. The yard duty workers are given copies of the K and 1 sign-up sheets.

3rd-5th can come in on any day, up to the capacity of the room. They have Thursday and Friday to themselves.

A student working on a class project can use the room without regard to signup.

We track all Tinker Time attendance to monitor Title I usage.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes! (Sort of)

From the beginning, Tales From CREATE has been about educational makerspaces. While that isn't changing, I’m going to start including some of my writings about STEAM education as an integrated platform and about Project Based Learning (PBL) here. Both are naturally connected to makerspaces.

Modern schools were not created to advance the interests of students. They were intended to create workers that were just educated enough to work in factories. That principle underlies nearly every public school, and many private schools that follow conservative educational philosophies.

School makerspace in the style of M.C. Escher.

From DALL-E

One of the core tenets of modern progressive education is to flip the manufacturing premise and create well-educated adults who are broadly educated in a way that serves the interests, not only of the individual students, but, as independent critical thinkers, and deciders about public policy. In other words, people who advance the interests of all of society.

School makerspaces can also serve the same social and cultural functions as other activities. Just as there can be "band kids," "sports kids," and "drama kids," there can be "maker kids." Now there are E-sports kids and coding kids. Often, they are the same individuals. The principles of Social Emotional Learning tell us that students who are socially comfortable do better in school and in life.

Making for students can be a project in Minecraft, a game in Scratch, or it can be a well-crafted prompt in a generative AI like ChatGPT or DALL-E used to present the results of a project. The point is to encourage creative thinking and instill the confidence that they can successfully navigate their world. It's our job as educators to equip their figurative toolkits and instill in them the certainty that that they can learn anything.

Note: I added "pen and ink" to the DALL-E prompt and got this one.