Going Low Tech

I just went to an IT integration conference in Shanghai, Learning 2.010, and it was just the spark I needed to try blogging again. So…

My nine year old daughter and I have been working our way through the activity book ‘50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Child Do)’. My daughter and I are having fun, but her mother is not all that happy about some of the things we have planned. The author of the book, Gever Tulley, also runs a summer camp  called the Tinkering School. I wanted to try something like this with my class of five and six year olds.

I decided to put together a tinkering cart to use in our kindergarten classes at school. At the beginning of the year I found piles and piles of old equipment outside our school’s AV department. All these goodies were getting ready for the final journey to the dump. A few of us kindergarten teachers decided took as many of these broken keyboards, mice and stereos as we could and put them into our storage room. Along with all the discarded equipment there was also an old overhead projector cart, perfect for this project.

Tinkering Cart

After getting a couple of sets of screwdrivers and some pliers it was time to assemble the cart. I put a piece of felt on the top metal shelf, put on the tools and another teacher added some magnifying glasses and a flashlight. Now we had everything ready to go. Cart + old AV equipment = tinkering time!

Next we reviewed our class rules, one of which is to ‘be responsible’. We had a long discussion with the children on the subject of how each tool is used and how each tool should not be used (example, no stabbing with the screwdrivers). We were also afraid the children might try this at home with the new flat screen TV, so we made sure to clarify that the equipment we were deconstructing was broken and did not work anymore.

Finally, time to get down to business. The children wasted no time the first few minutes getting into a stereo. Inside they found many cool moving parts, circuit boards, springs, buttons and cogs…and a little bit of grease. It was great to see that boys and girls alike joined in with the activity. I was afraid there wouldn’t be enough equipment left for the other classes so we put a stop to the deconstruction half-way through the first week. The children decided to make a robot with the mound of bits we now had (much cooler than my idea of making a collage). After A LOT of glue gunning the class had a new member. The robot’s name is A5-T1.

I made a time-lapsed video of our deconstructing, but was surprised at how unimpressed the children were. “We didn’t move that fast?” “Why did you make it do that?” I thought it was cool…they didn’t. The cart is now in another class and we’ll have another turn to tinker in about a month. When the tinkering cart returns I’m sure we’ll find more parts for A5-T1.

Advertisement