What a great way to end our first week at Tinkering School's After School. Friday's we open the shop up to our oldest group of builders allowing us to take on projects that really challenge us to think. Despite most being first time tinkers more than half of the group arrived with prior exposure or knowledge surrounding power tools and their use. Prepared with confidence we began our opening circle by exposing everyone to the culture of Tinkering.

We talked about our intent: to work as a team on a cool project that will require we think critically about problems, set clear goals to be accomplished and persevere through frustration. We also acknowledged that any project we take on might be an epic fail. It took a few minutes to clarify to a few kids who came in eager to work on there own idea that here we will all be working together on one BIG project. We explained that this session we would be taking on our most ambitious project yet as after-school collaborators and how we anticipate it to be full of problems. One we explained how we are going to need all the heads, hands and help we could get everyone seemed on board.

Next moved on to tool training emphasizing the safety and operational protocols we follow in our shop and taking time to clarify how/if it differed from other places the kids may have used power tools.

To encourage the ideas of working together to solve problems we broke into pairs. The only instruction: build a frame that didn't wobble. It was really great to see the kids working so well together, sharing ideas and solutions between groups completely on their own.

We Agree To Learn