What’s the use of all this tinkering?
Sometimes is my assumption that among the worst enemies of kids/children there are just their parents. And, you realize it when you heard similar complaint:
It seems to me that you are doing too much tinkering: but what is tinkering useful for?
I could write rivers of words on the reasons of how tinkering is useful and why. I could start (and maybe conclude) with a quote:
The hand is the window on the mind
Immanuel Kant meant that hands, in making, open the mind to the world enabling us to explore it and capturing his secrets.
Tinkering, is thinking by hands, is learning through the contact with things, is learning to relate objects, materials, tools. It is experiencing without fear, building, making, disassembling, failing; is give life to ideas, changing mind while are making them, is to have any instruction or indication at all.
It happens too often to me to see children not able to cut a shape on a paper sheet, or tie a not, or stick a cardboard; in short more and more children lack manual skill. And, that’s not good. Someone maybe is thinking that in a hyper-technologic world, where robots in the future will replace more and more humans, especially in manual activities, what’s the point to waste time, building, making, pasting?
Manual skills aren’t essential for the future labour market, but are important because they enable us to better understand the world around us, they help us to develop creativity, they allow us to realize projects, prototypes, ensuring to be ready for innovations.
Bruno Munari, long time ago, was talking about the needing of a tactile education:
We need to regain this direct tool of knowledge, nature gave us.
Who has manual skills accesses at least at two super-powers: creativity, and problem solving.
Cutting, sticking, disassembling, taping, bending, assembling are all actions that need to be practised, as they are the know-how opening the doors of knowledge and expertise, making us more creative, independent, and innovative persons.
Practise tinkering means it all: means learning to relate different objects and materials: such as stone, glue, batteries, cardboard, copper tape, gears, barn of yarn, electrical cord; and means utilizing trash materials.
When we make tinkering, we are able to coming up with ideas: creating, while making adjustment and finishing, we are able to explore new paths, changing the way, imaging new possibilities, on and on in a never-ending process of the creative learning spiral.
In a fast changing world and unpredictable way, skills and knowledge are not enough. The success, more and more, will be dependable from the ability to think and act in a creative way; the success will depend on the ability to invent innovative solutions to unexpected problems. And it is the tinkering, one of the educational tools able to develop these skills.
The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence. (Maria Montessori states)
That’s what is tinkering
