Making Deeper Learners Reflection- Juliana

This article helped me realize how important it is for learners of all ages to have opportunities to do making and tinkering activities. And while I hope that more and more classrooms are offering making and tinkering activities for young learners, I think that the Innovation Workshop does a great job at providing this. I noticed throughout the article that multiple teachers pointed out the comparison between the math problems you might see in a traditional classroom to tinkering/making projects. I’m sure it would be much easier to get a student interested in his or her own creative tinkering project rather than a math worksheet. In addition, another middle school teacher talked about how the skills that can be learned from tinkering are going to be much more useful in life than word problems that you might see on a math worksheet. Problem solving and critical thinking are extremely important skills both for school and work and can be applied to pretty much any field.

In the Innovation Workshop, I think that the more open-ended activities or variations of activities there are, the more opportunity there is for tinkering. One activity that comes to mind is when we worked with beeswax. One of the activities was making a beeswax food wrap, which required following the directions- dumping a scoop of beeswax onto your cut fabric, placing the parchment paper on top, then ironing on top of that. I would consider this more of an open-ended “making” activity as guests had to follow the directions in order to make the desired product. The other activity of that week, candle making, was more of a “tinkering” project, as it required more creativity and problem solving. I like that this article made a distinction between making and tinkering. I also like the idea of having both a “making” activity along with more of a “tinkering” activity in the workshop, as this can provide opportunities for learners of all ages.