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In 2005 Tulley founded the Tinkering School, which operates as an overnight summer camp in Montara, California, and a week-long day camp in San Francisco, as well as single-day workshops (some for all girls). There is also a branch of the Tinkering School in Chicago.
At the Tinkering School, children are allowed to pick up and use tools that are commonly viewed as dangerous by our overprotective society and be trusted not to hurt themselves or others. They use "wood and nails and rope and wheels, and lots of tools, real tools," according to one of Tulley's TED talks called "Life lessons through tinkering" (2009).
Most importantly, the kids are given time – something that's in short order these days with stressed-out, overworked parents and packed extracurricular schedules. Having the time to start these open-ended building projects, to fail at them, then to persevere and ultimately succeed (with the help of adults who are guiding the projects to completion) is a glorious thing.
When I was a kid this kind of summer camp was called, "Go Outside and Play!"
Original Submission
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Friday July 10 2015, @02:01AM
Boy, those were the days!
A discarded washing machine, TV, or "Hi-Fi" would provide me weeks of entertainment tearing it all down, then I would carefully arrange the parts into something that should have done something, albeit 99.9% of the time, the lesson was why it did not work. The ratio got much better with more experience.
It sure was fun to build it anyway... it was my "sudoku".
A good tinkerer never gets bored. However, in my case, it became so entertaining I lost interest in a lot of other things I should have been working on - like interpersonal relationships with the opposite sex or leadership skills.
You are so right about the system "smashing" creativity out of people. Even in an engineering career, one often finds management in place which considers creativity to be "re-inventing the wheel", yet they constantly refer to "thinking outside the box" as a bullet point in managerial communications.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]