Tinkering School

I just had a look on what TED talks there are on learning and education topics. And as always with TED talks I was totally inspired by what I watched. I saw Gever Tulley talking about his tinkering school. This is a school where kids can spent a week surrounded by all kinds of stuff, materials and tools and built whatever they can imagine with it.

This reminded me somehow of what we do with the kids at the scouts. But somehow I think in the last years really building stuff - even when we have our one or two days of building in summer camp - was a bit neglected by us. We - the grown ups - make lists of what we will build and the kids join us. But I guess they would have so much more and possibly greater ideas than we have.

I also noticed recently when I tinkered a present for a friend how much fun it is to actually create something with your hands. We should do that more often. We could offer special tinkering days for the scouts. Or it would be cool to offer such days to school and children in the neighborhood. Or as something they could do in the summer holidays.