[MUSIC] So, that's delve a little bit deeper into what makes this activity tick. Whenever, as a team, we discuss the design of an activity or how to make any activity better, there are really three aspects that we like to focus on. So these are, the design of the activity itself, which means paying attention to what materials people use, and how do the use them. The treatment of the environment, means we pay attention to anything from the size and placement of tables and chairs to what kind of pictures we might put on the walls. And, finally, we spend a lot of time paying attention to facilitation. How do we get people started with the activity? What we might say when somebody purchased the table or when they do something wrong, they can stay or get stuck on a particularly difficult problem. So let's take a closer look through each one of them. >> An important part of tinkering activities is the design of the activity itself. What kind of materials were involved. How it's structured. What the people are actually doing. And what we are trying to do with circuit boards is really pretty intentionally lose. It, it relies a lot on what you find most interesting and you're going to follow that lead and so will we. It also it about, not hiding things. The components themselves are pretty raw, motors, wires, batteries. It's really about the stuff. We have a mix of familiar and unfamiliar. There'll be toy parts on the table too, so. While you have a bulb and a battery, you also have this strange mechanism. We feel like that combination is also nice. There's also a plentiful amount of this stuff. It's not like you have one bulb and one battery, there are lots of things to choose from, which also brings up. An aspect that we care a lot about, which is choice. An individual kind of deciding what things they're going to work on and try next. As they're going through things, a lot of small insights happen really fast. You're trying something, it doesn't work, you try something else. That's really a part of the design of the activity as well. The design of the activity has. Circuit components kind of spread across the table. People are encouraged to come up and try figuring things out. The idea is really to figure out how to make this stuff work. That's not stated anywhere, and it's, there's no set instructions, but people are really naturally compelled to figure out what's going on. We're not telling you what the next step is. So you can go from a simple idea, to a complicated one very fast. And you're going to make some mistakes along the way, that's also intentional. >> One of the aspects of. Allowing people to work with such a loose collection of parts is that the path to understanding is not always straight, it doesn't always start from knowing nothing about the activity to knowing everything about it in linear fashion. Inside, it follows a lot of. Detours, meanders, and there's a lot of trial and error involved in it. And that's a good thing. It's the way understanding is built naturally. >> Another thing we do with circuit boards is we really allow people to make some mistakes. Making mistakes is an important part of the tinkering process. It's actually a part of it that we really value, so we don't try to eliminate all the things that could go wrong with the circuit boards. >> So the environmental details that we value and pay attention to when designing a tinkering activity have to do with everything that's in the space that's physical. It has to do with the furniture, the tools, the materials. So an environment for tinkering, where one is expected to spend a lot of time exploring, constructing and making things ought to be comfortable. And that includes everything from, the type of lighting that's in the space to what you're sitting on, to the number of people that are in the room around you, working and building and constructing things. Tinkering is a social endeavour so we do everything we can in the environment to support that. One of the biggest ways we do that is creating tables that are not square and in rows, but actually circular and rounded in ways that allow visitors and learners to work side by side making and constructing and doing their experiments with each other. The other advantage of a circular or round table where people are working side by side is that there's no one place for a teacher to stand and draw everyone's attention. It's a little counter-intuitive. But a circular table that doesn't allow a teacher to be the focus of attention forces the teacher to be a facilitator and work with everyone else who is around the table equally rather than stopping everybody, having them pay their attention to the teacher and then waiting for the next step to continue. Another very important element of the environment is to have objects, books and other things that can be used as both informational, but also inspirational. So we'll often play video or an art film, that shows light bulbs being manufactured, or have some other interesting connection to circuits. We might place around the room other objects that are using circuits in interesting ways. Sometimes we dissect toys and show the inner workings of them. So we'll have them around the room. Often times we'll use some of those inspirational aspects as part of the activity. And so everything that we can do to actually show that this activity or the circuit endeavor is greater than the circuit blocks that we're exploring is what we do with the environment with objects on the shelf, images in the room and sometimes videos on the monitor. [BLANK_AUDIO] >> One of the most interesting things about facilitation is that it's not something you can do by a route. It is practice, something that we are constantly getting better at, the more we do it. And, we try to be very reflective about it, and, as a group come together after we do this activity on the floor for a period of time. And really discuss what are the issues that we see. What are the strategies that work best for each of us. We learn from each other, we build a common understanding of what we're trying to do and how we're trying to accomplish it. And that in, in the end, makes our work better and makes the experience of our visitors better on the floor. >> I spend a lot of my time as a facilitator, just carefully watching how people are approaching the materials, their investigations, and each other. Just hanging back and trying to read people. Watching their gestures, seeing how they're, how they're interacting with other people, what their energy level seems like. It may seem like I'm not doing very much when I'm standing back and just letting things happen around the table, but I'm actually paying very close attention to the moments where I think I might have to step in. Oftentimes, if I just wait a few seconds longer some big breakthrough occurs on its own. One of the things that I often do to help people is they have a circuit that's really complex; there are so many wires and so many other objects and I'll just ask them to simplify. And we might do that by pushing other wires away, pushing the other components physically out of the purview of the person at the table, and then just trace the path from the battery to the component back to the battery. And that often does an awful lot to help in that specific instance and later I'll look over somebody's shoulder and see that their using that technique again for some of the other circuits that they're constructing. So, somebody may have great success at making their light bulb turn on, or making their motor turn on. But then I'll kind of check that by bringing in a second motor or another object that works in a slightly different way just to see how their thinking is going. And then by them actually trying to hook up the new component, or integrate the new component into their original circuit, I get a better sense of how sturdy their thinking is in terms of their understanding of the circuits. So one of the key tenets is that we design activities and facilitate people through failure and frustration. Now that doesn't mean that we want everybody to have an unsuccessful project, or get really upset. But we do believe that, right at the point that you're the most frustrated might be the moment when you're about to have a breakthrough in your own thinking. And that can be a powerful thing if you can work yourself through it. If we can help to facilitate that, it takes practice, but it's often a very good pay off at the end. [MUSIC]
