Ryan Jenkins's Blog, page 4

Energy Harvesting Prototyping Challeges

In my book, The Tinkering Workshop, I write that tinkering can sometimes be hard work and that “taking any idea from inside your head and putting it out in the world takes time, energy and effort.” This goes for the kids and families working on projects as well as educators and activity developers designing new prompts and projects.

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Energy Harvesting Prototyping Challenges

One important aspect of tinkering both for learners trying activities and developer working on new projects and prompts is that oftentimes there’s not a clear endpoint in sight at the start of the process. This makes things exciting and opens up possibilities for new and surprising results but it can also be a challenge especially when things don’t work out as expected.

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Playfully Exploring Three Museum Exhibits in Milan

I feel really fortunate to have many family and friends living near one of my favorite cities in the world, Milan, Italy. Over the past several weeks, I had the chance to check out three wonderful exhibitions that are connected to science, art, technology and tinkering in different ways.

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New Tinkering Book Recs for 2025

Since the recent publication of The Tinkering Workshop, I’ve been diving more and more into the world of books related to art, science and technology that offer entry points for making and tinkering. As we enter into the new year, I wanted to share a new batch of recommendations across several different catagories.

I’ll start with a couple of books from Storey Publishing, who I’m working with on The Tinkering Workshop. First off, I’ve been following in the website/newsletter The Marginalian (form...

Repairing a Maneki-Neko

I’m working on more and more making and tinkering projects with my two-year-old son in these days. I wanted to write about a recent experience that really opened my eyes about the possibilities for exploring these types of activities with very young learners. 

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Tinkering in Spatial Chat

This week I had the chance to collaborate with the Clean Conferencing Institute to facilitate an experimental online workshop using SpatialChat. This is a virtual meeting platform that lets each participant move their video around and only hear and interact with others who are close to them in the digital environment. 

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2024 Year in Review

This year has been so full of amazing connections and long-term projects coming to fruition. I’m excited to share some of the highlights of 2024 from Wonderful Idea Co. and preview a few of the things that I’m excited about for 2025. 

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More Making and Tinkering Gift Ideas

As the holiday season has swung into full gear, I’ve been really thrilled to see my new book, The Tinkering Workshop, featured in several holiday gift guides from some of my favorite websites, organizations and maker influencers. I wanted to share a couple highlights that you all can look at to find all sorts of toys, tools books and inspirational materials for the tinkerers in your life.

First off I wanted to highlight Jen Schachter’s “favorite things of 2024...

Light, Shadow and LEGO at Elztal Museum

Over the past months I’ve been working on developing more local tinkering connections with schools, libraries and museums in the Freiburg area. This weekend I tested a workshop at the Elztal Museum in Waldkirch which displays many musical (and sometimes automata-tized) organs, alongside other local craft traditions.

For the winter season they are hosting a special LEGO exhibition and they invited me to come and try out an experimental tinkering workshop for fa...

The Tinkering Workshop Gift Guide 2024

If you are reading this blog post hopefully you already have my new book, The Tinkering Workshop, on your holiday gift-giving list for any tinkerers, educators or parents in your life. It’s full of open-ended inspiration for new STEAM projects that could fit in classroom, library or kitchen table workspaces.

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