Ryan Jenkins's Blog, page 5

Prototype AI and Creative Learning Workshop

Over the past few months I’ve been collaborating with a group of colleagues that form the Connecticut / Baden-Württemberg Human Rights Research Consortium (HRRC) to develop open-ended, personally meaningful and creative pathways for all youth to engage with AI tools and technologies. My local partners are the NEXUS Experiments group at the BrainLinks-BrainTools center at the University of Freiburg.

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The Tinkering Workshop Fresh Reviews

Madonna once said something like, “I am an algorithm girl living in an algorithm world”, and as a recently published author of The Tinkering Workshop, I can relate to this possibly misquoted sentiment. There are lots of invisible forces that affect how “the algorithm(s)” promote(s) or hide(s) new books. From what I understand, the number of genuine and honest reviews that a book receives play a huge part in who can discover it organically when they are searching for tinkering, STEAM or makerspa...

St. Martin's Day Lantern Light Play

For the past four years, I’ve been living in Germany and over that time, it’s been interesting to see local traditions and festivals that have potential as jumping off ...

Recycle for LightUpPoUptober

Last month I was invited to take part in a fun celebration of pop-up and light-up tinkering led by the team at Chibitronics, inspired by a larger project by greeting card maker Keith Allen. For each day of October, a different tinkerer got assigned a specific theme for the project.

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Last Minute Halloween Costume Ideas

Tomorrow is Halloween! If you have been very busy lately and haven’t had time to pick up a costume for the big day, have no fear. My just-released book, The Tinkering W...

The Tinkering Workshop Book Tour Continues

After an fun and busy first few days after the release of my book, The Tinkering Workshop, the book tour headed south for some more fantastic events at a local bookstore, museum and afterschool center.

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The Tinkering Workshop Book Tour Gets Underway

Today marks one week since the release date of my new book, The Tinkering Workshop. It’s been so fun to share this collection of playful art, science and engineering explorations using everyday materials with families, educators and makers.

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Ars Electronica Chain Reaction Workshop

At the beginning of October, I joined my friends at Tinkertank to lead a giant chain reaction workshop at the Ars Electronica festival. Along with collaborators from Habitat Ausgburg and mrkz.at we spent five days inviting kids and adults to contribute free form rube goldberg style stations to our evolving kinetic sculpture. 

Our workshop took place in the “create your world” section of POSTCITY, a converted post office facility in Linz, Austria with literal hi...

Materials Spotlight: Magnets

My upcoming book, The Tinkering Workshop contains twenty spotlights on materials for everyday elements that can be used for playful explorations of art, science and technology. There were plenty of items that we couldn’t fit it into the final version of the book so as a little bit of “bonus content”, I wanted to write a few blog posts featuring tinkering materials that didn’t quite make the cut.

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Making a Book: Rough Draft to Final Iteration

I’m getting really excited about the launch of my upcoming book, The Tinkering Workshop, a collection of materials, projects and inspirations for exploring art, science...