Ryan Jenkins's Blog, page 6
July 15, 2024
Tinkering R&D Process: Focus on Kaleidoscopes
Over the past several months, I’ve been collaborating with colleagues at the Tinkering Studio and the LEGO Playful Museum Learning Network TIPs (tinkering inventive playsets) group on new materials and prompts for exploring kaleidoscopes.
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July 9, 2024
Material Spotlight: Fidget Spinners
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.
...July 4, 2024
Podcast with Paul Orselli
A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining the one of my museum inspirations Paul Orselli on his wide-ranging podcast that features conversations about museums, education and interactive design. We talked about my upcoming book, The Tinkering Workshop and then touched on many related topics. It was a wide ranging conversation that flowed from reflecting on how starting out as an exploratorium explainer impacts facilitation strategies to thinking about the ideas of John Holt related to teac...
July 3, 2024
Ball Run Inspirations in the Wild
Recently in the ATSC making and tinkering community of practice, Prinda Wanakule shared a post asking for new ideas and inspirations for marble machines and ball runs. That message coincided with a few interesting discoveries that I saw on personal and professional travel over the past couple of months.
...June 28, 2024
Light and Optics Prototyping with Phaeno: Part 2
Over the last couple months I’ve been putting together new exhibit prototypes on the theme of light and optics to contribute to a big renovation effort in the works at ...
June 17, 2024
Material Spotlight: Fluted Plastic Campaign Posters
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.
...May 24, 2024
A Tinkering Bibliography
As part of the process of putting together my new book, The Tinkering Workshop, I spent a lot of time looking over the myriad books that have inspired me over the years and researching possible additions to the list of publications that spark new ideas.
As part of the lead up to the release of my book on October 15th 2024, I wanted to share with you a few of my personal “reading lists” that I put together on goodreads that contain some of my top recommendations for building your own tinkering li...
May 23, 2024
Light & Optics Prototyping with Phaeno - Part One
I’m currently collaborating with Phaeno Science Center in Wolfsburg, Germany on a prototyping project centered on creating more tinkerable light and optics exhibits. For us, this means in part, developing or remixing existing exhibits to make them more open-ended, learner-centric, collaborative and to work in more familiar everyday materials. It’s still the early stages of the project but I wanted to share a few of the experiments that we’ve tried so far.
...May 17, 2024
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May 14, 2024
Exploring the Vitra Design Museum
Recently I visited the Vitra Design Museum located in Weil am Rhine, a city in Germany near Basel, Switzerland that’s about 40 minutes away from where I live in Freiburg im Breisgau. I first discovered the museum because I heard about its extensive collection of artifacts made by the designers Charles and Ray Eames.
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