It’s a cherished part of tinkering philosophy that people learn best by trying things themselves, so participants in our latest professional development workshop got a chance to facilitate tinkering activities directly with the public. In the group discussion afterwards we were deeply impressed with the participant’s insightful comments and touching stories about their day. Here’s just a tiny collection of the good stuff they had to say:

J.P. said he noticed a connection between tinkering and social work in that there’s a tension in knowing when to help and when to step back. If you help too much the relationship becomes symbiotic. Instead, he said, you need to show visitors how to solve their own problems.

Ray told us he wanted the visitors to feel like they were playing and having fun, not like they were learning or that he was teaching them. The learning mattered, but he hoped it felt accidental.

Lynne noticed that sometimes all a visitor needed was to have her start them with something simple, like lighting a lightbulb, and that they could elaborate from there.

Valerie found that if there were too many examples on the work table, visitors would often just copy what they saw. She said she noticed that having just the right amount helped them tap into their own creativity.

Click here for the full workshop agenda and lots more photos.

The Arkansas Museum Network tinkering project is made possible by The Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium in collaboration with Exhibit Services.

While the visitors tinkered, a small team of facilitators, armed with extra tips and tools, wove in and out of the crowd, admiring creations and offering nudges when necessary. Sam Dean and I traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas to be there for the grand opening. This studio is the first of seven that the Exploratorium will build this year for museums throughout the state, so we took careful notes about how visitors approached the activities, thinking about adaptations we’ll need to make for each museum’s unique personality.

I also spent a lot of time simply enjoying being in the space, now that it’s full of creative and curious makers, the way that I always imagined it being during the months of envisioning, design, and professional development leading up this. Here’s a peak at the tinkering studio in action, and congratulations to The Museum of Discovery, the original tinkering studio at the Exploratorium, and exhibit services for pulling together such a wonderful, warm, and thoughtful space.

This is glimpse of the kinetic entry sign. Welcome to the tinkering studio.

This boy wired an old toy part to two switches to transform it into a robot that quacks and dances on command.

Two master tinkerers perfect flying mechanisms to try out in the wind tube. These are the third ones they’ve built today.

The app, like the Exploratorium, takes a wide view on colorful phenomena, touching briefly on everything from history to biology. Learn about optical illusions, canine color vision, historical paint palettes, and how colors make us feel. Our online engagement team even managed to sneak in some hands-on experiments and teach you a little bit about the iPad itself.

Download your own version of Color Uncovered here. It’s free!

I hope the school field trip kids…

-get empowered to ask why.

-have an amazing time at the museum and that they discover new things and share their discoveries with others.

-get a moment of beautiful confusion.

-get the knowledge that science is all around them in the world, and they have the ability to learn something at any given moment.

-find something in the museum that they think is marvelous and that energizes and inspires them and leaves them with more questions.

-have fun and learn something new.

-feel welcome into our community.

-learn that learning is not always boring.

-get excited about learning new things, feel empowered to ask questions and connect their experience to their everyday lives.

-realize that learning can happen anywhere, not just in a classroom.

-for them to have an amazing unforgettable experience at the Exploratorium and to make it friendly for them to explore without fear.

-leave not only with answers but with more questions. These questions will lead to more learning.

-get confused and simultaneously excited enough to purse an answer.

-will have an experience that they will excitedly share with others.

-will find at least one interesting thing or phenomenon that would stay in their mind and keep them thinking.

-don’t just learn something at the Exploratorium, but get excited to go learn more about something they saw.

It is going to be a great year!

To search for these tiny signals, LIGO continuously measures the lengths of its two perpendicular arms, and looks for slight differences that might indicate that space itself is fluctuating. This very precise measurement is done with the use of an enormous interferometer. The interferometer takes a laser beam, splits it in two, shines the beam down two perpendicular, 2.5 mile long vacuum tubes with mirrors at the end, and compares the distance traveled by each beam by inspecting the interference pattern formed when the two beams meet back up again.

Gravity waves are created whenever a mass moves through space time, but most of them are not strong enough for LIGO to pick up. The largest waves they expect to find will be those created by massive celestial collisions, but by the time these waves reach the earth, even that signal is not expected to exceed an amplitude 1/1000th the diameter of a proton. In order to make their system sensitive enough, the LIGO scientists have had to engineer some very complex systems. The most obvious of these are the sealed metal tubes and chambers surrounding the entire apparatus. Air particles in the path of the laser beam would interact with the light and distort the signal, so the lasers must pass through a vacuum. The LIGO vacuum has an air particle density eight times lower than the emptiest void between here and the moon, and they continue to capture stray air particles with a liquid nitrogen system that removes molecules by freezing them.

LIGO also physically stabilizes their systems with a collection of sensors that detect motion in the ground and physically move the machinery in the opposite direction. Without these mechanisms, LIGO would be overwhelmed with signals from earth quakes on the other side of the planet, traffic on highways miles away, and the scientists themselves walking near the equipment.

One of the most interesting things about LIGO is that so far they have never actually seen a gravity wave. The entire facility is still in prototyping phase, although the end is in sight, and the current upgrade should bring it up to its final version. Meanwhile the LIGO scientists are checking and double checking all systems, and even the LIGO scientists themselves are being tested. A few of the senior scientists have been given the ability to inject false information into the data to simulate a detection. The rest of the scientists have to wait until the end of the year to find out if their findings were real or merely a test. This year they opened the white envelope containing the injection dates, only to find that the paper they had already written and were ready to publish, was based on false data.

Learn more about LIGO here.

Last week I had the honor of hosting this party of dynamic individuals as they embarked on a whir-wind schedule full of conversations with thoughtful exhibit developers and other great Exploratorium minds. The teachers learned about brainstorming techniques from Shawn Lani, took a deep dive into the scientific complexities behind some simple exhibits with Paul Doherty, heard the creation story of many of our newest exhibits, and accumulated tons of pages full of good advice and resources. They were so energized at the end of their second day of meetings that they flew immediately to work on their lesson plan and left with the whole thing already sketched out. The most common exhibit idea we heard: “don’t be afraid to copy good ideas at first and see where the exploration takes you.”

For educators who are not yet convinced that reading research is a valuable practice, here’s just a brief list of why you should try it out.

1) It’s interesting: Researchers dream up all kinds of fascinating topics to study. I’ve read papers ranging from the educational potential of comic strips to high-school baseball players ideas about curve-balls. It’s fascinating what scientists find out sometimes.

2) It’s informative: Researchers have written articles suggesting best practices for everything from training Explainers, to developing field trip materials, to talking with kindergartners about science. You probably don’t have time to try these things in every possible way and extensively interview everyone involved, so it can be very useful to find out what researchers found when they did just that.

3) It justifies your work: Studies highlighting the importance of informal science education and open ended inquiry provide evidence of how incredibly valuable our work is. Knowing about these studies can help you advocate for the work you already know is important.

image property of Casey Reas

We host residencies: The Exploratorium has a long history of inviting artists into our midst, to collaborate on building exhibits and simply to swap ideas. Our artist in residence program has hosted hundreds of artists, and the fresh perspectives they bring have led to some of our most elegant creations.

We display art pieces: Some of our pieces were created purely as art and others blur the line between science and art. Sean Lani’s Icy Bodies and Ward Fleming’s famous pinscreen are two great examples of artist created exhibits. We also have a large collection of artistic films that we use to inspire curiosity and introduce new ways of looking at things.

We invite them to inspire us: Artists give brown bags, make presentations to the public, and hold office hours. Other museum professionals, like scientists and educators, get new ideas from talking with and learning from artists.Casey Reas, for example, will be visiting the Exploratorium in August to inspire and dialogue with us.

We invite the public to make art: Making art is a great way to encounter and explore ideas. We provide opportunities for visitors to do art through special art focused programming and also in our tinkering studio on the floor.

We are artists ourselves: We think of ourselves as makers of things that not only have factual content, but which also inspire and amuse with aesthetic appeal. We hire artists and we all explore our creative sides.