"But there are no signs anywhere! How do you know what not to do?"

--Emmet, from "The Lego Movie"

Creative learning is all about working out your "tinkering" muscles. MIT Media lab is all about this, including an early and ongoing partnership with the Lego company, back when an early researcher there realized it was more than just a toy company. And MIT was able to re-assure a Lego executive that it would be a good thing if a user came up with a better way to use them than the company knew! Check out this video for a nice retrospective about this partnership.

This week, the Learning Creative Learning class covered "tinkering", where you open your mind to worlds away from "President Business", "Micro-managers", and "Instructions". We all know what tinkering is, right? You find something, take it apart, leave it, come back, change something, apply it and see how it works. Sometimes, it looks broken or unfinished. You sleep on it (figuratively or literally!), and then one day, you get that "aha", and it comes to you, what it is that would make it better. And, then you repeat ;)

Watch for ways that discourage this way of  "talking with your stuff". For teaching that gives kids too much information and allows too little time. That gives too much evaluation on the final output. That worries too much about distraction and messiness. As a teacher, you become a master in the art of balancing chaos, in a more "Lucy" construction site, less  "Unikitty" Cloud Cuckoo Land way. Take a read here for a nice overview co-authored by Mitch Resnick, Mr Scratch, about how a tinkering way of teaching works.

"Of course he won't be (a masterbuilder), not if you keep telling him (he isn't). He needs to see that he can."

--Vitruvius, "The Lego Movie"