The Exploratorium is one of the largest informal science and maths museums in the world. They were also one of the first to introduce a 'Tinkering Studio'. This is a place where people can play with materials and construction techniques to make things. Projects include automatons, scribbling machines, light boxes and mechanical music.
In January 2018, Tam and Ricardo, along with Cierra Rawlings and Molly Kelton from California, travelled to meet the team who run the Tinkering Studio, to present some of the things we'd been working on, and find out about their work.
It was great to take part in their projects, and learn about the philosophy of tinkering. Their were many discussions around the mathematics of seemingly random motions, the education of maths and sciences and how computation can be defined in the context of tinkering.
We also managed to apply the tinkering mentality to our own projects, which have since developed in new ways based on our experiences here.
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