About
Tinkering School Chicago is a place for children to engage in open ended building projects that foster creativity. A failure-positive environment encourages children to take risk, try out new things, and play in the face of adversity.
Tinkering School was founded by Gever Tulley over 10 years ago in California. (www.tinkeringschool.com) His TED Talk has inspired countless educators to trust children to build, make, and tinker with real tools and real problems. The results have been nothing short of remarkable. Check out the blog here! Also check out his K-12 school, Brigthworks
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At Tinkering School Chicago we have brought this strong foundation for experiential learning to the midwest and added a few twist of our own. We offer weekend workshops with partner organizations and celebrate the beginning of summer every year with overnight summer camp. Our version of Tinkering School is full nature immersion. We sleep, eat, and build out in the woods. We get sweaty, it is buggy, dirty, epic, and just really a ton of summertime fun!
Tinkering is a way of understanding difficult problems, of wrapping our heads around them and quantifying the unknowns.
-Gever Tulley
Nothing ever turns out as planned ... ever. And the kids soon learn that all projects go awry -- and become at ease with the idea that every step in a project is a step closer to sweet success, or gleeful calamity. -Gever