Volunteer for Tinkering School 2013

Would you like to spend a week at Tinkering School working with students on big, crazy, and possibly impossible, projects?

We are now accepting applications for volunteer positions at our summer sleep-over camp. In exchange for long days and hard work, applicants get three hot meals and a chance to learn how Tinkering School works first-hand. You will be working closely with a small team of dedicated adults. Think of it as a live-in seminar on radical, hands-on, experience-first, project-based learning.

Fill out an application today!

Details about the camp can be found on our camp site.

Day Six – Burning the Midnight Oil

Friday Night, August 24th, 11:42pm

It is quarter to midnight, and seven tinkerers are up with me as I write the blog. Three of them are playing Texas Hold ‘em, two are playing Spades, one of them is playing bass, and one is just watching the whole scene. We don’t impose curfew on Friday nights with the Seniors group. It’s a nice time to hang out and enjoy the transitory bittersweet nature of the relationships that we have spent the week building, wallowing in a proactively nostalgic atmosphere.

By the end of breakfast, we’d decided to rebuild the track, to flatten out the turns and figure out how to deal with the excess speed. We’re going for distance and thrill. And, when we saw the hay bale smash into the door frame at fourteen miles per hour, nobody thought it looked like fun.

So we head back to the drawing board to figure out everything we have to dismantle, and everything we will have to build – today.

Day Four – Going to the Beach, Tinkering School Style

Wednesday Night, August 22nd, 11:35pm

A great educator friend, Steve Davee, once told me, “if they are right in the thick of it, going strong, then that can be the perfect time to take a break – that way they are gung-ho to get started when they come back to it.” I’d like to retroactively claim that that is exactly what I was thinking when I started doing beach day, because it seems so obvious now that he’s pointed it out to me.

There was palpable excitement as we drove down to the beach, but there were also a lot of “we’re going to work on the roller coaster tomorrow, right?” checks. It’s clear that the whole group feels that going to the beach is a good idea, but let’s not forget that we’re all building a roller coaster.

The morning starts with some paddle building and last minute tweaks to the boats. Some of these boat designs are radical (to say the least) and “tuning” them up is deemed important.

Day Three – We Interrupt this Broadcast

Tuesday, August 21st, 11:43pm

We laughed, we ate tacos, we played, and we built – at every opportunity, we built. From immediately after breakfast, right through to dinner and then back again after. These are my favorite days at Tinkering School, when the projects are so provocative and engaging that meals are seen as interruptions.

Althea took up a position on the track factory making units for the first turn.

Day Two – Around the Bend

We got started so quickly this morning that we forgot to take a single picture until 10:06am. That was either fifteen minutes ago, or two days – I can’t quite tell. We’ve bitten off a little more than we thought, and what we have right now in the barn is less of a roller coaster than we started with… but less in such important ways.

We remembered the camera right about the time that Gever was recruited to cut a chunk off the cart. It turns out that the old cart is too long for the tightness of turns the track team are planning to build.

Day One – No Civilization Was Ever Built on Bare Ground

Sunday Night, August 19th, 2012 – 11:36pm

Dig down in the streets of New York and you will find New Amsterdam. Paris is a multi-layer wedding cake of overlapping cities stretching back into antiquity. This session is trying something that has never been done at Tinkering School before; we will build on top of, and extend, the roller coaster that Session 4 built.

In the mid-afternoon, Gever starts by establishing the ground rules of Tinkering School. Firstly, don’t hurt your self, or anyone else. Secondly, if you see a piece of fruit, and you want it, you must eat it. After that it’s pretty much noise; don’t play chase games in the house, no tools get left on the floor, don’t touch other people’s stuff without permission, don’t antagonize the animals, and so forth.

Day Six – Beyond Rickety Mountain

Friday Night, August 17, 2012

Up in the barn, there is a roller coaster – an unfinished roller coaster – and it calls to us. Like an itch you cannot scratch, the cookie you cannot have, or the water balloon you are not allowed to throw at your sibling.

It is also the morning in the week when tinkerers suddenly realize that this, right now, is their last day of building. But one can only stand so much premature nostalgizing, we abruptly depart the Ranch House and head to the barn.

Day Five – Things That Go Bump

Thursday Night, August 16th, 2012 – 11:30pm

Our day started with the arrival of this in our dining room:

You just know it’s going to be a weird day when it starts like that. Carter says that he is known for his epic bed-hair and we’re starting to believe him.

Day Four – Intermezzo with Sand

Wednesday Night, August 15th, 2012

One way you know that it is time to go to the beach is that nobody objects when you announce it over breakfast. Nobody wants to stay and work in the barn? “No!” Ok then, let’s make sandwiches…

We pack the icebox, toss in this and that, load up the vehicles, and head out to the newly discovered secret Tinkering School beach (which is public, just not well known).

Day Three – Getting Things Done

Tuesday Night, Day 3, August 14th

Gever is up early today, awakened by fragments of design solutions to the problems they encountered yesterday. He gets a mumbled “Is it time to get up?” from one of the boys in the boys dorm, but they are fast asleep again before he can answer. He sets out the breakfast buffet of cereal, yogurt, bagels, toaster, and all the fixin’s, before the house is awake. He desperately needs someone to talk to about the ways the wheel mountings for the luge capability on the car can be done – but the place is stubbornly peaceful. Time for a walk. Outside, the morning sun lights up a beautiful sky.