About
Facilitating Computational Tinkering is a collaborative project focused on designing more equitable experiences for youth and families to create and express themselves with computing.
Facilitators are educators who support youth and families to engage in learning through making in libraries, museums, makerspaces, and other community centers. They play important roles in these spaces to cultivate creative and equitable environments for their communities, especially for communities that have been excluded and marginalized from computing.
In our work, computing is not only about acquiring computational skills and knowledge, but about being able to express ideas, interests, and identities to imagine and build new futures and worlds.
Through our focus on computational tinkering, we aim to broaden the styles of engaging with computing, providing a more social, physical, and cross-disciplinary alternative to more dominant ways of teaching computing that focus on planning and optimization of a single solution.
Project collaborators include the Creative Communities research group at the University of Colorado Boulder, the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium, and the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. Our core community partner sites include the ideaLABs at Denver Public Library and the Clubhouse Network. Additional community partner sites include blackyard and Tacoma Public Libraries. With extensive contributions from ckMartin Consulting.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2005764, 1908351, 2005702, 2005731.