Tinkery: A Tinkerer’s Nursery for Problem Solving with Lego Mindstorms

Abstract

Problem-solving, in most of the engineering design laboratories is still systematic by the book, lacking exploration, curiosity building, investigation and discovery. Even with the wide availability of tinkering kits designed in accordance with tinkerablilty, their ability to nurture tinkering is limited to few pre-built models and instruction manuals. In this paper we discuss building experiences of exploration and play as an operational understanding of tinkering. Guided by our understanding and tinkering practices we designed Tink-table a learning environment to nurture tinkering by solving engineering design problems in the domain of robotics. Tink-table uses a Lego Mindstorm kit, is supported by our XprSEv (read as expressive) pedagogy, has a set of problems and a mentor. This paper presents the design of Tink-table along with a study design to understand its role in nurturing tinkering. We present observations of a preliminary study that align with our understanding of tinkering.