hello I am a master at fooling around I
recently spent way too many hours
throwing rocks in this stream just to
look at the shape of the splashes they
made I have balanced thousands and
thousands of rocks I take endless
portraits of the creatures that visit my
back porch at night including this
peculiar beetle later when I unloaded
these pictures I discovered something
odd this beetle has a passenger this
very picture led me to a long
conversation with an entomologist in
Chicago who explained to me that this
tiny little bug living on this beetle is
a mite not a parasite but just a
passenger riding around on the beetle
for meal to meal in what's called a
faretta k-- relationship never would
have learned this if I hadn't been out
on the back porch fooling around with my
camera I am a pathological doodler this
is what Ted looks like to me I love this
quote here from Andrew bird musician who
said what the world needs now is
reckless curiosity
reckless curiosity sounds like another
kind of play to me
I can make perfectly round balls of sand
I can but mostly I tinker with my camera
with two thousand strawberry baskets
with a sailboat we built in a weekend
and what's writing
have you ever licked a 9-volt battery
before no have you ever licked a 9-volt
battery before and are you ready
are you scared okay Nick do you want to
try a fresh battery or an old vet are
you scared
that's really weird bad and what does it
taste like when you're done amazing what
you can get kids on the street to do and
all the things that I do play us at the
foundation of it six years ago I started
a little thing called tinkering school
maybe you've heard of it I started it
because it seemed like kids weren't
getting a chance to work with real tools
and real materials anymore
and that's the official story that's the
story I tell at education conferences
but it's not the whole truth I also
wanted to spend more time fooling around
and kids are better at it than most
adults present company excepted this was
a great laboratory for me to learn how
children learn and we were doing some
amazing things it I had six years later
I had a program that was doing
everything that it set out to do but
most of them weren't doing it anywhere
except at tinkering school was I giving
them access only to exotic tools and
materials things that they couldn't get
their hands on anywhere else that became
my obsession I started playing around
with sticks and twine materials that any
child anywhere in the world can get
their hands on and I started teaching
kids how to do it and they started
building condom
like this one with a built-in hammock
that he made but there was still a
problem you see fingering school suffers
from the same problem that even great
science museums suffer from limited
engagement at the Exploratorium in San
Francisco they consider a science
exhibit that engages children for just
30 seconds to be a success
I began we had the kids for a week and
it wasn't enough and I began to wonder
what it would be like if tinkering
school were a real school but something
was missing tinkering school wasn't
enough and I started to discuss it with
my friend Brian who ran a different kind
of summer program and we discovered that
he had the curiosity based chocolate to
my tinkering school based peanut butter
his program is designed to encourage
discovery through free play and
exploration and imagination and this was
our pronoun keo moment
what if our schools could come together
to become a real school and this became
our shared obsession and we started
playing with this idea because how would
this possibly work we didn't know
anything about opening a school we
weren't even sure it was completely
legal but we couldn't stop playing with
it and one day way back in December of
2010 we figured it out let me show you
how it works just gonna spread out this
piece of paper here now if the standard
pedagogical unit of a traditional school
is a day divided into periods of 45
minutes each and each period has a topic
math science history lunch social
studies English and maybe if you're
lucky
still some art if that's the standard
pedagogical unit
then the pedagogical unit of brightworks
our school is the arc every every art
has a topic and the arcs lasts from 6 to
12 weeks long the arc is divided into
three equal phases each phase between 2
and 4 weeks the first phase is called
exploration now the exploration phase is
changes the character of the school we
take it over and inside it we build this
landscape that explores the topic from
as many different perspectives as we can
manage and we bring in people from the
community and from around the world to
share their love of that topic with
these children so if we meet someone who
works in wind power generation we bring
them into the school and we bring a big
wind generator and if we meet somebody
who's been sailing all their lives and
knows everything there is to know about
wind on the water we bring them in if we
meet somebody who is an artist who works
with wind in her sculpture we bring them
in and the children work with them up
close and personal very much like that
old experience of being an apprentice
somewhere between being an apprentice
and working with the most excited
enthusiastic person you've ever met our
children take a curated journey through
this landscape and as they do that we
watch for those moments where they
become inspired by the topics and we
group them together into very small
teams three is the ideal team size we've
tested this they work with an adult
collaborator not a teacher a
collaborator someone who shares their
sense of wonder to produce a declaration
a clear statement about what it is
they're going to do in the next phase
what this exploration inspired them to
do the next phase is called expression
we call it expression because we allow
all forms of expression those kids who
are inspired by the power generation
maybe they're going to build a windmill
those kids who are inspired by the
artist maybe they're going to write an
opera those kids that are inspired by
the sailor they might write they might
make a sailboat but maybe they're going
to do a survey of sailing
history to really understand the
influence that Sailing had on our
culture some of the kids inspired by the
scientists have a hypothesis wind is
important in this context so they
perform a series of branching
experiments to see how important wind is
in that ecosystem all the time working
against this is upcoming deadline that
sets up the beginning of the third and
final phase exposition exposition is
divided into two parts very distinct the
first part we open up the school school
shouldn't be prisons they should be a
kind of open flow with the community we
open up the school nearby kids from
kindergarten and pre-k come in and see
what our children have built our
children demonstrate everything they've
done this is our windmill we built it
out of recycled bicycle parts and PVC
pipe and it generates enough power to
light a household this is the science we
figured out about the effects of wind on
this environment we put on the Opera two
nights only here in Mission in the
Mission District in San Francisco and
then we closed the school we turn inward
there's a quiet moment a moment of
reflection a moment of language arts
where we introspectively look at what it
is we built surrounded by the the things
that we did during our expression in
exploration faces and we work on our
portfolios and the children document
what it is they did why they did it and
how they feel about it and what they
discovered and then we take an X and a
deep inhale of rest a few days rest one
or two because come Monday we start a
new art thank you so
where does play gets you these are
scenes from the opening ceremony of our
new campus in San Francisco the response
from the community has been overwhelming
we had an actual order of magnitude more
applications for the spaces we had
available for a school that didn't even
have a campus yet school starts on
September 6 never underestimate the
power of play thank you very much