"It's fooling around directly with phenomena, with tools and materials. It's thinking with your hands and learning through doing. It's slowing down and getting curious about the mechanics and mysteries of everyday stuff around you. It's whimsical, enjoyable, fraught with dead ends, frustrating, and, ultimately, about inquiry."

(Wilkinson & Petrich, The Art of Tinkering, 2014)


Tinkering is an approach to learning used as a way to engage learners with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). It fosters curiosity, posing one’s own questions and creative learning. This contributes to the development of several of the skills most useful today, such as critical thinking, innovation, collaboration, communication, responsibility, self-confidence, digital literacy and entrepreneurship.

Among the special features of the Tinkering activities is their approach to facilitation, learning and engagement of all. Tinkering helps everyone build their own experience and meaning, no matter who they are or where they come from by encouraging active engagement with materials and processes while pursuing one’s own path of learning and understanding.

The pedagogy of Tinkering began at the Tinkering Studio of the Exploratorium in San Francisco USA to spread all over the world across formal and informal learning settings.