The Vine

If the video from the previous post is correct…if we’re preparing children today for jobs that don’t yet exist…maybe what’s needed is more collaborative, free-form, problem-solving skills like those honed at the Tinkering School in Montara, California.

Founded by Gever Tulley, a senior computer scientist at Adobe, the Tinkering School is a one-week camp that offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids (ages 7 to 17) learn how to build things. This is not arts and crafts, or even woodshop. Parents are required to sign a waiver acknowledging that their child can be injured or killed (!) at this camp. Hands-on activities involve power tools, motorcycles, zip lines, fire, spears, and boats of the kids’ own creation.

Tulley describes it as “a place where kids can pick up sticks and hammers and other dangerous objects and be trusted…a place where children are given the freedom to build, and destroy, and fail in a way that is very different from how they are now taught at school or home.”

It is, in short, the kind of experience he wishes he’d had as a child.

Here’s a fantastic illustrated comic depicting the camp’s activities and principles.

Here’s an entertaining interview with Gever Tulley on NPR.

There are many lessons that we—as business leaders struggling to regain footing in a time of great uncertainty—can learn from the Tinkering School philosophy. One is this: “Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are encouraged and fertilized.”

But my favorite takeaway is the one dealing with setbacks. When faced with projects gone awry, the kids re-channel their efforts in a surprising way: they decorate them.

“Decoration,” Tulley says, “is a form of conceptual incubation.”

He elaborates: “By keeping their hands on the project, they refine their intuitive understanding of what they are building, and the materials they are building with. And from these interludes come intuitive leaps, leading to new approaches to the problem that had frustrated them just twenty minutes earlier.”

Intuitive leaps, leading to new approaches to the problem.

Who wouldn’t welcome some of those right about now?