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How can you consistently pull off hands-on tinkering with kids? How do you deal with questions that you can't answer? How do you know if tinkering kids are learning anything or not? Is there a line between fooling around with real stuff and learning?

The idea of learning through tinkering is not so radical. From the dawn of time, whenever humanity has wanted to know more, we have achieved it most effectively by getting our hands dirty and making careful observations of real stuff.

Make: Tinkering (Kids Learn by Making Stuff) lets you discover how, why--and even what it is--to tinker and tinker well. Author Curt Gabrielson draws on more than 20 years of experience doing hands-on science to facilitate tinkering: learning science while fooling around with real things.

This book shows you how to make:

• A drum set from plastic bottles, tape, and shrink-wrap
• Magnetic toys that dance, sway, and amaze
• Catapults, ball launchers, and table-top basketball
• A battery-powered magic wand and a steadiness game (don't touch the sides )
• Chemical reactions with household items
• Models of bones and tendons that work like real arms and ankles
• Spin art machine and a hovercraft from a paper plate
• Lifelong learners hungry for their next genuine experience

Curt Gabrielson runs the Watsonville Environmental Science Workshop and works with science education in East Timor. He has been a science educator for more than 20 years, with positions in the California public schools, the National University of East Timor, and San Francisco's Exploratorium Teacher Institute.