Creative learning
Museum festival promotes technology, creativity
Throughout the day Saturday, children and adults alike flocked to Mid-America Science Museum to fiddle with a host of contraptions.
The fifth annual Tinkerfest drew visitors from both inside Arkansas and out of state to tinker with the contraptions on display. The event featured 50 “tinkering stations” from area organizations set up throughout the museum.
Doug Herbert, the museum’s education director, said that the festival was initially inspired by the Makers Movement, which encourages individuals to use technology to create items for their own use. He said that, more and more, people are beginning to use technology to build their own products as opposed to buying one from a store.
“The idea behind it is that people are now starting to actually do things that, before, accounted on a manufacturer to do,” he said. “It goes from everything from extremely traditional type things like textiles and clothing, et cetera, all the way up to building your own computer or your own drones.”
Jim Miller, the museum’s marketing director, said that Tinkerfest is not the only one in the
state of Arkansas, and the stations change each year. He said that the concept of Tinkerfest is “continuing to grow” throughout the state and at home each year.
Miller said he was pleased with the festival’s attendance at noon. He said that by its end, the festival had yielded a total of 1,000 visitors, tinkerers and volunteers.
Tinkerfest’s stations encompassed a wide variety of concepts within the field of “tinkering.” Everything from interlocking wooden blocks to circuit boards were set up throughout the museum for public use.
“Our engineering, technology, mathematics, all of those things kind of come into play when you think about tinkering, whether it’s taking a computer apart, or whether it’s building something with at 3D printer,” Miller said. “So really, tinkering can encapsulate a lot of things that are science-related.”
James Hopper, development coordinator of the EAST Initiative, set up an Oculus Rift in the museum for the festival. He said that this is EAST’s second year at the festival. The first year, they came after hearing about it at North Little Rock’s Maker Fair.
Hopper called Tinkerfest “one of the best events in Arkansas.” “Everybody’s demonstrating different hands-on technology and different crafts and arts,” he said. “Just very interesting and engaging items for youth and family.”
Tinkerfest also offered attendees the opportunity to potentially use technology they had never been exposed to. Julian Post, program coordinator for National Park College’s Innovative Technology Center, had what he called a “3-D Print Farm” set up in the museum. The “farm” contained about half a dozen printers from the center, which allowed children to create three-dimensional designs and print them.
“This is the first time many of these people have seen it,” Post said, referring to the printers.
“Hot Springs, of course, is not necessarily an area where people get to play around with emerging technologies,” Herbert said. “What Tinkerfest does is they get to experiment with the hands-on science that they may not get to in their day-to-day lives.”
Miller said that he was pleased to see adults — as well as children — taking part in the festival’s tinkering. He said that the festival’s involvement spanned all ages.
“We’ve had elderly people, we’ve had middle-aged people, we’ve had adults of all ages just kind of really getting into it,” Miller said. “It’s kind of a collaborative concept, taking things apart or building things or creating things.”
Herbert said that those who attended Saturday’s festival take the concept of tinkering beyond the museum.
“We want them to know that this is something within their reach, within their grasp. We hope that they come away inspired to actually start making for themselves.”