By Ina Opitz, Melanie Kryst, Pia von den Benken and Audrey Podann.
2. Melanie Kryst (biography)
3. Pia von den Benken (biography)
4. Audrey Podann (biography)
How can children’s everyday experiences and perceptions of problems and solutions be made accessible for potential inclusion in transdisciplinary research? How can these processes also be used to familiarise children with the fundamentals of transdisciplinarity?
We have developed a three-hour “tinkering workshop,” based on design science principles, to encourage children to think about their environment and identify problems and solutions in a playful and creative way.
Our tinkering workshop is suitable for children aged between 9 and 12 years. We have tried it out in four workshops with a total of 56 children, focusing on the problem of plastic waste. Two workshops were held with school classes and two were open workshops held in a modular space in a shopping mall. We suggest that an effective group size is around 20 or 24 children and that the process works most effectively in school classes.
The workshops have six phases, with a break in the middle.