In 2019, Imagination Station in Toledo, Ohio recognized a need in their community for high quality STEAM education. However, there was a transportation barrier in many of the areas that needed it most. With this in mind, Imagination Station set off to develop a mobile tinkering lab, with high quality STEAM curricula, that would take the program to those communities. With the generous support of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), along with several other funders, Toledo Tinkers: Through a Child’s Eyes was born.
Toledo Tinkers is a comprehensive initiative designed by the Imagination Station Team to engage underserved parts of the Toledo community through a shared vision of culturally responsive tinkering experiences. The goal of Toledo Tinkers is to increase high-quality STEAM education among diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds through a mobile tinkering laboratory, community programming and a community narrative exhibit. For this project, we partnered with several local organizations along with established professionals in the field of making and tinkering to maximize the impact of this program on our community.
Generally, Toledo is an area of particularly high need. According to data from 2018 to 2022 from the National Institute of Health, both Toledo (23.3%) and Lucas County (17.8%) exceed the average poverty rate of both Ohio (13.3%) and the nation (12.5%). In the city of Toledo, nearly 20,000 children under 18 years of age live in poverty, nearly one in every three children. We identified areas of high priority for program delivery as STEM deserts, which is similar in concept to food deserts. We identified barriers to accessing high quality STEM education, such as lack of public transportation, financial constraints or sociological factors. An area was flagged as a STEM desert if its local school’s 5th-grade science test score average was below the state of Ohio’s average score in the year 2019. This identification system provided us with specific zip codes in the Toledo area where we could set our highest priorities for program delivery.
Tinkering serves as an open-ended method of discovery and exploration for people of all ages. Through tinkering, individuals can learn life skills such as self-expression, collaboration, and persistence. Toledo Tinkers invites individuals from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in making and tinkering through two kinds of community programming: Maker Club and Tinkering Takeovers.
Maker Club is a 12-session series, geared toward students ages 11-13, that is typically hosted at a local partner organization site. At Maker Club, students engage with a new project each session that fits into one of four themes: fabrication, engineering, electronics, and robotics. These projects can be anything from creating 3D print designs on CAD software to making a wooden crank puppet using power tools. While at Maker Club, students are free to participate however they choose because meaningful interactions are happening, even if students are not actively creating something. From supporting a friend, to demonstrating a skill, to observing someone else’s creation, students are learning and growing in a safe atmosphere. The collaborative and engaging environment fostered at Maker Club is what makes the program so impactful.
A Tinkering Takeover is a one-time experience, hosted at a community-centric location, designed to foster family engagement. Families of all kinds can experience 6 different activities that introduce them to the newest innovations in fabrication, engineering, electronics, and robotics. Families that attend a tinkering takeover receive admission passes to the science center, inviting them to come tinker with us again.
In addition to the community programming, we developed a narrative exhibit on the project inside the science center. The exhibit takes visitors on a journey of tinkering in Toledo through past, present and future, highlighting innovations & artwork in each time period. The future section exhibits artwork from our Maker Club program, showing what the future can hold when we make an impact.
The IMLS funding for this project wrapped up in fall of 2024 but the work of Toledo Tinkers has continued to make lasting impacts on many families in our community. Thanks to sustained support from local funders, we have been able to continue programming at the same level, with hopes to grow larger in the upcoming years. The outcomes of Toledo Tinkers have been compressed into a replicable framework that can be found here: https://www.imaginationstationtoledo.org/educators/toledo-tinkers-the-future/
The NISE Network sends a huge thank you to the team at Imagination Station Toledo for sharing back this wonderful story of serving their community, as well as sharing this framework for others to approach similar efforts with their local communities!
Toledo Tinkers is made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant #MA-245768-OMS-20). Additionally, this work is supported by the Stranahan Foundation, General Motors Corporate Giving, KeyBank Foundation, Columbia Gas/NiSource Charitable Foundation, Toledo Rotary Club Foundation through the Greater Toledo Community Foundation, the Elsie and Harry Baumker Charitable Foundation and the Target Foundation.