6 Ways Kids Benefit from Tinkering

6 Ways Kids Benefit from Tinkering

So your child has shown an interest in tinkering—that’s great news! Even if they’re at the stage where they’re taking apart the toaster (and not quite mastering its reassembly), it’s important to find ways to foster your child’s curiosity and imagination. Tinkering—especially controlling robots, drones, and other connected toys with code—makes for a great childhood learning experience. Here are six reasons to encourage your child’s love of tinkering:

1. Building hobbies builds confidence. When your child has a chance to activate their creativity, their self-confidence grows. Exploring an interest, especially one as creativity-driven as tinkering with robots or drones, gives your child a sense of purpose and accomplishment.
2. They’ll fail—and that’s okay. For every successful invention, there are dozens of failed prototypes. Failure builds determination, and chances are that you learned this lesson as a kid (how many mud pies did you make that just wouldn’t hold their shape?). Encouraging your child to tinker is a great way to pass on the lesson that success requires failure.
3. Hands-on learning is powerful. The Maker Movement and project-based learning have spread to classrooms, and we’re realizing that children thrive when they have the opportunity to learn by doing. Let your child take their education into their own hands (literally), and see where it takes them.
4. They’ll see that learning = fun. We know that tinkering builds young brains, and messing around with robots and drones is undeniably fun. Let your child build the connection between the two. When your child categorizes learning as enjoyable, they’re setting themselves up for success throughout their education and career.
5. Coding is a timeless skill. From Ada Lovelace to Bill Gates, coders have made names for themselves in recent history. And now more than ever, programming is a basic literacy. While technology does evolve, what remains consistent is the analytical imagination that coding requires, and connected toys lay the groundwork for this kind of thinking and exploration.
6. They may just change the world. We’re not saying that every child who tinkers will go on to develop life-changing inventions…but what if they do? Give your child the tools and agency to change their world.

We know that funneling your child’s interest in tinkering into appropriate outlets can be a challenge, which is why we offer a variety of ways for kids to play with Tynker! Kids can design their own games with our patented visual-block coding language, mod in Minecraft, and play with connected toys like Sphero and LEGO WeDo 2.0. Tynker’s fun, hands-on lessons make it easy for parents—even those with no previous coding or robotics experience—to encourage their child’s interest in tinkering. Visit our site to learn about other ways to engage your child’s interest in tinkering!

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