ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the Tinkerlab’s celebration of curiosity can inspire learning experiences that carry over outside the museum walls. The Tinkerlab, a makerspace at the University of Arizona Museum of Art in the southwestern US, opened in the summer of 2017 with a great deal of anxiety and excitement. The lab was something new to the author as an art educator and more specifically as a museum educator at a university art museum. The mission of the Tinkerlab is to demystify the act of making and thereby the culture of making. Everyone has a story to tell, but not everyone feels empowered yet to “write” that story. With tools and materials within eyesight or easy reach of all visitors, the lab makes acts of making visible and accessible to museum visitors. Visitors to the Tinkerlab, like that young child, have demonstrated repeatedly an interest in combining materials in various ways.
