TinkerlabOpen-source workshop for urban teens.
Weekend workshops and remote mentors for middle-schoolers with limited extracurricular access — bringing open-source engineering culture beyond the classroom.
Why this exists
Where it started
Tinkerlab began as a weekend question between two engineers and a school teacher: what would it look like to give middle-schoolers — the ones who don't have a parent in tech, don't have an after-school program, don't get a robotics kit on their birthday — an open-source engineering experience that wasn't a watered-down demo?
The first session ran in a borrowed library room. Seven kids, two laptops short, one project: a sensor that emails you when your plant needs water. They all left with a working circuit and a Github repository under their name.
How a session runs
- Friday eve — a remote mentor pairs up with each student for a 30-min "kick" call.
- Saturday morning — the local cohort meets in person. The mentor on a screen, snacks on the table.
- Saturday afternoon — debugging, building, and breaking. Adults watching, not steering.
- Sunday — students push their code, write a short retro, and pick the next thing.
The remote mentor model means a kid in a 4th-tier city can be paired with an engineer in Berlin, Hangzhou, or Bangalore. Nothing about the experience is "regional".
What we're learning
Three things keep showing up across cities:
- The bottleneck is rarely the curriculum — it's having an adult who treats the kid as a builder, not a beneficiary.
- The kids learn by ear before they learn by docs. The mentors who get this in week one are the ones who stay.
- The right end-of-session question is "what would you build next?" not "did you have fun?"
Open materials
All session plans, mentor briefs, and project repositories are published under MIT. Translation into Mandarin and Vietnamese is in progress; help welcome.
How it's going
- Q4 2024Tinkerlab idea pitched at a Novawerk open day. First collaborators commit a Saturday afternoon.
- Q1 2025Validation conversations with target users. Scope cut on purpose; the smaller version turns out to be the one people actually want.
- Q2 2025First measurable result: Open-source workshop for urban teens.. The team writes the playbook so others can replicate.
- Q4 2025Working with a partner organization to extend reach without losing the qualitative care that made it work.
“We didn't want a product launch. We wanted something that would still be here in three years — without us.”
Team & roles
Coordinates direction, runs weekly retros, talks to partners.
Owns the artifact — code, hardware, or the printed thing — depending on the week.
Shows up in person where the work meets the world.
Documentation, retros, community check-ins. Looking for someone.
Get involved
If anything in here resonates — even just one paragraph — that's enough to start a conversation. Lightweight contribution is welcome. So is sitting in on a retro before you decide.
