Marco’s Story
A tinkerer’s journey: seven years after his first Tinkering Club session, Marco came back to the iOi for work experience.
Marco first came to iOi as a small child, attending iOi’s Tinkering Club sessions with his family. The big open hall (a converted fire station) filled with other families, crates of junk, odds and ends, and no instructions in sight, would shape the way he thinks and makes for years to come.
Each month came with a new theme, from scribble bots to vending machines, and Marco was given free rein to build with whatever was available, from cardboard and split pins to springs and a glue gun. It was at the club that Marco first came across the micro:bit, something that he and his brother went on to “mess around with at home a lot”.
Years later, now at secondary school and with an interest in maths and science, the iOi came immediately to mum Silvia’s mind, and Marco immediately followed through with an email to the team: “I remembered that I really enjoyed the Tinkering Club, so I decided to write an email to James, and yeah, it happened.”
The work experience week
Over the week, Marco worked hands-on with a micro:bit for the first time in years: coding a propeller to spin and lights to flash at intervals, then building a robot that could hold a simple spoken conversation, then a micro:bit controlled car. He also helped put together Tinker Tubs going out to families, and researched laser cutters.
Picking the micro:bit back up wasn’t like starting from scratch. “I knew what I needed to do, I just didn’t know how to achieve it,” he says. “I just tried a few different options until… wait, oh, it’s this.”
Silvia noticed a shift in how Marco approached the week compared to the Tinkering Club days. "He was welcomed into a real work environment and got to contribute to the 'behind the scenes', having been a beneficiary of the iOi's work in the past." He also enjoyed thinking about younger children during the Tinker Tub work, thinking about what they would enjoy, and had a go at helping sort and tidy iOi activities and resources.
What Marco makes of it now
Marco isn’t sure yet what he wants to do long-term, but the week left him thinking in that direction: “I’ve discovered that I quite like messing around with the coding a bit, and the technology that I used was quite cool. So potentially I would go into a career with similar technology, or helping people to use technology like this.”
Asked what he’d want iOi to focus on next, he suggested more clubs teaching kids to code or use micro:bits. Marco pointed out how central AI has become, and thinks younger children should learn to use it well: “I know that in secondary school they don’t necessarily teach us how to use it correctly. So teaching primary school kids how to use AI to help them and inspire them to do creative things would be quite useful, I reckon.”
Silvia’s reflections on the week were that it gave [Marco] “a really good insight into the real world” and that “the iOi is a fantastic place, I wish there were more places like it around.”