Mimi Shalf
We're building a zine library for ISLS 2026!

As a part of the new ISLS Arts Gallery & Performance track, we will be hosting a zine library and zine making table at ISLS 2026 in Irvine, CA! A zine (pronounced zeen) is a small-batch circulation of self published work, often in the form of text or images. They are easily reproducible and come in all shapes and sizes, but are most often seen in the form of a stapled or bound paper booklet. This zine library will be a display of zines made by the ISLS community and beyond, open for visitors to explore and read through as they please. 

We're building a zine library for ISLS 2026!

We're building a zine library for ISLS 2026!

We're building a zine library for ISLS 2026!

As a part of the new ISLS Arts Gallery & Performance track, we will be hosting a zine library and zine making table at ISLS 2026 in Irvine, CA! A zine (pronounced zeen) is a small-batch circulation of self published work, often in the form of text or images. They are easily reproducible and come in all shapes and sizes, but are most often seen in the form of a stapled or bound paper booklet. This zine library will be a display of zines made by the ISLS community and beyond, open for visitors to explore and read through as they please. 

A Creative Communities Guide to Pictorial Research Papers

A Creative Communities Guide to Pictorial Research Papers

This blog post is dedicated to sharing more about how and why our group often uses pictorials to communicate our research.  Pictorials are a research paper format accepted in several ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) venues in which “the visual components (e.g., annotated photographs, Artwork, collages, diagrams, field notes, illustrations, photographs, renderings, sketches) are the primary means of conveying information with at least, if not more, importance as the accompanying text.”

Translating Research into Zines: What We’ve Learned

Translating Research into Zines: What We’ve Learned

If you are familiar with our work or have met our team at conferences, you may have come across our interactive “What Equity Means to Me” zine (formerly “Equity as a Moving Target”). We have more recently started sharing our “Now What” zine that focuses more on supporting the implementation and sustainability of learning innovations . Making and sharing these zines has been really rewarding for our team and met with so much enthusiasm from participants that we are currently scheming about how we can make even more.

Connecting and Sharing Resources with Educators at “Play Make Learn” Conference In July

Connecting and Sharing Resources with Educators at “Play Make Learn” Conference In July

Last month Mimi and I (Ronni) attended Play Make Learn (PML) in Madison, Wisconsin from July 17th-19th.  Play Make Learn is an annual conference around the “design, research and practice of playful learning, games for learning and positive social impact, making and makerspaces, STEAM education, and arts in education. PML creates an inspirational space for preK-12 educators, designers, developers, innovators, librarians, museum professionals, makers, and researchers to tinker together, share knowledge, and celebrate one another’s work.” 

Case Study: Tinkering with Scribbling Machines and Computation

Case Study: Tinkering with Scribbling Machines and Computation

Creating new activities and resources like activity guides are key parts of the Facilitating Computational Tinkering (FCT) Project. But what do you do when you discover something cool that isn’t quite ready to be turned into a guide? My answer is this: a “case study”. A case study documents the cool things we’ve learned with a good amount of detail in hopes that someone else might want to pick up these ideas and continue to tinker with them. This approach to sharing in-progress ideas is inspired by FCT collaborator the Tinkering Studio’s wonderful blog, which is described as a “virtual sketchpad to share our half-baked ideas and works in progress”.

Joy as an Aesthetic: Reflections on Designing Transformative Learning Experiences

Joy as an Aesthetic: Reflections on Designing Transformative Learning Experiences

Over the last couple of months, I have given talks on how my team and I design for joy in our learning opportunities for youth and families. In April, I gave a talk for the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies at AERA 2024. Then in May, I adapted this talk for a keynote for the Colorado Library Association Maker Workshop. I share here an edited version of both talks, which is organized in three parts: What do I mean when I talk about joy? How do we design for joy? And how can joy be a sustaining force?

What Does Equity Mean to Me? Zine + Facilitation Guide

Our team is excited to share a new resource for educators in the form of a zine called “What Does Equity Mean to Me"?” This zine is based on research our team conducted with informal learning educators, or facilitators, from 2020-2022. In addition to the zine, we made a facilitator guide for educators to use the zine with their peers to reflect on what equity means in their spaces and organizations together. The facilitator guide includes a sample workshop outline, facilitation tips, and other strategies that we’ve gathered from our experiences facilitating these sessions with educators.

Spring 2023 Family Creative Learning Workshop Implementation

Spring 2023 Family Creative Learning Workshop Implementation

This past April, Creative Communities facilitated a new iteration of Family Creative Learning (FCL) program in collaboration with the Hadley Branch Denver Public Library. We continued our long term partnership with Jose, a facilitator at the Hadley ideaLAB makerspace who previously helped us design our virtual FCL workshops and last year’s FCL workshop series. We also continued to include pre-service teachers as facilitators and co-designers of the FCL workshops. We recruited and worked with four pre-service teachers from the School of Education at CU Boulder who are undergraduate students in the process of becoming elementary school teachers. 

Creative Communities at ISLS, IDC, FAccT, C&C, and PML

Creative Communities at ISLS, IDC, FAccT, C&C, and PML

This summer, our Creative Communities research group will be presenting our work at ISLS, FAccT, IDC, C&C, and PML. We look forward to sharing our work more broadly, especially as many conference and gatherings are in-person again. We’ll feature our work studying family learning, infrastructures of informal learning settings, embodied algorithmic tinkering, physical play and computing, and facilitating computational tinkering.

Tinkering with Lights and Code at the Tinkering Studio

Tinkering with Lights and Code at the Tinkering Studio

Last month I visited the Tinkering Studio–one of our collaborators for the Facilitating Computational Tinkering project–at the Exploratorium for a short artist’s residency. One fun thing we did was participate in an open-ended exploration of the Circuit Playground Express, a microcontroller that the Creative Communities group often uses when we co-design computational tinkering activities and workshops with the ideaLabs at Denver Public Library. The Circuit Playground Express was new-ish to most of the Tinkering Studio team, and there is so much you can do with this microcontroller. Sometimes that makes finding a good starting point difficult. We decided to start with programming the neopixel LED lights built into the Circuit Playground since many of us are interested in tinkering with lights, shadows, and lanterns. 

Workshop Reflection: Mar Lee Commemorative Quilt

Workshop Reflection: Mar Lee Commemorative Quilt

This past weekend we held a workshop in collaboration with our partners at the Hadley Public Library in Denver. Originally this workshop was planned to fit into other activities happening at the library in honor of Día de los Muertos, centered around remembering and celebrating our loved ones who have passed. The theme of celebrating and remembering is one that we explored a few ways this fall, which you can read more about here. We had to reschedule the workshop due to unforeseen circumstances but we were excited to still be able to host the workshop this month!

Celebrating and Remembering: Reflections on an Activity Prompt

Celebrating and Remembering: Reflections on an Activity Prompt

his is an excerpt from the latest Tinkering Together newsletter:

Last month, Ricarose and I (Celeste) visited our project partners at the Lifelong Kindergarten (LLK) Group at MIT. While there, we facilitated a virtual tinkering session with educational partners from global community-based organizations located in Mexico, Cuba, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, India, and throughout the US to explore the possibilities of a new coding app that the LLK group is developing.

Reflections as an FCL Facilitator

Reflections as an FCL Facilitator

This past April our team facilitated a new iteration of our Family Creative Learning (FCL) workshop series in collaboration with the Hadley Branch Denver Public Library. We were joined by two teacher candidates from the University of Colorado, Boulder as facilitators during the workshops. Below is a brief interview with Kylah reflecting on deciding to participate and on her experience working with families.