Holiday Glow or Glühen

Ryan Jenkins shares a "wunderfitzige" Maker Meetup in Germany

This post is adapted from an article on Wonderful Idea Co.

For the past five years or so, I’ve been living in Freiburg im Breisgau in the southwest corner of Germany. In that time I’ve been interested to connect with local makers, artists and educators who are exploring the playful side of STEAM (or MINT as the acronym goes in German). I’ve worked on many collaborations leading workshops for kids and families and have also offered fun and informal professional development workshops for educators. My experiences over the past years has only reinforced my belief that there are makers, tinkerers and experimental educators all over the world and that I can learn so much from these local communities.

I'm proud to share that last week we launched our first "wunderfitzige" Maker Educator Meetup here in Freiburg, Germany

I collaborated with local educator Julia Jenny Kreß to put on this first experimental event that brought together playful maker educators to share updates, get to know each other and tinker together.

We picked the theme of Glühen (or Glow) and experimented with making a light-up cardboard city using conductive tape, LEDs and coin cell batteries. Participants with varied backgrounds and experience levels explored the materials and contributed to building a festive winter village. In the end we reflected on the qualities of the tinkering activity and thought about how we might adapt and remix the project for our learners.

It was a short working session (only about 30 minutes) but in the end we added our creations together to make a festive cardboard village with blinking and flashing lights. We spend a few minutes reflecting on the experience, noticing how we collaborated on something larger than our own projects, had a wide variety of ideas to test and all could have spent longer working through additional prototypes.

Over the coming months, I’m looking forward to figuring out how to sustain this initiative both financially and creatively with interesting topics and formats that are relevant to our local community.

Our next MEM will take place on March 5th 2026. If you are a educator, maker, STEM teacher or artist in the Freiburg area who could be interested to get involved, please fill out this survey to share ideas and be informed about the next steps: https://lnkd.in/dD_n798Q

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Happy Holidays to all maker educators. See you next in 2026.