allisyn levy's List: MIT MOOC

• • In her book Minds 
    in Play, Yasmin Kafai [7] documents how elementaryschool students become more creative thinkers as they 
    design their own games
• • kindergarten approach to 
    learning” – characterized by a spiraling cycle of Imagine, 
    Create, Play, Share, Reflect,  and back to Imagine
• • Today, more and more kindergarten 
    children are spending time filling out phonics worksheets 
    and memorizing math flashcards [5]. In short, kindergarten 
    is becoming more like the rest of school.  
• • Instead of 
    making kindergarten like the rest of school, we need to 
    make the rest of school (indeed, the rest of life) more like 
    kindergarten.
• • I think of it as a spiraling 
    process in which children imagine  what  they  want  to  do, 
    create a project based on their ideas,  play with their 
    creations,  share their ideas and creations with others, 
    reflect on their experiences – all of which leads them to 
    imagine new ideas and new projects (see Figure 1).
• • Our goal is to provide 
    tools that can be used in multiple ways, leaving more room 
    for children’s imaginations. 
• • The design challenge is to develop 
    features specific enough so that children can quickly learn 
    how to use them, but general enough so that children can 
    continue to imagine new ways to use them [14]
• • In effect, Froebel was designing for designers – he 
    designed objects that enabled children in his kindergarten 
    to do their own designing. F
• • Seymour Papert’s  constructionist 
    approach to education [11], which aims to engage learners 
    in personally-meaningful design experiences.
• • If we are trying to help children develop as 
    creative thinkers, it is more productive to focus on “play” 
    and “learning” (things you do) rather than “entertainment” 
    and “education” (things that others provide for you).  
• • Shaffer’s “epistemic games”
• • We have found that 
    construction and community go hand-in-hand in the 
    creative process: children become more engaged in the 
    construction process when they are able to share their 
    constructions with others in a community, and children 
    become more engaged with communities when they are 
    able to share constructions (not just chat) with others 
    within those communities. 
• • for me, the most impressive 
    part of the Reggio kindergartens is the way they encourage 
    children to reflect on what  they are doing. Children in 
    Reggio are constantly producing drawings and diagrams as 
    they work on projects. Teachers use these artifacts to 
    engage the children in discussing and reflecting on their 
    design process and thinking process. The classroom walls 
    are filled with children’s  drawings, with teachers’ 
    annotations, providing children a way to look back at 
    earlier stages of their work. 
• • . In recent years, 
    schools have adopted more “hands-on” design activities, 
    but the focus is usually on the creation of an artifact rather 
    than critical reflection on the ideas that guided the design, 
    or strategies for refining and improving the design, or 
    connections to underlying scientific concepts and related 
    real-world phenomena
• • Iteration is at the heart of the creative process. 
• • s. If children have enough time to go through the 
    cycle only once, they’ll miss out on the most important part 
    of the creative process. 

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• • Anything is easy if 
    you can assimilate it to your collection of 
    models.
• • What an individual can learn, and how he 
    learns it, depends on what models he has 
    available.
    

• Shouldn't we be looking at the Internet as an amazing network enabling
• The Power of Pull
• empowering kids to learn through building things together

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