Brian C. Smith's List: Playful Learning

• Hobbies are, quintessentially, forms of play, much like the rough and tumble, make-believe and constructive games that fill early and middle childhood.
• if you cultivate your hobby with all the love and devotion of a true amateur, recreation becomes a form of creation that recreates you. 
• And that re-creation can set you on the path towards novel invention and discovery.
• There is, in fact, connection between personal (little c) creativity and public (Big C) creativity—those innovations in art, science, technology, politics, you name it, that affect wide circles of the human community.
• the necessity for self-invented play and the come-back of the amateur; the importance of artistic hobbies for many top-flight thinkers in the sciences; and the role of that polymathy as an educational and creative strategy.

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• “This study does not establish whether children understood the importance of isolating variables initially or whether they inferred its importance in the course of the experiment.” But the cognitive scientists claim, however, that the results begin to “bridge the gap between scientific inquiry and child’s play.”

• Does the challenge that we're facing require a moment of insight, a sudden leap in consciousness? Or can it be solved gradually, one piece at a time?
• For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of expertise.
• big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders.

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• The brilliance of Legos is that they are not a single toy, but a platform for creation with nearly endless possibilities, making them one of the best teaching tools ever.
• But if the contemporary education model discourages kids' curiosity and creativity, a new generation of companies are finding ways to emulate Lego and encourage those traits through play.
• Like Legos, littleBits and MakerBot replicators can be educational, but they're fundamentally about playing.
• Play is about active engagement and experimentation with the world in a situation in which there is no clear "right" or "wrong," but a set of possibilities.
• It's a process of learning-by-doing driven not by an externally defined outcome, but about personal instinct, passion, and goal-setting. 
• It is not just children that need this type of play—they tend to do it without being told. Adults, on the other hand, inhabit a world in which "success" tends to have little to do with creative experimentation. This new infrastructure of play is not just a collection of interesting startups, but a broad entrepreneurial movement with the potential to restore the creativity that's been lost in too many schools.

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