Exploring Enriching Environments
I’ve been reading some very depressing stuff today – about one school that doesn’t allow anyone over the age of 6 to have recess, kids not feeling protected from their tormentors, and so on – so I needed a pep talk.
Adora Svitak’s TED talk did just the trick.
An article featured on the O’Reilly Radar last month that interviews Kevin Slavin, managing director of Area/Code, who is currently working with Frank Lantz to integrate gameplay into the fabric of reality, or what he calls “Big Games.”
Big games are “games that take place using some elements from the game system and some elements of the real world. Something Frank Lantz had worked on with Katie Salen and Nick Fortugno was called the Big Urban Game. It involved transforming the city of Minneapolis into a game board. They did that by using huge inflatable game pieces, about 25-feet high. The players, among other things, were moving these huge pieces around the city.”
“There’s a few of us who have been thinking about how “play” and the “city” were going to combine. We’ve been drinking the same Kool-Aid from the same cooler for quite a while.”
The way Slavin’s describing his vision reminds me a lot of parkour. Interesting ideas.
Read the full interview (highly recommended).
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The title of this blog post sums up the entire concept. There’s no other way to say it: you need to play to be a productive member of society.
However, this idea doesn’t seem to be sticking.
The perception in America is that the harder and longer you work, the more productive you’ll be. Especially now when jobs are scarce and companies are holding on by the skin of their teeth, people sacrifice play, exercise, and good old legitimate downtime, not to mention sleep (September 30th was National Coffee Day!), to get more work done.
But it turns out we weren’t built to work that way. We need breaks, we need downtime, and we most certainly need to cut loose and be a little silly every once in awhile. As biology professor Robert Sapolsky pointed out in his book “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers,” occasional stress is good – it makes sure we get that report in on time and we are aware of our surroundings in a new city. But constant stress just wears us down.
And it’s not just time away from work that’s rejuvenating. Repeated research has found that play increases new ideas and overall productivity at work. Psychology Today reports that telling stories and jokes makes us better writers. It also reports that even a little bit of physical play or just boring old exercise – a brisk walk around the block three times a week – fights depression.
New business, products, and companies stem from play. The t-shirt company Threadless, for example, started off 10 years ago as a hobby. The company has since grown to employ 80 workers, but Jake Nickell, founder and chief strategy officer, “has made sure playtime remains a part of company culture. Shooting a potato gun at plastic parachute guys is a way to relieve stress.”
Pamela Meyer, author of “From Workspace to Playspace: Innovating, Learning and Changing through Dynamic Engagement,” agrees that taking time out for fun is a good workplace practice.
“This idea of play space is very much a key part of business success” because it fosters dynamic employee engagement, said Meyer in an interview with the Chicago Tribune. “Companies that engage their workers by giving them space to create, try new roles or test new ideas benefit from higher employee retention, greater productivity and better financial returns.”
So, to re-re-emphasize my point: Go play, it’s good for your work.
The Education system in the U.S. has reached a pretty low low right now. This is currently being displayed on the big screen in the documentary “Waiting For Superman.” Film-maker Davis Guggenheim “follows a handful of promising kids through a system that inhibits, rather than encourages, academic growth, and undertakes an exhaustive review of public education, surveying ‘drop-out factories’ and ‘academic sinkholes’.” (IMDB)
So, what do we do about it?
Lots of things.
One idea is HASTAC, or Humanities, Arts, Science, and Advanced Technology Collaboratory. Pronounced “haystack”, it is “a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities.” They’re the group behind Reimagining Learning (DMLcompetition.net), and other scholarly workshops.
Cathy Davidson, Duke University Co-founder, HASTAC; Co-PI, HASTAC, writes:
Traditional education too often forgets its precious social condition of face-to-face interaction and takes its collective opportunity for granted. If your classroom can be replaced by a computer screen, maybe it should be.
We are using lessons from collaborative open web development and peer-to-peer learning and assessment to storm the academy at the first international Drumbeat Festival in Barcelona, Nov 3-5. Surrounded by pioneering open source web developers and experimenters in online peer-to-peer learning, we are using methods of the open web to look back and at shake up traditional learning institutions. Were looking at four key areas that need storming: collaboration, syllabus building, assessment, and publishing (including peer review). Our chief idea is that face-to-face learning should not be taken as a given in education but as an affordance, as an opportunity not a default. How does thinking about the unique opportunity to learn together change the components of traditional learning?
more via We’re Storming the Academy! A Provocation and a Promise | HASTAC.
Teachers are already spending their own money to provide supplies for a fuller education experience.
“Vicky Halm spends a $1,000 a year out of her own pocket to equip her Brooklyn classroom. She buys star stickers to help motivate her students, but she also spends a great deal on basic supplies — such as pencils and paper.
A whopping 97% of teachers frequently dip into their own pockets to purchase necessary classroom supplies, according to a national survey conducted by Kelton Research. Last year, teachers spent more than $350 on average from their own income on school supplies and instructional materials, according to the National School Supply and Equipment Association” (CNNMoney)
There are lots of opportunities for students to gain hands-on learning outside of the classroom too. Zoos and Universities often have family or kid-only programs to try out.
“Children and parents hummed through wax paper-covered combs while jazz singer Jeni Fleming sang the “Science Saturday” version of “Hound Dog,” everyone rocking out to their newly learned blues chord progression. And so — with tingling lips and a room full of smiles — the second season of Science Saturdays came to a close. Over 900 children from Bozeman, communities as far away as Helena, Stevensville and Glasgow; and the Crow Indian Reservation have participated in Science Saturdays since MSU started offering the program in the fall of 2008, said Suzi Taylor, outreach director for MSU’s Extended University. (MSU News)
Parents can also organize these events. A blogger on GeekDad describes his son’s school fair:
For our school fete we blacked out a classroom with curtains and asked for donations from people to enter the “Corner of Curiosity.” It was amazing what people came up with. There was a delightful Plasma Ball near the entrance which was a favorite of the younger children, and a beautifully faded yellow newspaper from 1938 headlining concerns about Hitler’s leadership in Germany. One parent produced a display of the “history of mobile” phones and others had insect collections.
One student produced what has to be the most curious of collections – a collection of animal scats. A local community member supplied a whale vertebrae (and a kangaroo vertebrae for comparison). But, the real value was being able to present a fund raising activity for the school that was also educational. (GeekDad)
Any small measure, from buying markers to throwing a curiosity fair, helps enrich kids’ learning and keeps them wanting more. Even just a little bit of time each week adds up quickly.
I am so excited to share! My friends Janine and Willow were quoted as part of a workshop this past week about the Maker culture that has been growing dramatically over the past ten years and is really starting to bloom. My friends are part of the Jigsaw Renaissance, based in Seattle. The article appeared on the O’Reilly Radar article (excerpt below, with my friend’s quote in bold):
From a social perspective, vibrant communities are organizing around projects, technologies, and physical places. For example, one community called DIYDrones has developed a $500 unmanned aerial vehicle using open source chip sets and gyroscopes. Hacker Spaces and Maker Spaces are springing up around the country — like Jigsaw Renaissance in Seattle, which seeks to encourage:
Ideas. Unfiltered, unencumbered, and unapologetically enthusiastic ideas. Ideas that lead to grease-smeared hands, lavender sorbet, things that go bang, clouds of steam, those goggle-marks you see on crazy chemistry geeks, and some guy (or girl) in the background juggling and swinging from a trapeze … Walk through our door with an open mind, and you are liable to be whisked off your feet and into a project you’d never have thought up. We encourage communal learning, asking questions, and pushing that red button. Go on. Do it. If you stick around long enough, you’ll end up being the one creating projects and doing the 3-2-1 countdown for some new toy. Which is exactly what we hope will happen.
Technologically — we are moving towards what MIT‘s Neil Gershenfeld has called personal fabrication. Consider how Moore’s Law has enabled the transition from the expensive and remote mainframe to the personal computer to the smartphone that fits in your pocket to the Internet of things. We are seeing the same phenomena with the dramatic reduction in the cost of the tools needed to design, make and test just about anything — including $1,200 3D printers, CAD tools, machine tools, sensors, and actuators. Remember the replicator from Star Trek? It’s rapidly moving from science fiction to science fact. What will happen as we continue to democratize the tools needed to make physical objects that are smart, aware, networked, customized, functional, and beautiful? I have absolutely no clue — but I am confident that it will be awesome. As one maker put it, “The renaissance is here, and it brought ice cream.”
Economically — we are seeing the early beginnings of a powerful Maker innovation ecosystem. New products and services will allow individuals to not only Design it Yourself, but Make it Yourself and Sell it Yourself. For example, Tech Shops are providing access to 21st century machine tools, in the same way that Kinkos gave millions of small and home-based business access to copying, printing, and shipping, and the combination of cloud computing and Software as a Service is enabling “lean startups” that can explore a new idea for the cost of ramen noodles.
Makers are also becoming successful entrepreneurs. Dale just wrote a compelling story about Andrew Archer — the 22-year-old founder of Detroit-based Robotics Redefined. As a teenager, Andrew started off entering robotics competitions and making printed circuit boards on the kitchen table. He is now building customized robots that transport inventory on the factory floors of auto companies. With more entrepreneurs like Andrew — we could see a bottom-up renaissance of American manufacturing.
The article even goes on to talk about why the Obama Administration is behind DIY-ers and Makers. Exciting stuff! Read the whole article on O’Reilly Radar.
I have always been a HUGE proponent of physical exercise and play for health reasons and brain function, and now here’s more evidence of why physical play is sooooo important:
Animal studies had already established that, when given access to running wheels, baby rodents bulked up their brains, enlarging certain areas and subsequently outperforming sedentary pups on rodent intelligence tests. But studies of the effect of exercise on the actual shape and function of children’s brains had not yet been tried.
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For budgetary and administrative reasons, school boards are curtailing physical education, while on their own, children grow increasingly sluggish. Recent statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that roughly a quarter of children participate in zero physical activity outside of school.
At the same time, evidence accumulates about the positive impact of even small amounts of aerobic activity. Past studies from the University of Illinois found that “just 20 minutes of walking” before a test raised children’s scores, even if the children were otherwise unfit or overweight, says Charles Hillman, a professor of kinesiology at the university and the senior author of many of the recent studies.
more via Phys Ed: Can Exercise Make Kids Smarter? – NYTimes.com.
Let’s get play back into everyone’s lives!
For me this is one of those “well, duh!” studies, but I suppose people hadn’t previously realized just how strong the effect could be.
From the 2009 article…
“Not only does the environment an animal is reared in have marked effects on its ability to learn and remember, but also that these effects are inherited. The study suggests that we are not the mere sum of our genes: what we do can make a difference.”
read the full article at Could Living in a Mentally Enriching Environment Change Your Genes?: Scientific American.
Another oldie-but-goodie. NPR did a fantastic series about the evolution and importance of play. The article I’ve linked to here is the first in the series. Eventually I plan to post them all into a right-nav bar for easy access. But start here and then explore for yourself; after all, the first story in the series (featured here) talks about the importance of imagination and self-exploration in play, and finding things out for yourself:
“…For most of human history, what children did when children played was engage in free-wheeling, imaginative play, elaborate narratives of pirates and princesses. Basically, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.
They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors, the fields and the forests, or whether it was on a street-corner or somebody’s backyard. They improvised their own play. They regulated their play. They made up their own rules.
But Chudacoff argues once TV and toys began to supply children with ever-more-specific scripts and special props for their stories, the size of children’s imaginative space begins to shrink, and that’s not the only way that imagination comes under siege, according to Chudacoff.
In the second half of the 20th century, he says, parents were increasingly concerned about safety, which again affected play.”
Growing up in sunny, dry, southern California, my mom always let me go out and play in the rain. Now that I live in Washington, I have go out and play in the rain or I’d never get to go out and play. This article from the BBC discusses why it’s okay to go get wet and playful.
“Why do we let ourselves be penned in so by the rain?
If a small child sees a puddle their first instinct is to jump in it. Perhaps, in a sense, that’s part of the problem.
Are we spoiling their fun or even their learning just so we can cut back on washing?”
via BBC NEWS | UK | Education | Rain stops play – but should it?.
Several researchers, psychologists, and journalists are exploring the idea of creativity right now. Two in particular stood out to me recently.
One was author Po Bronson and his article for Newsweek about the Creativity Crisis he and co-author Ashley Merryman believe is taking place in the United States with our current education system:
Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test—a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist—has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.
Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says. It is the scores of younger children in America—from kindergarten through sixth grade—for whom the decline is “most serious.”
The potential consequences are sweeping. The necessity of human ingenuity is undisputed. A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future. Yet it’s not just about sustaining our nation’s economic growth. All around us are matters of national and international importance that are crying out for creative solutions, from saving the Gulf of Mexico to bringing peace to Afghanistan to delivering health care. Such solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others.
In response to Bronson’s article, Darell Hammond, CEO of Kaboom, a non-profit working to get more parks installed around the U.S., agreed, and wrote a commentary supporting Bronson’s article in the Huffington Post, as well as offering solutions on what can be done about this drop in creativity:
With objects as simple as boxes, rubber bands, and Styrofoam peanuts, children can create their own narratives and games; build something and tear it down; or simply play to enjoy shapes and textures.
We need to let our kids spend more time roaming freely in forests, backyards, fields, parks, and beaches — all environments rife with opportunities for creative play. And we need to rethink our playgrounds as places that not only let children run around and let off steam, but that also challenge, stimulate, and inspire their imaginations.
The first Imagination Playground Park, which opens this week at Burling Slip in the South Street Seaport area of New York City, is one such example. The park includes a sandpit, cascading water channel, rope climbing structure, and loose parts — such as burlap bags, buckets, shovels, brooms, carts and fabric. It also includes Imagination Playground blocks — blue blocks made from biodegradable foam that come in a variety of shapes and sizes and provide endless possibilities for creative play.
What do you think? Are we suffocating the creativity and play out of our children? Are we doing enough to encourage it?
Mental Flowers 