Lifelong Kindergarten
Mitchel Resnick
Quotes
At Tsinghua itself, almost all students had received excellent grades from elementary school through high school, and many continued to get A grades at Tsinghua. Chen referred to them as A students. But Chen knew that something else was needed. He felt that many of the A students, despite their high grades and test scores, didn’t have the creative, innovative spirit needed to succeed in today’s society. Chen argued that China needed a new breed of students, which he called X students. Chen explained that X students are willing to take risks and try new things. They’re eager to define their own problems rather than simply solve the ones in the textbook. It’s X students who come up with the most innovative ideas and creative new directions.
You can’t teach creativity, if teach means giving children a clear set of rules and instructions on how to be creative. But you can nurture creativity. […] You can create a learning environment in which creativity will flourish. So yes, you can teach creativity, so long as you think about teaching as an organic, interactive process.
It’s not enough to do something: You need to make something. According to the maker ethic, the most valuable learning experiences come when you’re actively engaged in designing, building, or creating something – when you’re learning through making.
Rather than toys that think, I’m interested in toys to think with.
Joren: As soon as you have a bit of an idea, you don’t really need to theorize about how to formulate it or how to think of a plan to completion, you just have to try something. I try to do that with almost any project: start with something tangible and then keep revising it. You can build a small part and see it running, and then tweak it as you go. Your idea develops as you see what happens.
On “wide walls”
When discussing technologies to support learning and education, Seymour Papert often emphasized the importance of “low floors” and “high ceilings.” For a technology to be effective, he said, it should provide easy ways for novices to get started (low floors) but also ways for them to work on increasingly sophisticated projects over time (high ceilings). […] but we also add another dimension: wide walls. That is, we try to design technologies that support and suggest a wide range of different types of projects. […] If the projects are all similar to one another, we feel that something has gone wrong; the walls weren’t wide enough.
On passion
When people work on projects they’re passionate about, they’re eager to dive in and immerse themselves. They’re willing to work for hours, or longer, and hardly notice that time is passing. They enter a state that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow – completely absorbed in the activity. But it’s also important for people to step back and reflect on their experiences. Through reflection, people make connections among ideas, develop a deeper understanding of which strategies are the most productive, and become better prepared to transfer what they’ve learned to new situations in the future. Immersion without reflection can be satisfying, but not fulfilling. Passion is the fuel that drives the immersion-reflection cycle.
On gamification
Researchers like Edward Thorndike and B.F. Skinner, pioneers of a branch o psychology known as behaviorism, demonstrated the power of offering rewards to encourage desired behavior. […] But recent research calls into question the long-term value of the behaviorist approach, particularly in creative activities. […] Daniel Pink describes the differences this way: “Rewards can deliver a short-term boost – just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off – and, worse, can reduce a person’s longer-term motivation to continue the project.”
The lure of a reward or payment seems to narrow people’s focus and restrict their creativity. […] found that the artists produced work that was less creative when they were paid for their creations – even when there were no restrictions on what they could create. If your goal is to train someone to perform a specific task at a specific time, then gamification can be an effective strategy. […] But if your goal is to help people develop as creative thinkers and lifelong learners, then different strategies are needed. Rather than offering extrinsic rewards, it’s better to draw upon people’s intrinsic motivations – that is, their desire to work on problems and projects that they find interesting and satisfying.
On peers
Throughout history, thinking and learning have too often been framed as activities done by individuals, on their own. When people think about thinking, they often think of Rodin’s famous sculpture The Thinker, which shows a lone individual, sitting by himself, in deep contemplation. Of course, some thinking happens that way, but most doesn’t. Most of the time, thinking is integrated with doing: We think in the context of interacting with things, playing with things, creating things. And most thinking is done in connection with other people: We share ideas, get reactions from other people, build upon one another’s ideas.
Often, the best way for a teacher to provide a spark is to ask questions. At Clubhouses, we encourage mentors to ask questions, such as “How did you come up with that idea?”, “Why do you think that happened?”, “If you could change one part of your project, what would you change?”, or “What was most surprising to you?”. By asking the right types of questions, a teacher or mentor can catalyze exploration and reflection, but the learner remains that active agent, in charge of the activity.
Teachers and mentors can’t single-handedly provide learners with all the support they need. So an important part of their job is to connect learners with other people who they might work with, learn with, and learn from.
Too often, adults try to hide what they don’t know. At Clubhouses, we try to create an environment where mentors feel comfortable acknowledging what they don’t know, and talking openly about their strategies for learning new things.
On tinkering
The tinkering process is messier. Tinkerers take a bottom-up approach: They start small, try out simple ideas, react to what happens, make adjustments, and refine their plans. They often take a meandering, circuitous path to get to a solution. But what they lose in efficiency they gain in creativity and agility. When unexpected things happen and when new opportunities arise, tinkerers are better positioned to take advantage. As Media Lab director Joi Ito likes to say: “You don’t get lucky if you plan everything.”
Studies of scientists working in their labs reveal that scientists do a lot more tinkering than they describe in their papers.
A careful plan can lead to efficient results, but you can’t plan your way to creativity. Creative thinking grows out of creative tinkering.
On assessments
As sociologist William Bruce Cameron once wrote: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Portfolios and non-quantitative forms of evidence have proven to be very successful […]
Ten tips for learners
- Start simple
- Work on things that you like
- If you have no clue what to do, fiddle around
- Don’t be afraid to experiment
- Find a friend to work with and share ideas
- It’s ok to copy stuff (to give you an idea)
- Keep your ideas in a sketchbook
- Build, take apart, and rebuild
- Lots of things can go wrong; stick with it (Being determined and persistent is helpful, but it’s not enough; you also need strategies for getting unstuck. […] You need to know when to take a break. After taking a break, you can come back to the project with fresh ideas.)
Ten tips for parents and teachers
- Imagine: show examples to spark ideas (A collection of examples can help spark the imagination. […] we always start by showing sample projects – to give a sense of what’s possible (inspirational projects), and to provide ideas on how to get started (starter projects). We show a diverse range of projects, in hopes of connecting with the interests and passions of workshop participants.)
- Imagine: Encourage messing around
- Create: Provide a wide variety of materials (The greater the diversity of materials, the greater the opportunity for creative projects.)
- Create: Embrace all types of making (Encourage children to engage in multiple types of making. That way, they’ll get an even deeper understanding of the creative design process.)
- Play: emphasize process, not product
- Play: extend time for projects (Trying to squeeze projects […] discourages risk taking and experimentation, and it puts a priority on efficiently getting to the “right” answer within the allotted time.)
- Share: Play the role of matchmaker
- Share: Get involved as a collaborator
- Reflect: Ask (authentic) questions (I often start by asking: “How did you come up with the idea for this project?” […] The question prompts them to reflect on what motivated and inspired them. Another one of my favorite questions: “What’s been most surprising to you?” […] If something goes wrong with a project, I’ll often ask: “What did you want it to do?”)
- Reflect: Share your own reflections (talking with children about your own thinking process is the best gift you could give them. It’s important for children to know that thinking is hard work for everyone.)
Ten tips for designers and developers
- Design for designers (We want to develop tools and activities that enable children to design, create, and express themselves.)
- Support low floors and high ceilings (In designing new tools, we try to provide children with easy ways to get started (low floors), but also opportunities to work on increasingly complex projects over time (high ceilings).)
- Widen the walls (We design our technologies as spaces to explore, not as collections of specific activities.)
- Connect with both interests and ideas (On one hand, we want to make connections with children’s interests so that they’ll be motivated to explore, experiment, and learn. At the same time, we want to help children make connections with ideas that will be useful to them in their lives. These two types of connections reinforce one another.)
- Prioritize simplicity (Each new generation of products tends to have more features – and more complexity. We try to resist this trend, putting priority on simplicity, understandability, and versatility. […] restricting features can foster new forms of creativity.)
- Understand (deeply) the people you’re designing for (We’ve found it most productive to watch people using our prototypes, carefully observing what they do (and don’t do), and then modify our prototypes accordingly. It’s not enough to ask people what they think or what they want, you also need to watch what they do.)
- Invent things that you want to use yourself (We do a much better job as designers when we enjoy using the systems we’re building.)
- Put together a small interdisciplinary design team (The team needs to be large enough to bring together diverse perspectives, but small enough so that everyone has a chance to contribute actively as the weekly meetings)
- Control the design, but leverage the crowd (To produce a coherent, consistent, integrated design, it’s important to have a small group that controls and coordinates design decisions – but it’s also valuable to get contributions from a larger community of people)
- Iterate, iterate – then iterate again (we never get things quite right on the first try. We are constantly critiquing, adjusting, modifying, revisiting. The ability to develop rapid prototypes is critically important in this process. We find that storyboards aren’t enough; we want functioning prototypes. Initial prototypes don’t need to work perfectly, just well enough to play with, experiment with, and talk about. […] Almost as soon as we start to play with (and talk about) one prototype, we start to think about building the next)