Learning Creative Learning Reflections Part 3: The Untapped Potential of Play

What comes to mind when you hear the word play? Is it something children do to pass the time until they grow up and move on to more important pursuits? Or maybe something that’s lighthearted and pleasurable? Or, perhaps, could it be an essential ingredient of not only learning, but also innovation?

The Learning Creative Learning online course, offered by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group and MIT Media Lab, immeasurably expanded my vision for cultivating creativity while teaching English as a foreign language. It also helped me better understand the power behind certain long-established practices in my classroom. I’ve already blogged some reflections on the three of the four P’s of creative learning—projects,passion, peers, and, now, I’ll share some reflections on the fourth, play, and how I believe it relates to language learning.

It’s fascinating how the language we speak shapes our understanding of the world. The LCL course and its international community allowed for lots of interesting discussion about how we understand play. In Danish, there are two words for play. Spille refers to playing within a set of rules or expectations, such as in a sport or a game. Lege is more open-ended and imaginative—with no specific goal in mind.

Different words for play are common among other languages as well. Portuguese has three. There’s jogar, similar to spille—playing a game or a sport by the rules. There’s tocar, which means to play (or to “touch”) a musical instrument. And then there’s brincar, which is more about fun and amusement. It would seem that brincar and lege describe the kind of play that leads to creativity. And yet I am not sure if the Portuguese word carries the same innovative potential as the Danish one. Furthermore, I somehow doubt many parents in the local culture would be quick to embrace the idea of their children learning a language through play, even though I sincerely believe it’s fundamental.

Another important word that came up in LCL discussions was tinkering. An Italian speaker taking the course reflected that the Italian language has no specific word for this idea because, from this person's point of view, it’s “the normal way to do things.” Portuguese, which is similar in many ways to Italian, also has no specific word for tinkering. The closest I can think of is mexer—to mess around. Its connotation isn’t exactly positive. Parents yell “não mexa!” at their kids when they don’t want them touching something. It's something people say if they are afraid to ruin something or make a problem worse--"It's better not to mexer--let's call someone who knows how to fix this." And so if I’m introducing an unfamiliar creative experience to adults, or teens, there is often a fear that to mexer might bring a result that isn't nice and pretty, within some imposed (not by me) set of expectations.

With the desire to leave well enough alone and avoid risks, I feel there is a general fear of tinkering in this culture. Even in English dictionaries, though, tinkering might come across as something negative—an unskillful or unproductive dabbling. And yet in the world of innovation, tinkering often leads to discovery, and is by no means frowned upon.

So what do we mean by play and tinkering? How can these activities lead to creative learning—or any kind of learning—and how can we communicate that to the culture in which we live?

Marina Bers, a professor of child development at Tufts University, starts to answer part of this question by distinguishing a playpen from a playground. Parents put mobile babies in a playpen when they don’t want them messing around with stuff in the house. There is limited room for movement, risk, or autonomy. These little humans quickly realize that it’s not a fun place to explore—or to learn.

I think it’s funny that in Portuguese, the word for playpen is chiquerinho—a pig pen! It's like we want to contain a mess! But what would happen if we let the little piggies loose onto a playground? According to Bers, a playground is a environtment that allows for greater exploration, where children not only move around freely and discover new abilities, but can also collaborate with others as they embark on imaginative adventures. How many classroom activities—even “fun” ones—confine students to a pigpen where “play” is to be done in a particular way? What if students were free to roam around a playground, with just enough structure but also the freedom to allow for discovery and self-expression with the language they are learning?

Mitchel Resnick of MIT Media Lab talks a lot about LEGO bricks. Easy to put together and take apart, able to be constructed into anything, they bring about a kind of tinkering that resembles playground play. But he laments the restricted play—and limited creativity—that results from LEGO kits with step-by-step instructions. Although a great way to learn skills, and perhaps a satisfying activity, if the goal is creative learning, Resnick recommends such instructions be used as stepping stones, and not as a final destination.

Maybe teachers and textbooks should consider this more when designing a creative activity. I've seen so many classes that have step-by-step instructions about how to build a certain animal, and in the end, everyone's project looks the same. That always makes me sad. What if, instead, we provided students with some stepping stones--show them a few different things they can do with the material--both physical materials as well as the target language--and then set them loose, to build an animal of their choice, to develop a talk about something they care about, or to collaborate with peers on a topic that excites them.

LEGO, a Danish company, is actually a combination of the words lege and godt, meaning to “play well.” Resnick notes that LEGOs, as well as the virtual bricks in Minecraft and in the programming language Scratch, let young people experience the thrill—and the challenge—of bringing their ideas to life in the form of projects. In his book Learning Creative Learning, and in videos throughout the course, Resnick shares stories of children and teens discovering new concepts as they tinker with these and other materials.

So when learning a language, why not tinker with words? Why not give students just enough freedom to explore different sounds, different meanings, and play around until they say what they want to say—or discover their communicative abilities and the resulting global connections with appropriate awe?

In the Learning Creative Learning course, the assignment for the week on play was to tinker with a material or technology and to reflect on the process. I’ll share my experience here, and relate it to some of the principles of tinkering that Resnick talked about in his book.

I had previously made a little wobble-bot out of a battery and a tiny motor, mounted on a bottle cap. When the motor runs, it vibrates the cap, and makes it wobble in a circle, looking like a dancing insect. I had also added a slightly bigger battery that lit up an LED, just for style. It was part of an experiment for a possible maker activity at school, and I remember being frustrated with it, because the batteries kept falling off or burning out. Electronics aren’t my area of expertise. I decided to re-visit my little robot for this assignment, and this time to try and have more fun with it.

On my way to class one day, I saw a fellow teacher using glitter on a poster, sprinkling the excess onto a sheet of paper. For some reason, the sheet of paper in that moment caught my eye more than the actual poster, and it sparked my idea. I decided to make a robot that could draw designs in glitter!

I pulled out my wobble-bot, tested the battery and the motor, and then added some toothpick legs. I found that the toothpicks were too tall, so I broke them in half. I thought that the pointy ends would make a nice drawing implement, and so I put them face down. And then I gleefully spilled glitter onto my desk—it was time to test the artbot! To my surprise, it didn’t work how I intended.

It moved, and the feet started combing the glitter, but the points of the toothpicks were too fine to draw much of a visible line through it. I realized I needed something slightly thicker to be able to separate the glitter. So I poked around a box of recycled materials and came across some polystyrene netting—the kind used to protect fruit. I cut off a few tiny pieces, and I was able to easily attach them to the toothpick legs by poking the pointy end into them. Then I tested the robot again.

This time, as the little creature spun freely around, its legs drew surprising patterns in the glitter. Not only did it draw a negative line by separating the glitter, but it also drew some positive lines by dragging the glitter outside the original spill. I was quite happy with the result of my tinkering. Unskilled as my dabbling was, it served the intended purpose and resulted in some unexpected and interesting designs.

According to Mitchel Resnick, good tinkerers do the following:

Use familiar materials in unexpected ways. The bottle cap robot idea wasn’t my own, but using a wobbling piece of plastic and some toothpicks to draw was something I had never thought of before. And intentionally pouring glitter onto a desk (for anyone above the age of eight) is almost unheard of! Although I always clean up my mess, I also refuse to keep it confined to a pig pen.

Draw on personal experience. I had already made a wobble bot, and so the guiding idea behind this was the vibration of the motor that caused a bottle cap to move. I had also already made a larger wobble bot out of a can with markers attached to the side—a popular children’s maker experience that I learned in a workshop. The consequence of the wobbling is that the robot draws onto the paper surface that it stands on. I’ve also done a lot of drawing—not with glitter, but with charcoal and other materials that can leave similar negative lines. Personal experience, however, doesn’t always have to relate to the activity at hand. Resnick talks about a boy noticing his arm movements from skateboarding, and using that idea to build an arm-like structure to increase the movement of a similar wobbling device.

Take advantage of the unexpected. It wasn’t a failure when my robot’s legs didn’t draw. Instead, it led me to find a drawing tool that made a more beautiful shape. I’ve learned to embrace “happy accidents” in art. Why not let them lead to new discoveries in technology or in language learning, or in all of the above combined? Sometimes students discover new words or new forms of expression by making mistakes. It’s important to create an environment where mistakes are OK and even welcome.

Educators often promote planning, a top-down approach, versus tinkering, which works from the bottom-up. But this doesn't have to be a binary. What if educators made room for students to tinker--again, not just with materials, but also with the content to be learned? If students are given freedom to improvise, then quickly iterate something, and then adapt as needed, they won't get stuck, like a robot, reciting grammar rules, speaking only the English that they are programmed to. When tinkering is allowed to develop alongside of planning, students won't stay in the past, doing the same project over and over again, but rather, they'll be ready to work toward facing the challenges of the future. They will be learning creative thinking skills, which are essential--for speaking a language, for developing a project, and for dealing with the complex problems they'll have to face as the 21st Century unfolds.

It's important to make room for students to tinker. Sometimes that means adjusting the curriculum as much as possible; other times it means embracing a moment and encouraging a student to keep playing around with something they've just discovered. I allow my students to go on brief rabbit trails, asking questions and exploring words they've found by accident. I also welcome mistakes and the language and communication skills can be learned from them.

When I was teaching exchange students in Boston, I often told them to work hard and play hard--to invest themselves in their English studies while also getting out to see the city. Now I realize that these don't have to be separate and distinct. Let's encourage hard fun, purposeful play--tinkering that gets ideas off the ground, pattern play that empowers students with tools, storytelling that allows young people to find and share their voice.

What are some familiar things in your world that you could tinker with? What would it look like to embrace the unexpected and learn from happy accidents? Share your thoughts here, and check out my Maker Monday posts for more practical classroom examples of learning English through creative learning.