[ED 256: Week 7 Reading] Playful Learning

The following is a reflection on week 7 reading in ED 256: Tech and Education class, for which this blog was made, on playful learning.
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This discussion is based on the following reading:

M. Resnik. "All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking) I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten." Creativity & Cognition conference. June 2007.

M. Resnik, J. Maloney, A Monroy-Hernandez, et al.  "Scratch: Programming for All." Communications of the ACM. Vol. 52, No. 11. November 2009.

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This week we have feature articles from the MIT media lab. The main concept is to highlight the kindergarten way of learning, in which the learner is constantly "designing, creating, experimenting, and exploring." Resnik outlines several keys feedback processes for an effective learning process in which the user sets the pace of the learning environment. These are imagine, create, play, share, and reflect. This philosophy is implemented in the online community surrounding Scratch, an interactive platform that uses the idea of Legos to teach concepts of programming. Since starting in 2003, the Scratch community has expanded to thousands of users who create stories, games, animations, and simulations.

Scratch user interface

Scratch website frontpage

The idea of representing code as pieces that fit together in an intuitive way is appealing, including myself who has had some training in programming. I think the idea of using modularity that can be configured in any which way but adhere to certain rules is the perfect balance for which something can be learned and still flexible enough to be personalized. Indeed, MIT is a key locus for experimenting with the vanguard of education. In addition to what has come out of the Media Lab, there is OpenCourseWare that provides access to past lectures and class materials and newly started MITx offers free classes with certifications of many engineering courses. 

Even within individual departments (and individuals who graduated from MIT; see Khan Academy), there are several initiatives to make knowledge more accessible to anyone with the desire to learn. For example, in my undergrad Materials Science and Engineering department, I took a course in which the classroom was flipped. That is, we watched lectures outside of class and had more interactive discussions in-class. This class was particularly well-suited for this endeavor since it was a higher-level course on electronic devices, so much of the basic physics was covered in earlier semesters. Having such a format affords much flexibility and control of learning on the part of the student while still preserving face-to-face communication with the instructor. I feel lucky to have experienced something that people are talking about in papers!