Learning by Playing Around

I taught elementary school in the 60s. During a brief few months, when I was more free from supervision than I knew, I developed a sixth grade curriculum where everything was taught through play. I mean everything: math, reading, science, social studies, you name it. We made up our own arithmetic. We made machines that measured thickness and softness. We created our own "foreign" language. For me, most of the kids, and a few of the parents, it was learning as it was meant to be - fun, experimental, creative, playful. For the "high achievers," and especially their parents, who were worried about things like getting into the academic stream in high school, not so much. Near the end of the term, the principal explained this to me rather vividly. It was the only time in my career that I received a negative evaluation. And I'm still proud of it.

Which maybe explains why, almost 40 years later, I find myself feeling so significantly smug when I discover sites like Project Interactivate, which offers children a collection of Java-based virtual toys that are designed for experimentation and, well, play. For example, there's this delicious spinner that allows you to change the proportion and number of targets.

The amount of fun varies significantly from activity to activity. Like the spinner activity, those that are most intuitive and simple tend to be the most fun. Others, like the "Rabbits and Wolves" activity where you can play with the parameters of a simulation of an ecological system of rabbits, wolves and grass; are more complex, but once you really start playing with them, prove to be exemplary invitations to fun and learning.

Yes. And again yes. The sseparation between learning and fun is artificial and unnecessary. Vindication is sweet. The increase in the use of conceptual toys for learning even sweeter.