Build Play Learn

Building on LEGO’s systematic creativity

After reading through the LEGO’s research paper, Defining Systematic Creativity in the Digital Realm, we have gained a number of insights… LEGO offers what the company calls “systematic creativity”—a combination of logical/systematic play and imaginative/creative play. LEGO believes this is what makes their product unique and effective in allowing children to learn while playing.

To support systematic creativity, a toy must afford 2 things:
1) A logical set of constraints that are easy to understand and master.
2) A collection of interlocking parts.

LEGO toys offer these two things but many other toys do not.

Now, consider that our world is full of “stuff”: old & new toys, recycled materials, found objects, scrap, worn out appliances and other low-cost, highly available materials. This “stuff” has the potential to be used to make all kinds of new creations. An old CD player, for example, can be taken apart and the motor and batteries used to make a new, moving creature (example). Simple (and inexpensive) cardboard and pushpins can combine to make a moving sculpture (see example).

However, if children only see the CD player as a whole, and not the parts inside, how can they use the parts of the CD player to make something new? If they are just given a pile of cardboard and pushpins with no “logical set of constraints” they may be intimidated by the question of what to build.

If we can design a system that applies these two affordances of LEGO’s to everyday stuff, the world could become a collection of “LEGO” parts from which children can build!

Visit to the Please Touch Museum

Build Play Learn visited the Please Touch Museum at Memorial Hall in Philadelphia this weekend. We wanted to get a perspective on how a museum dedicated to learning through play structures their exhibits and interventions. The Please Touch Museum is highly popular among adults and children alike. The exhibits are designed to be targeted toward children and seem to allow the children interacting with them to assume the role of an adult. For example, there is a section of the museum titled City Capers in which children can wander around and play different roles in very lifelike situations including a miniature Shop-Rite supermarket, doctor’s office, McDonald’s, and shoe store.The museum also features over 12,500 items in a contemporary toy collection that can act as a multi-generational conversation piece. It was very apparent that the children visiting the museum were playing, and definitely having fun. Our concern was in how much and what exactly the children were learning with their experience at the museum. For the most part, the play that the children were engaged in was done in closed parameters and specific roles, rather than leaving the child to openly create solely with their imagination. View the Flickr set here.

Lego System of Play

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

In this set of 3 videos, Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, CEO of LEGO Group, talks about the LEGO system of play. Knudstorp describes LEGO’s main objective to be the development of children and learning through play. He explains that play is a catalyst to learning and that hands-on or minds-on play is how children learn. With LEGO children have the opportunity to play and while playing be able to think extremely systematically. He described LEGO as a digital system, even in it’s physical form LEGO has the ability to teach the basics of algorithmic learning because it is a highly structured system. Knudstorp says, although boundary-less in what you can create, as a system there is a certain way that the six or seven thousand pieces available can fit together. He explains that with systematic play comes systematic creativity. Systematic creativity is not about creativity vs logic & reasoning, it’s about both at the same time. If systematic creativity can be harnessed through play then children will learn to be creative problem solvers. From this, Knudstorp describes the future of the world’s workforce, saying that “the world needs creative problem solvers, in the good old days of industrial society as a worker your biggest obligation was to do what you were told.” Further expanding that “no nation is going to survive with a workforce whose primary value is obedience.” We need more creative problem solvers in every sector of every economy. We need more people to ask questions about what they are doing everyday.