Resources: Tinkering, Creativity, & Play

Play

• American Journal of Play – Peer reviewed but accessible for a wide audience, the journal covers the history, science, and culture of play to increase awareness and understanding of the role of play in learning and human development and the ways in which play illuminates cultural history.
• Great Thinkers Endorse Play – Quotes collected by The Strong Museum of Play.
• Learning Through Play Resources – LEGO Foundation resources on learning through play. Research, videos, and activity guides.
• Learning Through Play: a Review of the Evidence – This LEGO whitepaper summarizes research about learning and play.
• The Strong National Museum of Play – An educational institution in Rochester, NY devoted to the study and exploration of play. Features exhibits, collections, and research, plus the National Toy Hall of Fame and the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.
• Free-range Kids – Common sense advice about parenting.
• The Power of Play: A Pediatric Role in Enhancing Development in Young Children – Research report on the benefit of play for young children from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
• Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul – A classic book by Stuart Brown about the science of play, and its profound role in all aspects of being human, including learning.
• Purposeful Play: A Teacher’s Guide to Igniting Deep and Joyful Learning Across the Day – Lessons, classroom setups, and helpful tools and charts to infuse play across the curriculum.

Tinkering

• Tinkering Is Serious Play – By Bronwyn Bevan, Mike Petrich and Karen Wilkinson. An Educational Leadership magazine article on the connection between STEM, making, tinkering, play, and real learning.
• Tinkering as a mode of knowledge production in a Digital Age – John Seeley Brown explores how tinkering is an essential part of modern creativity and knowledge.

Creativity

• Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention – by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Using interviews and first person accounts of creative people from all disciplines, the originator of the concept of “flow” synthesizes how to be more creative.
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience – by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. A best-selling classic on the concept of the state of creative consciousness known as “flow.”
• Computer as Paintbrush: Technology, Play, and the Creative Society – This paper by Mitchel Resnick discusses how new technologies, such as programmable robotics kits, can support the development of creative thinking.

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