Why Children and Engineers need Sandboxes
Today’s software engineers will tell you that a Sandbox is ‘a virtual space in which new or untested software or coding can be run securely.’ But if I were to go back to the literal roots of this word, a sandbox is just a hole in the ground that is filled with sand for children to play in. It’s a great metaphor though, one that stretches across diverse fields. In its essence, it’s an unrestricted and unstructured space to experiment in, to play in. One can alter it to any extent, and it will regain its original shape without much effort.
I had a sandbox growing up. In real estate terms, it was an attached terrace — an expanse of concrete tiles spanning 150 sq ft, which my siblings(an elder brother and a twin sister) and I used for our experiments. My parents couldn’t care less as to what potential damage we could cause to the space, for the simple reason that it wasn’t a ‘true’ part of the house. It was truly an unrestricted playspace. As soon as the last bite of the after-school lunch had been gulped down begrudgingly, we would jump over the beam that separated the living room and our sandbox, and resume our game from its last checkpoint.
This is where it gets interesting — the games we used to play weren’t one of common parlance, they didn’t have rules or a governing body. We dreamt up our games. One of those was called Gosh, Mosh, and Tosh (Tosh was added later when my sister complained to my mother). Cricket stumps would become guns and Cosco balls would take the shape of bombs as the three of us would navigate the post-apocalyptic war land that was our terrace. We wrote our screenplays and would indulge in diplomatic negotiation if our scripts were to intersect. I was particularly skilled at mimicking gunfire, and I find it pitiful that I haven’t been able to kickstart my beatboxing career yet. We derived inspiration from whichever spy thriller we’d last seen, and also were wary enough to lay off on the hand-to-hand combat if we heard our mother’s footsteps incoming.
A decade on, it’s been a long time since my family has shifted houses, and I have become used to life without a terrace. I had all but forgotten about my sandbox until one day when I was re-reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.
The late founder of Apple iterates time and again that if it weren’t for his dad’s garage, Apple wouldn’t have been a reality. As a teen, he would tinker with his father’s mechanical tools and cram the garage with DIY kits, to the extent that his father had to start parking his car in the driveway. He experimented with electric transistors, light-emitting diodes, and a ton of other stuff which would be deemed a fire hazard in any household. He claims with a staunch resolution, that these creative experiments were key to building the first Apple I. Even Marc Randolph, the founder of Netflix, gives immense credit to his wilderness training for placing him an environment that demanded him to be creative to sustain himself.
Marc, Steve and I don’t have a lot in common apart from the fact that we had a sandbox for ourselves. And though my siblings and I aren’t tech tycoons yet, we did grow up creative. My brother is a closet sci-fi and pop-culture movie critic who astounds me with his analyses at times. Kids of all ages love him because he has this inane ability to conjure games that keep them occupied for hours at an end. My twin is a fellow with Teach for India where all her fifty-five kids swear by her interactive lesson plans, and her poems make me feel emotions that I didn’t know existed.
I have learnt about anticipating a competitor’s strategy from playing Hide & Seek. I learnt about proper resource utilisation and policy design when I was tasked with coming up with scoring rules for playing cricket in a haphazard environment. The lessons I learnt from unrestricted play are invaluable and deeply ingrained in me, simply because at the time, I didn’t know I was learning. Fun Fact: I tried learning cycling a few days back, but I couldn’t. I was too afraid to fall. Numerous studies show that children are fast learners. Why wouldn’t they be? Children aren’t afraid of zilch!
Parents today are scratching their heads over finding the best creche, school, and extra classes that might go some way in making their child think for themselves. Free play is on a steady decline as parents tie their kids up in numerous extra-curricular classes. My 6-year old nephew has a timetable stuck to the head of his bed, clearly specifying that Thursday is elocution class and Saturday is for pottery. More and more kids are finding solace in Netflix’s kid-mode even while Disney prepares to release Disney+, their behemoth streaming platform.
Even as an adult, I know the mind-numbing effect a session of binge-watching has on me, simply because the last thing a TV show needs me to do is to think. The child who could read an entire Sherlock Holmes novel in one sitting has become the adult who finds it difficult to get through a long read from Aeon. It’s no surprise that child anxiety is on the increase and attention spans around the world are decreasing, as leisure is increasingly becoming a thoughtless activity.
Being the last generation that has seen a world without internet domination, the onus is on us to make sure that the coming generations learn to think for themselves before a blogger tells them how to. Today being Children’s Day, I took my nephew out for a long session of gully cricket, and by the end of it, he was too tired to open his eyes for Peppa Pig. He swears he hasn’t had so much fun in ages.
Let’s bring the sandboxes back!
