PlayWorx Studios: The Third Teacher
Sensory Learning in Immersive Spaces
Above all things we must take care that the child does not develop a deep dislike to the application of an instruction which he cannot yet love, and then continue to dread the bitterness which he had once tasted, even when the years of infancy are left behind. His instruction must be made an amusement to him…his powers be called forth by rewards such as that age prizes.
~ Quintilian I.I.20
Imagine with me for a moment that your child bounces off the bed in the morning to a self-set alarm, speed-dresses, gobbles breakfast, and, eyes sparkling and humming a chirpy tune, hops on his bike and races off to start his day. Imagine again he arrives at the door to a wonky shaped building, radiant in bright and warm colours, painted on the sides with art depicting things that move — cars, trains, planes, rockets; scenes of natural wonders — space, coral reefs, the Grand Canyon, atoms; characters from apps and games — Red, Chuck, Bomb and the rest of Bird Island from Angry Birds, the Scratch Cat; objects from recent kid-culture — fidget spinners, Minecraft constructions, slime (yuck!) — and milling around the door are a dozen other kids, babbling excitedly, with half-eyes on a clock up on the wall — they are early. A few minutes later, the doors turn green and slide open, and a voice reminiscent of Kevin from the Minions announces “Proceed!”
The children all rush into the hallway, an interactive space with floors, walls and ceilings that mimic movement by lighting up into multi-colours of varying intensities, accompanied by distinctive sounds as they detect movement across — a slide generates a surf wave accompanied by the crashing sound of the sea; a kick generates a soccer ball flying towards a goal, with a whoosh sound; and curling up like a ball and rolling across the floor generates a snowball that grows in size the longer the roll. The interactive hallway can generate tons of these mimics and each morning the children exercise and contort their various limbs into trying to generate unique and original combinations; success crowns its composer and creates playground lore that will be narrated for some time until another amazing mimic tops it.
One-by-one, entirely unprompted, once they’ve had their fill of the hallway, the children drift off further into the building.
As they skip down the further end of the hallway, they step on a springboard which catapults them onto a giant bubble, shimmering with colours, through which they wade to get to Kaleidoscope Mountain — a multi-colour, multi-storey climbing structure which resembles a vertical obstacle course strewn with bric-a-brac from a mad inventor’s lab. Getting to the top brings them to Explorer’s Landing, which branches off into 5 arterials labeled Space Adventures, Airscapades, Land Xpeditions, Underground Probes, Sea Quests. Each arterial branches even further, such as Land Xpeditions divides into Landscapes and Settlements, and subsequently further capillary branching into sectors such as Forests ‘N Woods and Cities respectively. I’m sure you get the drift, but for this imaginary walk I’m going to take you down Space Adventures — I am biased because I did want to be a NASA aerospace engineer growing up…
A smaller group steps through Space Adventures’ portal, suits up in silver-coated overalls reminiscent of astronaut uniforms, then huddle into a semi-circular briefing room, which suddenly goes dark, lights flash up on the screen, and a voice comes over the public address system. “Good morning cadets! Your mission this week should you accept, is to design, build and launch a ship that is capable of transporting 47 space tourists, and their pets, to the Rusty Iron Resort on planet Mars. Your ship must successfully launch into Earth orbit, transfer to martian orbit, and safely land them on the Red Planet’s Visitor Gateway. For successful completion of this mission, CIGNET (Confederation for Inter-Galactic Nutation, Exploration and Terraforming) will pay 1,000 ludens. Good luck!”
With faces lit up like New Year’s Eve night sky, and eyes bright, sparkling and twinkling with eagerness, the apprentice space crew huddles again to commence mission planning, all with one thought on their minds, “School is fun!”
The short narrative above is a brief re-imagining of how we could do ‘school’ today. Not in science fiction. Not in some indeterminate future time. Today. Or at least over the next decade if we could have a John F. Kennedyesque moonshot ambition in education. The elements of that educational model are here already; for the physical spaces, check out your nearest children’s museum or discovery centre (see childrensmuseums.org); for the technology, there are a plethora of educational technologies already in use in scaffolding learning experiences — one example being Minecraft, the incredibly popular sandbox video game that enables players build a variety of 3D worlds. (For the purposes of the narrative above, check out Kerbal Space Program).
One question that has animated me continuously is, How can we engineer physical environments and synthesize experiences that give our children the freedom to explore, to play, to create, all the while inadvertently learning? Learning about themselves, the world around them, as well as their capabilities for shaping that world, and the limits to doing so? That enquiry has become even stronger for me personally as our three children rapidly grow into tweens and pre-teens. How do I immerse them into an environment that enables them flower their imaginations, discover and build out their capabilities and provide them a launchpad to continuously unpeel and express dimensions of their unique core identities?
We take our children to science museums. Specifically, we take them to W5 up in Belfast, a 2-hour drive from Dublin. (An incredible shame that Dublin has no appropriately-sized facility — in fact Ireland is the only modern economy without such a centre*. There is Imaginosity, which is also a fantastic imaginative play space, but the curse of tall genes means that our children outgrew it well before the 9-year old age limit). But the challenges of suitability, as just mentioned, distance and the non-cumulative, episodic nature of such visits, which generates intense excitement over a short period that then dissipates completely till the next visit, led me to attempt a reformulation of a more normative and cumulative home-based, immersive learning environment that enables the compounding of knowledge. This reformulation I call PlayWorx Studios — which is essentially our family life reconstituted as an immersive learning environment.
Of course we employ Kerbal Space Program to run a science, technology and research program. But we don’t have the Mimic Hallway, the Kaleidoscope Mountain, or the Giant Bubble. Yet! But we are using our first child’s deep passion for car racing to develop a virtual eRacing program, built on playing games such as Gran Turismo and Project Cars 2 on the PlayStation console — which will be a pathway to develop knowledge around traditional school subjects such as maths (arcs, angles, lines — addressing the aspect of the optimal path across the racing track), physics (kinematics, thermodynamics, statics — addressing the forces on the car as it speeds across the track and how to harness them for optimal performance), chemistry (fuel mixes, combustion — addressing the propulsion aspect of racing cars and how to adjust them for the best results) for example, but also non-school knowledge areas such as design (car, track), leadership (crew management), marketing (motorsport sponsorship), and media (YouTube video making and streaming). Similarly, we will use our other 2 children’s current and budding interests in gadgetry and slime (yuck! again) to wrap learning pathways around their self-chosen fun activities. (How about a self-propagating slime used to coat highway roads that ensures drivers maintain a minimum speed limit else their cars sink, but that also softens and re-flows to repair cracks and pot-holes? An Oobleck-variant anyone?).
Children’s natural inclination is to play. And the products of play are what builds our civilisation — play is humanity’s most valuable natural process, and our most dependable natural resource. As parents our efforts should be aimed at not interrupting that natural drive, but seeking ways to harness it, to work with it, to flow downstream with it, till we succeed at boring a path through our children’s world to a world that we co-create with them, a world where their imaginations are given full rein and their contributions valued. PlayWorx Studios is my home-brew attempt at that endeavour.
A Giant Bubble down our stairwell will be nice btw…
And oh, remember that Mimic Hallway? Incidentally those mimics are programmed by the children themselves…for which they earn 50 ludens — the currency of play — with a further bonus of 25 ludens for the chart-topping mimic. And best of all, at the end of each week they get to convert 10% of ludens earned from completing various missions throughout the adventure playground, er school, into real cash — cold, hard euros (or dollars, or whatever is the official currency in their locale), for personal spending money. The rest they bank and spend on their next missions — buying resources, recruiting skilled AI, buying face-time with Mission Experts — human specialists in particular knowledge domains. You know, the sort of things they already do in their games…
*Footnotes:
1. You can read all about the plans to establish a national interactive science centre in Dublin, called Exploration Station. The centre is scheduled to open in late 2020.
2. Incidentally as I was finishing up this post, I came across this website touting an about-to-launch interactive science and sport centre — explorium — billed to open November 2018. After dashed hopes from numerous false starts over the years on similar proposals, this is an incredible discovery! Hope they have a Formula 1 racing section, Inspector Gadgetesque lab and deep vats of sticky, yucky slime — holding my breath, can’t wait…
[This article was originally published, in its entirety, as a post on my personal blog.]
Update (25 Sep 2021): PlayWorx is currently on sabbatical.
At present, I am blogging exclusively at The Global Careerist.
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If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
I champion parents of t(w)eens to become intentional in nurturing them as Imagineers, enabling them engineer their imaginative and creative ideas into productive and practical forms, thus empowering them to masterfully navigate and thrive in an Age of Massive Disruption.
I do this by writing a Medium publication, speaking at events and cooking up ingenious ways to spread the PlayWorx Method message of emphasizing nurturing of bold imagination and building of sustained creative capital during the t(w)eens years.
If you are a parent of a t(w)een, I invite you to subscribe to my weekly PlayWorx Insights email and join other perceptive parents who are already benefiting from this ‘front-side seat’ into another way to grow t(w)eens!
