Kids And Creativity, Creativity, STEM Education / Play, Learning at Home, Learning Through Play
Various playful and gaming aspects can be used in learning; some of them require our imagination and nothing else, others are more demanding and work best with special attributes, classroom themes, and so on. Teachers have to use all their creativity to reenact all those learning ideas and set up the right atmosphere.
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Kids And Creativity, Creativity, Learning at Home, Learning Through Play, STEAM
Are you the creative type, who is tired of finger painting? If you’re in need of an art project upgrade, we’ve found some easy, unique ideas and pinned them to our Getting Crafty Pinterest board.
Kids And Creativity, Creativity, STEM Education / Play, Learning Through Play
All games are systems: the rules (or constraints), components (game pieces), space (from a soccer field to a game board to a tablet screen), and goal (to win!) interconnect. A game’s interconnected system is driven by player actions; as players learn a game, they also learn its system. Scholar James Paul Gee wrote, “Games encourage players to think about relationships, not isolated events, facts, and skills. In a game like Rise of Nations, for instance, players need to think of how each action taken might impact their future actions and the actions of the other players playing against them as they each move their civilizations through the Ages.” Similar to the aforementioned civilization building game Rise of Nations, the city management series SimCity tasks players with balancing a complex urban system. Another systems thinking game is Plague, Inc., in which players release a pathogen into a map of the world. Playing it illustrates how actual infections spread around the globe.
Insider, Compose Music, Kids And Creativity, Creativity, Learning Through Play
Unsurprisingly, a frequently asked question at ThinkFun is “How do you find your games?” Or, “Who comes up with your games?” We love these questions because we are hopeful someone will soon be inspired to create their own game!
School’s out and summer is here! While we like to spend as much time as possible spending time playing in and exploring the outdoors (have you checked out our latest summer learning series: the sun? ), we like to have a few games on reserve to play when the craving strikes! Without further ado, here are 6 games we picked that will ensure fun all summer long.
Happy National Week of Making everyone! From June 16th-22nd, individuals throughout the U.S. are encouraged to celebrate innovation, ingenuity and creativity through the power of making! Our favorite craft projects require an item that you already have at home, so don’t throw those tubes away. To embrace the spirit of the week, we’re sharing some of our favorite ways to repurpose toilet paper tubes, straight from our crafty Pinterest board.
Over the past 30 years, the number of teenagers who say that they “never” or “hardly ever” read had tripled (Common Sense Media). This trend, unsurprisingly, is the opposite of what parents would like to see – according to Scholastic, 75% of parents with children aged 6-17 would like their children to read more books for fun. They’re smart to want this; studies have shown that strong early reading skills can positively affect general intelligence in later life, and can improve one’s understanding of other peoples’ mental states, i.e. improve empathy, according to Science Magazine.
