Promoting Playful Learning With Technology

In the 2006 article “Computer as Paintbrush: Technology, Play, and the Creative Society,” Mitchel Resnick, professor of learning research at MIT, argued that “computers will not live up to their potential until we start to think of them less like televisions and more like paintbrushes”—as tools with which to create, not merely to consume.

Nearly 20 years later, Resnick’s words still ring true. While we have the power to use devices to create imaginative works of art and scholarship, kids (and adults) spend much of their screen time passively scrolling through TikTok and Instagram feeds instead. The trend can be seen in the classroom too: Instead of having students harness the full creative potential of modern technology, many teachers primarily use it for things like Google Slides presentations, digital quizzes, and the occasional YouTube video.

Resnick isn’t thrilled by the average person’s relationship with technology, but he is optimistic about where we can go from here. An advocate of play-based learning, which he believes can be successfully implemented at all grade levels, Resnick leads a team called Lifelong Kindergarten, and he published a book of the same name in 2018. One of his team’s primary goals is to develop educational technologies that encourage creative, playful learning. In 2007, they released Scratch, a platform with over 100 million users that lets them create games and animations by dragging around simple building blocks of code.

I talked with Resnick about play-based learning at all ages and asked about his advice for teachers on helping students become active users of technology.

DANIEL LEONARD: Your research team at the MIT Media Lab is called the Lifelong Kindergarten group; that’s the name of your book as well. Is lifelong kindergarten the overarching theme of all of your work?

MITCH RESNICK: I’ve always been inspired by the way children learn in kindergarten. When I think of the classic kindergarten, I think of children playfully creating things in collaboration with one another. And as they do that, they learn particular concepts. When they build a tower with blocks, for example, they learn about structure and stability—but more importantly, they learn about the creative process. And I think that approach to learning is so important today in order to develop as a creative thinker. We should take that kindergarten approach and extend it to learners of all ages.

LEONARD: The creative process is also the focus of your article “Computer as Paintbrush,” which you wrote nearly 20 years ago. Do you think students’ using devices passively, rather than actively, is as big a concern now as it was then? 

RESNICK: That’s still a major concern. People in general, and young people in particular, do spend a lot of time just watching videos or scrolling through social media. And even if they’re interacting with the technology, they’re not necessarily creating and expressing themselves.

There’s been some progress with technology to open up new avenues where people of all ages can express themselves, but unfortunately, many of the ways technology is being used are not helping young people develop as creative thinkers.

LEONARD: In the article, you wrote that a driving force behind people’s relationship with technology is that teachers, not just students, still think of computers as televisions, not reckoning with their full creative potential. What advice do you offer teachers about fostering creativity with classroom tech?

RESNICK: There are teachers who don’t recognize the full creative potential of technology—but many also might not recognize the full creative potential of their students. I think that’s even more important. A big role that educators can play is not just providing guidance around technical skills or consulting students on how to use the technology, but offering guidance on the creative process itself. Like, “Did you ever think about trying that?” or helping students consider alternatives when they feel frustrated or stuck.

When my team does workshops with educators, we often start by having them actively engage with tech tools on their own—trying to get them to have a creative experience so they can get an understanding of it. If they’ve gone through the creative process themselves, they’ll be better equipped to guide students through it.

LEONARD: I wanted to ask about your team’s highly regarded platform, Scratch. I’ve personally been playing around in Scratch since middle school. In the 17 years since its release, what do you think has been its overall impact on learning?

RESNICK: One goal that we set when we were first developing Scratch is that we wanted to appeal to kids who never imagined themselves being interested in coding. And I do think it’s been quite good at that; it’s not something that’s only used by kids who would have ended up becoming coders anyway.

In the early days, when we presented Scratch at conferences, people were mostly focused on how Scratch could help you develop your computational thinking skills—and those skills were defined pretty narrowly. And there was value in that, of course, but I’ve always said that Scratch isn’t just for developing your thinking; it’s also for developing your voice and your identity. It’s for figuring out how to express yourself and to take your ideas and share them with others.

One of my favorite projects is one that was done seven years ago, an animated story where a student talked about his experiences being on the autism spectrum—some of his challenges in dealing with the world and how other people might view him and fail to understand him. But then he makes a strong point: If everyone were alike, the world would be a boring place. And he ends with a passionate appeal to say, “The most important thing in life is to find your own path.” And when I saw that, I was just so happy that he found a way to use Scratch to share those ideas.

LEONARD: I’m also really interested in the MIT Media Lab’s more recent project, the mobile coding platform OctoStudio. What was the inspiration behind it?

RESNICK: Since we started designing Scratch more than 20 years ago—before smartphones—we did not design it with mobile devices in mind. So, right now, you can’t create Scratch projects on your iPad or your iPhone. But we saw that around the world, more and more young people had access to mobile devices, but not to computers. And we wanted to make sure that as access to mobile phones grew, young people weren’t using them just to watch videos and scroll social media, but to design, create, experiment, and explore.

LEONARD: How is OctoStudio different from Scratch?

RESNICK: It’s mobile, which opens up new possibilities. When making a project on OctoStudio, you can take advantage of smartphones’ sensors to have things react to shaking or tilting or even be triggered when a magnet passes nearby. You could tape the phone to a Frisbee and turn it like a steering wheel, or take advantage of the phone’s camera. So you can create new types of interactive projects that don’t just involve pointing and clicking with your mouse.

Scratch is still better for more sophisticated, large-scale projects, which are harder to create while working on a phone; and at least for now, OctoStudio doesn’t have an online community, partly because we didn’t want it to require internet connectivity. So they each have their separate advantages.

LEONARD: Have you had any pushback against OctoStudio from educators who are trying to get students to use phones less?

RESNICK: Not really, though I do think that’s a challenge. But I hope, over time, people focus less on what the technology is and more on what the activity is. I sometimes say rather than trying to minimize screen time, people should try to maximize creativity time. That creativity time could be making origami or building with Lego or painting with watercolors—or it could be making a Scratch project or an OctoStudio project. So, again, it comes back to the paintbrush analogy.

LEONARD: What are some small tweaks teachers can make—next week, or even tomorrow—to prioritize creativity in their classrooms?

RESNICK: I like your use of the word “tweaks.” I suggest that teachers offer kids more opportunities to work on projects that are connected to their own interests. Whenever you notice that everyone’s working on this one standardized thing, see if you can tweak it so that students can personalize it somehow. If you’re learning about the French Revolution, for example, let kids make their own animated stories about it rather than just reading about it and studying it. If they work on a project they care about, they’re going to make deeper connections to the ideas as well as developing their creative capacities.

I also encourage teachers to pursue what I call the four Ps of creative learning: projects, passions, peers, and play. And “play” doesn’t just mean having fun. When we say “play,” we mean being able to experiment and take risks and try new things—which are critical to young people developing as creative thinkers.

This interview has been edited for brevity, clarity, and flow.