I’m helping organize the Creativity & Cognition conference. It’s an interesting mix of artists, computer scientists, and just plain creative people. Which leads to the question: How do kids learn to be creative? To create is to make; so learning to make things is an important part of learning creativity. Construction kits like Lego and Meccano offer a structured (“scaffolded”) way to make physical things; and programming languages like Seymour Papert’s Logo and Alan Kay’s Squeak have offered kids a way to make computational things. Now we’re amidst a revolution that brings together the physical and computational in massively parallel and distributed ways. So, we need construction kits to scaffold kids creativity in this new world.
Sparking Creativity: Cubelets in the School Library Makerspace
As the library media specialist at Avail Academy in Edina, Minnesota, Karen Christensson has been utilizing Cubelets in her makerspace for three years. During each