Early Futures
Alternative Play
Futurist Tool
An Early Futures affiliate project, MIXTUM, is releasing it’s first futurist tool (for children and adults alike).The open-ended tool is a circular mandala of symbols, organized in concentric rings, which allows a player to spin for a random arrangement of three symbols. The game is designed to create very surrealistic outcomes, focusing on the combining [...]
Mandala Practices with Children
“The mandala (Sanskrit “circle”) is a basic form which can be found in nature, in the elements of matter, in the plant and animal worlds, as well as in objects and images created by man and his psyche. It portrays a system of order which superimposes itself, so to speak, on the psychic chaos in [...]
Berkeley Adventure Playground
Time to return to the always inspirational adventure playground. We already described the essence of what adventure playgrounds are in other articles, we now turn to the reality and details of a specific adventure playground: the Berkeley adventure playground. How does it work? What does it look like? How does one maintain an adventure playground?
The [...]
Japanese Play Parks
The hand-painted sign read Abenteuerspielplatz and seemed like just another interestingly incongruous vignette to stop and take a picture of along a photo-walk I was taking from Ikebukuro station to Shinjuku station in Tokyo last winter. Along the three miles I had walked, I passed an once-ostentatious neon hotel sign now engulfed in bamboo [...]
Presentations by Children
Finally, here are the highlight clips from children who were giving guided reviews of their work to their peers in the Children’s Think Tank. The videos show the range and diverse set of topics and insight, as well as presentation styles, of the children who were involved.
First is two short clips from five-year-old Abigail. She [...]
Overimitation in Learning
Alison Gopnik’s research lab at UC Berkeley recently posted a new article describing their research on how young children respond to direct instruction vs. naive demonstration.
You can read the .pdf of the article “Children’s Imitation of Causal Action Sequences” by Buchsbaum, Gopnik, Griffiths & Shafto or the summarized article in Slate: “Why Preschools Shouldn’t [...]
Research Summaries
The Children’s Think Tank completed their first session in December 2010! In the next month we will be updating their final work, including sharing two fantastic presentations made by a few children during our opening. In the meantime, we’d like to share our “Research Summaries” publication put out for the culminating event at the Maryland [...]
Children’s Think Tank Meeting 4
Meeting #4
Summary:
Our meeting this week took us out to the library for our first research into external resources to help expand our topics. The children drew and photographed parts of the books that interested them:
(How the universe was made, by Abigail).
(Spencer looking into things that are related to the Earth, i.e. how the Earth was [...]
Children’s Think Tank / Meeting 3
Meeting #3
(photo: Annika studying astral projection)
Part 1
This week we did not have a lecture or research meeting agenda. We began by exercising our internal visualization skills with “Breathing” and “Mirror” imagination games from the fabulous book, Put Your Mother On The Ceiling, by Richard De Mille. At the end of this exercise we were [...]
Children’s Think Tank / Meeting 2
Meeting Notes, Meeting #2
Part 1
Meet in group to discuss the choice topic (as voted on in previous meeting): Aliens.
Part 2
Short lecture/discussion on the presentation topic: Research Methods (you can view the .pdf of our meeting agenda). In the research methods lecture, we discussed traditional research methods, and alternative research methods.
A brief transcript of topic [...]
Children’s Think Tank / Meeting 1
Meeting 1 Documentation
Our first experimental session of the Children’s Think Tank has begun. It is a research group with children that helps articulate what they are interested in, while exploring future research methods that attend to their concerns and abilities (view gallery on left for photographs from the first meeting). For those of you have [...]
Alternative Library
My present home city of Baltimore is a very antagonistic, yet at times, very hopeful place to be working. There are a number of institutions and individuals focused on alternatives here, due to the interesting, conflicting fact that there are high volumes of dissent and intense violence due to economic, racial and class conflict. The [...]
Adventure Playgrounds and Workyards / Notes
This is a summary of notes written a few years back in the effort to gather the pros and cons of starting an adventure playground and for what purpose. Most of these notes come from a variety of written resources (mentioned at end of article).
To those of you who have not heard of adventure [...]
Imagination Games
It is integral that we purposefully give our child peers tools to keep their imaginations connecting and deconstructing reality and fantasy. When a child can visualize, imagine and challenge the normal understanding of how things work together, they have more control over imagining our future worlds. They also become more comfortable with the diversity of [...]
Futures by Kids (FSxK) Developments
FSxK is the name of the Futures by Kids study group with children. I had my first development meeting with one of the potential leaders of the group, Spencer David, age 6. Here is a transcript of some of the things he and I discussed.
Spencer David /
FSxK First Meeting/
H: Let’s talk about the future, let’s [...]
Adventure Playgrounds by Kids / Part I.
After describing Adventure Playgrounds to a group of 4/5 year olds and showing them examples, they decided they wanted to plan a course of action to have their own. We went forward with Part I., in which we draw our ideas of what an Adventure Playground would look like.
Here’s a few examples of what they [...]
Adventure Playgrounds / A Brief Guide
Adventure Playgrounds (also known as junk playgrounds and work yards) are one of the most intriguing examples of malleable, participatory spaces that engage children, but they are disappearing every year and now in the US they are almost extinct.
The premise of adventure playgrounds is that they “are places where children can create and modify their [...]
Radical Children’s Museum
The Zoom Kindermuseum in Vienna, Austria blows most children’s museums away. Based more on a contemporary art museum or science laboratory then a children’s museum, it focuses on experimental ways to give children experiences with the world. Kindermuseum allows for curatorial ideas, and can choose to bring pieces in from other institutions/people/corporations or just focus [...]
Urban Sandbox Idea
(a transient sand pile in Champs Elysees, France)
Inspiration /
“If you ask adults about their happiest or most vivid recollections of city childhood they will seldom talk about the park or the playground, but they will recall the vacant lot, the secret places behind billboards or hoardings. They will describe the delights of sand in the [...]
Future Playgrounds
I found a great resource today while looking at energy playground related materials. Playground of the Future lists pretty much every kind of awesome playground style and resource links on where to read more information on their implementation. They also just list off ideas for future playgrounds like a, Color Changing Ground Surface, which would [...]
Energy Producing Playgrounds
The idea is an energy playground, where children could play on normal playground equipment, but it would be generating and saving energy. As I began researching I found a lot of great ideas already in use for play equipment:
Play Pumps is a non profit company that creates merry-go-rounds that children can play on while [...]