What if learning felt like an opportunity for creativity, exploration, and play? What if schools supported children’s curiosity? And what if you could combine creativity and technology into engaging experiences that spark the imagination of kids, no matter their age?
Answering these “what-ifs” just may be the key to unlocking a new and improved way of learning—one designed to build confidence, engage students, teach life skills, and emphasize social-emotional well-being. This is what Andrew Sliwinski—the Vice President, Head of Product Experience at LEGO® Education—and his team do every day. Sliwinski brings to the proverbial table a unique perspective. Early on in his career, he worked with public schools, after-school programs, and makerspaces in cities like Detroit and Oakland, and then moved on to continue his passion for helping others learn. Eventually this led Sliwinski to serve as Co-Director of MIT’s Scratch project, the world’s largest coding community for children. Now, at LEGO Education, he is in charge of designing new, innovative, hands-on STEAM solutions that are not only fun and playful, but also deeply engage students in learning. Sliwinski’s focus is on innovation and how it can be used to reimagine how children learn, how learning plays into the way in which children see themselves, and, ultimately, how they see themselves in the world.
What’s the Most Impactful Learning Experience for Children in the Long Term?
This is a question that is always top of mind for Sliwinski and his team. It is an important one in that there has historically been too much emphasis placed on the short term. How to get kids ready for that test on Friday? How to make sure they are successful at taking the end-of-year standardized assessments? While these forms of assessment can be very helpful for adults who are attempting to understand a child’s development (which is critically important for both educators and parents), they can come at the expense of the child’s long-term development. This short-term approach often creates conditions where children see learning as something that is inflicted upon them. It doesn’t nurture the conditions for children to embrace their curiosity and develop a lifelong passion for learning. Motivating children to continuously develop new skills and adapt to an ever-changing world is the biggest focus for Sliwinski and his team.
The Importance of STEAM in Education
Incorporating STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) into the classroom in a fun and engaging way should be a big part of the school system’s overall educational strategy. Why?
The benefits of creating connections across subjects like Math, Science, and the Arts (as we see in STEAM-based curriculum) are countless. This approach provides students with opportunities to construct, synthesize, and demonstrate their knowledge through hands-on projects. It also encourages students to step outside the abstract problems that are often seen on tests and employ critical thinking skills to come up with creative solutions to real-world problems. It can also encourage collaboration as students must come together to solve common challenges, which of course, is a great lesson for when they get out in the real world.
That said, Sliwinski points out that it can be helpful to look at our motivations behind the world’s increasing emphasis on STEAM—and that these underlying motivations actually matter. He broadly finds there are two motivations: workforce development and fluency. In the former, the focus on STEAM is rooted in preparing students to go out into the world and begin careers—giving them a leg up, particularly since more and more jobs will be in STEAM-related fields. However, Sliwinski argues that it can also be beneficial to consider many of the academic and life skills underlying STEAM as a form of fluency. “In the same way we teach children how to read and write early in life, we also have to teach them to become fluent in technology, science, engineering, mathematics, and the arts,” says Sliwinski. “It’s not that we expect all children to grow up and become computer programmers, but we do expect them to grow up and be able to engage in a society that’s increasingly mediated and influenced by science and technology.”
By engaging children in these types of learning experiences at a younger age, you can foster a love of learning that develops into a lifelong passion. How does this happen? It is all about building confidence in learning—confidence that allows children to believe they can do it and that they have the tools and problem-solving skills necessary to conquer the challenges they face. To do this, Sliwinski recommends the idea of scaffolding. Scaffolding is a way of teaching that promotes breaking up the lesson or project into approachable steps, providing successive levels of support for the child to be able to go on to the next level. As the student progresses, some of the supportive strategies are removed, shifting some of the responsibility of the learning process to the student. “We can think about learning to ride a bike: How do we support a child in their journey from ‘tricycle’ to ‘two-wheeler’ to ‘popping a wheelie’?” says Sliwinski. This is a gradual process in which students are supported as they start to engage with a problem (aka the “training wheels” stage). Then, as they start to see that they can figure it out, they step up to the next phase. “The ‘two-wheeler’ stage is all about helping the child see the possibilities and expanding their interest in solving the problem,” says Sliwinski. What he describes as the “popping a wheelie” phase is when the educator is able to step back and let the students fully immerse themselves in the challenge and discover their unique perspectives on how to solve it. This scaffolding approach helps put children first in the educational equation, giving them the support they need to realize they can go out on their own to explore and bring their own passions and creativity to the learning process—a lesson that will resonate for a lifetime.
How to Implement a Child-Centric Approach to Education
Another way to make the educational experience more child-centric is through incorporating purposeful play into everyday lessons. The good news is that the idea of purposeful play has been gaining traction in recent years. However, there is still much work to be done to change the narrative around purposeful play and ensure it is embraced and implemented in all school districts so all students can benefit from it.
Purposeful play has been found to cultivate children’s social, emotional, physical, and creative skills. It builds their confidence to ask questions and to engage and collaborate with their peers to come up with solutions. It also promotes resilience. If one idea doesn’t work, they can take a step back, rethink the problem, and try again. Incorporating purposeful play into a curriculum gives students the opportunity to learn in any environment and promotes a love of learning that will go on long after their formal education is complete. That is why Sliwinski says, “We must build an approach around STEAM learning that feels purposeful and connected to a child’s interests and passions.”
How do you do this? Working with educators all over the world, LEGO Education has a long history of developing innovative STEAM solutions that help to drive this learning strategy.
How Can We Increase Purposeful Play in Schools?
This past August, LEGO Education introduced the LEGO® Learning System, a range of interconnected solutions that work together to make STEAM learning easy to implement in the classroom. It was designed to be adaptable—able to meet every student right where they are on their learning journey. With this research-backed learning system, abstract concepts become tangible as students move from exploring simple ideas to tackling increasingly complex real-world challenges. Activities such as building, prototyping, and storytelling facilitate multi-modal experiences that help students learn STEAM concepts more quickly and at a deeper level.
As part of the LEGO Learning System, LEGO Education also recently launched LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Essential, a STEAM solution designed specifically for elementary school students. It combines creativity with STEAM learning concepts to give students an opportunity to get hands-on in their learning. It is largely based on the philosophy of using storytelling to help solve problems. To do this, LEGO Education created four distinct LEGO® Minifigures, each with their own characteristics and personalities that students can relate to. “Say one of the characters has a hard time getting out of bed in the morning,” Sliwinski says. “That is something a student can empathize with, and then explore ideas that may help.” The great thing is that there is not just one answer to this problem. Students must use their imagination to come up with a solution. This may be a new and improved alarm clock, or it might be a robotic bed “ejector seat.” The goal is for children to relate to a real-world scenario, explore solutions, and apply their skills to make it all come to life. This notion of not being limited to just one right answer is what Sliwinski refers to as “solution diversity.” “We want to see every child’s creativity and agency being engaged as part of the problem-solving process,” Sliwinski says,“because there shouldn’t be one answer. In the real-world, there is very rarely only one way to solve a problem.”
Purposeful play, as seen in SPIKE™ Essential and other STEAM solutions offered by LEGO Education, is key to solution diversity. It is a way to grow young students’ love of learning while at the same time teaching them life lessons of adaptability, creative problem-solving, and resilience. It represents technology for the greater good. As Sliwinski puts it, “Technology is never the goal; it is a tool to help us create meaningful, creative learning experiences for kids.” Mission accomplished.
For more information, please visit LEGOeducation.com.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for LEGO® Education
