Tag Archives: imaginative play

Last week I almost wrecked the imaginary birthday party my daughter was throwing for Strawberry Shortcake. I was sitting on the floor in her room next to Plum Puddin’, Lemon Meringue, Orange Blossom and a few other three-inch-tall plastic guests, when she looked up and casually asked: “What’s more, daddy, four and a half or five years?” I jumped up, got the wooden blocks out and started piling them up in five columns. I was hoping that the concreteness of…

Picture for a second the first thing you ever constructed, designed, prototyped, or invented. If you’re like most of us, there’s a pretty good chance that you built your idea using toys like LEGOs, Play-Doh, Lincoln Logs, or perhaps, to your parents’ dismay, a mix of all of the above (good luck getting Play-Doh out of those bricks). Over the years, magazines like MAKE have featured lots of DIY toy projects, but very few talk about designing for Creative Play…

We’re always happy to spread the word for our Cooney Center Prize finalists — especially when they have exciting new projects and updates to share. This week, Andy Russell and Thushan Amarasiriwardena of Launchpad Toys have partnered with Wired’s GeekDad to announce a fun new contest: Kids and their parents are invited to share ‘toons they create about their summer travel adventures for a chance to win a LEGO space shuttle or a $100 Amazon gift certificate. (Check out the…

I recently had the pleasure of sitting on a panel at the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning conference to discuss mobile learning. As our good friends at Project Noah and other games/apps like The Hidden Park have shown, mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad present incredible opportunities for developers like ourselves to get kids out of the house, learning about the world around us, and sharing their findings with peers around the globe. Inevitably, the Million-Dollar-Question arose: How…

Give a young child a couple of toys or a box of crayons and he or she is likely to play for hours, deeply engrossed in an imaginary world. In both art and dramatic play, children construct settings, create fictional characters, and act out fantastic storylines that would be the envy of many Hollywood scriptwriters. Yet, ask that same child to write out a story in a blank notebook or a word processor and you would be lucky to capture…