This Used To Be My Playground
Am I about to write a wonky, decidedly un-playful dissection of play and its constituent parts?
Yes, yes I am.
But I am this wonky in defense of play! Because – much like the Glitter and Glue Effect – learning through play is often viewed as something slight. As ephemeral. As “cute.”
There is nothing “cute” about play. I mean, it is totally cute to watch kids play. But underneath that façade of cuteness, it is serious, serious business.
For those of you in charge of facilitating play, encouraging play, or justifying the value of play to powers-that-be? “Cute” is not enough.
Why does play matter?
Wait, there is too much, let me sum up.
Researchers have studied this from every angle – cognitive development, language skills, self-regulation, executive function, social skills, emotional resilience, motor skills. In many studies, using many lenses, and many methodologies, the conclusion is that play is a valuable catalyst for learning and development.
Still doubt that play is fundamentally important? Watch those National Geographic documentaries with baby animals playing. (Documentaries with frolicking baby animals, by the way, are my personal version of Xanax.) These are animals surviving in the wild. Frivolity is not in their evolutionary vocabulary.
Baby animals play to learn and build the skills they need to stay alive in this brutal world.
Our kids are no different.
Should place-based educational play be different?
While all play has intrinsic value, if you work in an institution whose mission is more specific than “healthy child development” – there’s an argument that not all play is created equal for your institution.
Whether it's a museum, library, or outreach program, you probably have specific aims. Maybe it’s a discipline – art or nature or STEM. Maybe it’s a skillset – engineering or inquiry or literacy.
As institutions like yours explore play as part of learning, I often hear about the emergence of an institutional tug of war between Play and Content.
Here’s what I think really happens:
Many institutions start from the place of “content”. (We are often defined by our content.)
Research on the power of play largely comes from content-agnostic research settings.
In the excitement to apply the attributes of playful environments, it can feel like a pendulum swing in the opposite direction. All play is valuable, right? Child direction is key, right? Sometimes, the content, discipline, or mission fall to the side.
But when the rubber meets the road, things can look like a playful free-for-all. And sure, research says all play is prompting learning. But if you are in a place where someone has paid cash-money and/or time to bring kids to this specific place, the question starts to come up - for you, a parent, a boss, or a funder:
Why are they doing that play HERE?
This underlines the tug of war. Centering play feels like you’ve abandoned your content core. Centering content feels like you’re handing a dissertation to a 4 year-old.
The real solution is not either-or. It’s both-and.
It's not a dichotomy. It's Purposeful Play.
Play and content are not opposites. They are not enemies. They are not in tension.
The secret for an education organization or program with a place- or subject-based focus is connecting play with the place/content. Around the JSC team, we refer to this as Purposeful Play. And we contrast it with Free Play.
Purposeful Play: Playful activities designed to engage with concepts, themes, or ideas that you – the designer or educator – care about. There's a lot of adult thought and structure behind the scenes.
Free Play: Child-directed play that takes any shape, form, or materials the players come up with.
Let’s get concrete using an imaginary museum with some niche content.
The Museum of Oversea Shipping. They’re all about the ocean! A water table exhibit seems a natural fit. That gives them lots of tots wearing plastic smocks using materials and gadgets in, on, and around that water. Let's imagine two versions of that water table:
Free Play Water Table offers a wide variety of materials, tools, and gadgets. All sorts of play is possible. Each kid follows their own path. And they are learning about all sorts of things about the properties of water. Including, maybe, how much water you can dump on your brother before Mom calls timeout. (An important lesson, to be sure.)
Purposeful Play Water Table starts with a purpose. Let's try Sink & Float – physical science concepts that are pretty darn important to oversea shipping! That guides every design choice:
- Selecting materials with gradations of floatability and sinkability
- Including materials that float in one condition, but sink when full of water
- Finding or creating those materials to look like relevant objects – containers, freight ships, tugboats, etc. – with appropriate sinkability and floatability qualities.
- Designing open-ended prompts, questions, and challenges to spark sink/float exploration.
The characteristics of playing are the same. But in Purposeful Play, you’ve structured the materials, prompts, and environment so that child-led exploration is far more likely to go in your content direction.
Evaluating for "Purposeful" Play
I’ve thought so much about this because our team is often faced with figuring out how to gauge if a playful experience is effective.
We have to start by digging into your aim for having this play in this place at this time in this way. I like the label “purposeful” to signify that the call is coming from inside the house – the designers must define the aim.
Evaluation follows that purpose. And, let's be clear, there are many different potential shapes to purposeful play. Here are a few examples you might lean into for a design and/or an evaluation.
Phenomenon: Play engages with aspects of the targeted phenomenon – sink/float, color mixing, balance, rhyming, light/shadow, how sound travels, etc.
Iteration: Play instigates trying again and again, ideally with making changes to design or approach each time.
Creativity: Play involves creation, novelty, variation, or thinking “outside the box.”
Problem-Solving: Play comes up with a solution to a challenge or problem.
Collaboration: Play requires players working together (perhaps negotiating) toward a goal.
Adult Play: Play gets a caregiver taking a co-player role
And those are just a few purposes of designed play! If you can define your purpose, you are better positioned to both design and find ways to measure if it’s happening.
Real World Example:
In a past project we did early-stage testing of a pilot activity. They had a concept and some rough ideas of playful activities, but nothing was set in stone. As in all good pilot testing, they used inexpensive materials first, to guide decisions for the full build.
For this early test, we tried what I call a “kitchen sink” approach – as in “everything but the kitchen sink.” Expert educators identified many different hands-on materials, tools, activities, and gizmos that related to the core phenomenon.
We tested these at a prototype station and “Let’s see what families do!”
There was ZERO doubt that kids were going to have fun here. There were so many super-fun materials to explore. Our question was which materials were more likely to prompt that purposeful play (and why and how).
We tackled this through a few strategies:
We needed to define the purposeful dimensions of play desired here.
We needed to be able to associate specific materials with different forms of play. (Was the bucket used for sink/float or for dumping water on their brother’s head?)
We wanted to capture how materials were used in combination and how those helped (or hindered) purposeful play. (Think: putting container boxes on a ship before floating it across the water table.)
Our observation tool took all of these factors into consideration, linking material use and type of play during different intervals of observation.
Ultimately, this allowed us to distinguish materials that prompted purposeful play from those that were attractive primarily for free play.
We identified “gateway” materials – ones that that inherently prompted purposeful play and led to explore further with that idea.
And, perhaps most importantly, at their Data Party, their team concluded they have to collectively decide how much of what type of play they want to encourage in the final design. Maybe it's phenomenon. Maybe it's a process. Maybe it's a mix.
Ultimately, what is purposeful is defined by you.
What do you think: What could make play special at your institution – makes it stand out from play we can do anywhere else? Hit reply and tell me the magic (which, BTW, is the purpose) in your play.