All I Really Need to Know (About Creative Thinking)
I Learned (By Studying How Children Learn) in Kindergarten*
Mitchel Resnick
MIT Media Lab
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA+1 617 253 9783
mres@media.mit.edu

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the “kindergarten approach tolearning” – characterized by a spiraling cycle of Imagine,
Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and back to Imagine – isideally suited to the needs of the 21st century, helping
learners develop the creative-thinking skills that are criticalto success and satisfaction in today’s society. The paper
discusses strategies for designing new technologies thatencourage and support kindergarten-style learning,building on the success of traditional kindergarten
materials and activities, but extending to learners of allages, helping them continue to develop as creative thinkers.
INTRODUCTION

Kindergarten is undergoing a dramatic change. For nearly
200 years, since the first kindergarten opened in 1837,
kindergarten has been a time for telling stories, building
castles, drawing pictures, and learning to share. But that isstarting to change. Today, more and more kindergarten
children are spending time filling out phonics worksheets
and memorizing math flashcards [5]. In short, kindergarten
is becoming more like the rest of school.
In my mind, exactly the opposite is needed: Instead ofmaking kindergarten like the rest of school, we need tomake the rest of school (indeed, the rest of life) more likekindergarten.
As I see it, the traditional kindergarten approach to learning
is ideally suited to the needs of the 21st century. In a society
characterized by uncertainty and rapid change, the ability
to think creatively is becoming the key to success andsatisfaction, both professionally and personally [2]. For
today’s children, nothing is more important than learning tothink creatively – learning to come up with innovative
solutions to the unexpected situations that will continuallyarise in their lives [17].
Unfortunately, most schools are out-of-step with today’sneeds: they were not designed to help students develop as
creative thinkers. Kindergartens (at least those that remaintrue to the kindergarten tradition) are an exception. The
traditional kindergarten approach to learning is wellmatched to the needs of the current society, and should be
extended to learners of all ages.

What do I mean by the kindergarten approach to learning?
In traditional kindergartens, children are constantly
designing, creating, experimenting, and exploring. Twochildren might start playing with wooden blocks; overtime, they build a collection of towers. A classmate sees thetowers and starts pushing his toy car between them. But the
towers are too close together, so the children start moving
the towers further apart to make room for the cars. In theprocess, one of the towers falls down. After a briefargument over who was at fault, they start talking about
how to build a taller and stronger tower. The teacher showsthem pictures of real-world skyscrapers, and they noticethat the bottoms of the buildings are wider than the tops. So
they decide to rebuild their block tower with a wider basethan before.
This type of process is repeated over and over inkindergarten. The materials vary (finger paint, crayons,bells) and the creations vary (pictures, stories, songs), but
the core process is the same. I think of it as a spiraling
process in which children imagine what they want to do,create a project based on their ideas, play with theircreations, share their ideas and creations with others,reflect on their experiences – all of which leads them toimagine new ideas and new projects (see Figure 1).
In going through this process, kindergarten students
develop and refine their abilities as creative thinkers. They
learn to develop their own ideas, try them out, test theboundaries, experiment with alternatives, get input fromothers – and, perhaps most significantly, generate newideas based on their experiences. In reality, the steps in theprocess are not as distinct or sequential as indicated in the
diagram. Imagining, creating, playing, sharing, andreflecting are mixed together in many different ways. But
the key elements are always there, in one form or another.

*

Apologies to Robert Fulghum (1986). Fulghum’s bestselling book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in
Kindergarten focused on what children learn inkindergarten, and why those lessons remain important for
the rest of their lives. This paper focuses on how children
learn in kindergarten, and why kindergarten-stylelearning serves as a useful model for learners of all ages.

Some of the most creative artists and inventors of the 20th
century credit their kindergarten experiences with laying
the foundation for their later success [1].
If this learning approach has been so successful inkindergarten, why hasn’t it been applied in other parts ofthe educational system? One reason, I believe, is a lack ofappreciation for the importance of helping young people
develop as creative thinkers. Another reason has to do withthe availability of appropriate media and technologies.
Wooden blocks and finger paint are great for students
working on kindergarten projects and learning kindergarten
concepts (like number, shape, size, and color). But as
students get older, they want and need to work on moreadvanced projects and learn more advanced concepts.
Wooden blocks and finger paint won’t suffice. If older
students are going to learn through the kindergarten
approach, they need different types of tools, media, andmaterials [12].

Figure 1: The kindergarten approach to learningThis is where, in my opinion, digital technologies can playa transformational role in education. I believe that digitaltechnologies, if properly designed and supported, canextend the kindergarten approach, so that learners of allages can continue to learn in the kindergarten style – and,in the process, continue to develop as creative thinkers.
My focus here is on what researchers have called “little c”
creativity – that is, creativity within one’s personal life –not “big C” Creativity that transforms the boundaries of an
entire discipline or domain. The goal is not to nurture thenext Mozart or Einstein, but to help everyone become morecreative in the ways they deal with everyday problems.
The rest of this paper is organized around the different
aspects of the kindergarten learning approach: Imagine,
Create, Play, Share, Reflect, and back to Imagine. Eachsection discusses strategies for designing new technologies

that encourage and support kindergarten-style learning,building on the success of traditional kindergarten
materials and activities, but extending to older learners, inhopes of helping them continue to develop as creative
thinkers.
IMAGINE

Consider the most popular kindergarten materials: blocks
for building, crayons for drawing, dolls for role-playing,tiles for making geometric patterns. All of these materials
are designed to encourage a child’s imagination. The
materials do not over-constrain or over-determine. Children
with different interests and different learning styles can all
use the same materials, but each in his or her own personalway.
In developing technologies for older learners, we try toachieve a similar effect. Our guiding principle is “manypaths, many styles” – that is, to develop technologies thatcan be used along many different paths, by children withmany different styles. Too often, educational technologies
are overly constrained, such as tutoring software forteaching algebra, or simulation software for modelingplanetary motion in the solar system. Our goal is to provide
tools that can be used in multiple ways, leaving more room
for children’s imaginations.
When my research group developed Cricket technology,
for example, we explicitly tried to broaden the range of
projects that children could create [15]. Crickets are small
programmable devices, small enough to fit in the palm of achild’s hand. Children can plug motors, lights, sensors, andother electronic blocks into a Cricket, then program theircreations to spin, light up, and play music. Children haveused Crickets to make a wide range of imaginative
creations. For example, a group of girls at an after-school
center in Boston used Crickets and craft materials to create
an interactive garden, with flowers that danced andchanged colors when you clapped your hands. At aworkshop in Hong Kong, a 12-year-old boy created awearable jukebox that played different songs when you
inserted different coins, and an 11-year-old girl added
lights to her boots and programmed them to turn different
colors based on the pace of her walk, as measured by
sensors that she attached to her boots (see Figure 2).
Cricket kits are similar, in many ways, to the Mindstorms
robotics kits developed by the LEGO toy company, incollaboration with my research group. But there areimportant differences. While Mindstorms kits are designed
especially for making robots, Cricket kits are designed tosupport a diverse range of projects combining art andtechnology. Cricket kits include not only LEGO bricks andmotors but also a collection of arts-and-craft materials,
colored lights, and a sound-box for playing sound effects
and music. By providing a broader range of materials, we
hoped to encourage a broader range of projects – and spark
the imaginations of a broader range of children. In
particular, we aimed to encourage broader participation

among girls. Even with strong efforts to increase female
participation, only 30% of the participants in LEGO
robotics competitions are girls [9]. In Cricket activities atmuseums and after-school centers, participation has beenmuch more balanced among boys and girls [16].
As we develop new technologies for children, our hope isthat children will continually surprise themselves (andsurprise us too) as they explore the space of possibilities.
When we created Crickets, we didn’t imagine that children
would use them to measure their speed on rollerblades, orto create a machine for polishing and buffing theirfingernails. To support and encourage this diversity, we
explicitly include elements and features that can be used inmany different ways. The design challenge is to develop
features specific enough so that children can quickly learn
how to use them, but general enough so that children cancontinue to imagine new ways to use them [14].

Figure 2: Projects from a Cricket workshop
CREATE

Create is at the root of creative thinking. If we want
children to develop as creative thinkers, we need to provide
them with more opportunities to create.
Friedrich Froebel understood this idea when he opened theworld’s first kindergarten in 1837. Froebel filled his
kindergarten with physical objects (such as blocks, beads,
and tiles) that children could use for building, designing,and creating. These objects became known as Froebel’s
Gifts. Froebel carefully designed his Gifts so that children,as they played and constructed with the Gifts, would learn
about common patterns and forms in nature.
In effect, Froebel was designing for designers – hedesigned objects that enabled children in his kindergarten
to do their own designing. Froebel’s work can be viewed as
an early example of Seymour Papert’s constructionist
approach to education [11], which aims to engage learners
in personally-meaningful design experiences.
In creating his Gifts, Froebel was limited by the materials
available in the early 19th century. With today’s electronicand digital materials, we can create new types of
construction kits, expanding Froebel’s kindergarten
approach to older students working on more advanced
projects and learning more advanced ideas. With
Mindstorms and Crickets, for example, children can create
dynamic, interactive constructions – and, in the process,learn concepts related to sensing, feedback, and control.

I view Mindstorms and Crickets as Froebel’s Gifts for the
21st century, using new technologies to extend thekindergarten approach to learners of all ages.
Unfortunately, they are the exception rather than the rule intoday’s toy stores. Most electronic toys are not in the spiritof Froebel’s Gifts, since they do not provide children with
opportunities to design or create. Most of today’s electronic
toys are pre-programmed by the toy company. Children
cannot design or create with these toys, they can onlyinteract with them; for example: hold the doll’s hand andits mouth turns to a smile, sing to the doll and it starts
dancing. I am sure that designers and engineers at the toy
companies learn a great deal while creating these toys, but I
doubt that children learn very much while interacting withthe toys.
PLAY

Piaget famously proclaimed that “Play is the work ofchildren.” Certainly, play has been an integral part of the
traditional kindergarten approach to learning, and most
adults recognize the importance of providing young
children with opportunity to play. But as children growolder, educators and parents often talk about playdismissively, referring to activities as “just play,” as if play
is separate and even in opposition to learning.
In my mind, play and learning can and should be intimately
linked. Each, at its best, involves a process ofexperimentation, exploration, and testing the boundaries[19]. Unfortunately, many recent attempts to link play andlearning are at odds with the kindergarten approach to playand learning. Consider the recent focus on “edutainment”
products. Creators of edutainment products tend to vieweducation as a bitter medicine that needs the sugar-coatingof entertainment to become palatable. They provide
entertainment as a reward if you are willing to suffer
through a little education. Or they boast that you will haveso much fun using their products that you won’t evenrealize that you are learning – as if learning were the most
unpleasant experience in the world.
I also have a problem with the word “edutainment” itself.
When people think about “education” and “entertainment,”
they tend to think of them as services that someone else
provides for you. Studios, directors, and actors provide youwith entertainment; schools and teachers provide you witheducation. Now, edutainment companies try to provide youwith both. In all of these cases, you are viewed as a passive
recipient. If we are trying to help children develop as
creative thinkers, it is more productive to focus on “play”
and “learning” (things you do) rather than “entertainment”
and “education” (things that others provide for you).
Spurred by the extraordinary popularity of video games inyouth culture, a growing number of researchers have begun
examining how and what children learn as they play video
games [4]. There is no doubt that children learn manythings when they play video games, and children exhibit adeep sense of engagement that is all too rare in schoolclassrooms. But, with a few notable exceptions, such as the
Sim series games and Shaffer’s “epistemic games” [18],currently-available video games do not support
kindergarten-style learning. Even games that engage
children in strategic thinking and problem solving provide
few opportunities for children to design and create, a key
ingredient in the kindergarten approach to learning.
How can we use new technologies to integrate play, design,and learning? One way is to provide children with theopportunity to design their own games. In her book Minds
in Play, Yasmin Kafai [7] documents how elementaryschool students become more creative thinkers as they
design their own games. More recently, my research groupteamed up with Kafai to develop a new programming
language, called Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu), thatenables children to create not only games but alsointeractive stories, animations, music, and art [13]. In
designing Scratch, one of our key goals was “tinkerability”– that is, we wanted to make it easy for children to
playfully put together fragments of computer programs, trythem out, take them apart, and recombine them. To create
programs in Scratch, you simply snap together graphicalblocks, much like LEGO bricks or puzzle pieces (seeFigure 3). You don’t need to worry about where to put
semi-colons or square brackets: the blocks are designed to
fit together only in ways that make sense, so there are no“syntax errors” as in traditional programming languages.
You can even add new blocks as the program is running, so
it is easy to “play with your code,” testing out new ideas
incrementally and iteratively.

Figure 3: Scratch programming blocks
SHARE

At an educational-technology workshop a few years ago,participants were asked which of the following learning
experiences had been most difficult for them:o Learning to ride a bicycleo Learning to write a computer programo Learning to share
An overwhelming majority selected “learning to share.”
Sharing has always been an important part of the creative
process in kindergarten, but the ability to share andcollaborate has generally received less emphasis in later
years of schooling. That has started to change recently, as aresult of several independent but converging trends, all ofwhich are pushing schools to pay more attention to sharing
and collaboration:

•

•

•

Business leaders and policy makers, noting thatteamwork is more important in today’s workplacethan ever before, have encouraged schools to put
more emphasis on collaboration to help prepare
students for their future jobs
Educational researchers, building on foundational
work of Vygotsky, have focused more attention on
the social nature of learning and strategies forsupporting communities of learners [8]The proliferation of interactive technologies andwidespread access to the Internet has led to aflourishing of what Henry Jenkins [6] calls a“participatory culture” – in which people actively
create and share ideas and media with one anotheron blogs and collaborative websites like Flickr(for photographs) and YouTube (for videos).

Our Scratch programming language aims to build on thesetrends, making sharing an integral part of the programming
process. Even in today’s participatory culture, very few
people are creating and sharing programmable media (suchinteractive characters and interactive games). While online
worlds like Second Life make it relatively easy to createand share graphical objects, making those objects dynamic
and interactive requires some form of programming, andtraditional programming languages have had a steep
learning curve. The difficulty in sharing programmablemedia has been one of the critical limiting factors inprevious efforts to engage children in programming. In a
critique of the Logo programming language, for example,
Marvin Minsky [10] noted that Logo has a great grammar
but not much literature. Whereas young writers are often
inspired by the great works of literature that they read,
there is no analogous library of great Logo projects toinspire young programmers – and no outlets where young
programmers can share their Logo projects with others.
To overcome these limitations, the Scratch programming
language is interwoven into a website that provides both
inspiration and audience. Children can try out projects
created by others, re-use and modify code from thoseprojects, and post their own projects for others to try. The
goal is a collaborative community in which children are
constantly building on and extending one another’s workwith programmable media. We have found that
construction and community go hand-in-hand in thecreative process: children become more engaged in theconstruction process when they are able to share theirconstructions with others in a community, and children
become more engaged with communities when they areable to share constructions (not just chat) with others
within those communities.
REFLECTThe kindergartens in Reggio Emilia, Italy, are a mecca forresearchers and educators interested in kindergarten.
People making the pilgrimage to the Reggio schoolsinvariably come away impressed with the organization of
the space, the availability of diverse materials forexperimentation and creative expression, the support ofcollaborative activities. But for me, the most impressive
part of the Reggio kindergartens is the way they encouragechildren to reflect on what they are doing. Children in
Reggio are constantly producing drawings and diagrams as
they work on projects. Teachers use these artifacts toengage the children in discussing and reflecting on theirdesign process and thinking process. The classroom walls
are filled with children’s drawings, with teachers’
annotations, providing children a way to look back atearlier stages of their work.

We try to apply these ideas to ourselves, in my researchgroup, as we develop new technologies like Crickets and
Scratch. We never expect to get things right on the first try.
We are constantly critiquing, adjusting, modifying,revising. The ability to develop rapid prototypes iscritically important in this process. We find thatstoryboards are not enough; we want functioning
prototypes. Initial prototypes don’t need to work perfectly,
just well enough for us (and our users) to play with, toexperiment with, to talk about. We’ll build a prototype,play with it ourselves, watch some children play with it,talk with them about it, talk among ourselves about it – andthen quickly build a new prototype.

Such reflection is a critical part of the creative process, but
all too often overlooked in the classroom. In recent years,
schools have adopted more “hands-on” design activities,
but the focus is usually on the creation of an artifact rather
than critical reflection on the ideas that guided the design,or strategies for refining and improving the design, orconnections to underlying scientific concepts and related
real-world phenomena.

When children use our technologies, we encourage them togo through the same process. It doesn’t matter whether they
are creating an animated story or building an interactive
sculpture. In all cases, our message is the same: iterate,
iterate, and iterate again. Time, of course, is essential inthis process. If children have enough time to go through thecycle only once, they’ll miss out on the most important partof the creative process.

As we introduce new technological tools like Crickets and
Scratch, we make a special effort to engage children inreflecting on the process of design. We explicitly talk about
the spiral of imagine-create-play-share-reflect-imagine, andlook for ways for children to use and communicate theseideas. At the end of a two-day workshop using our Cricket
technology, for example, my colleague Bakhtiar Mikhak
asked the 12-year-old participants to write down “tips” forchildren who would be starting a similar workshop the nextday. The children provided the following tips:

The process of becoming a creative thinker is itself an
iterative process. Historically, kindergarten has provided agood foundation for creative thinking. Think ofkindergarten as the first time through the creative-thinking
cycle. Unfortunately, after leaving kindergarten, children
have not had the opportunity to iterate on what they learnedin kindergarten, to continue to develop as creative thinkers.
By extending the kindergarten approach, we hope toprovide opportunities for learners of all ages to build on
their kindergarten experiences, iteratively refining theirabilities as creative thinkers throughout their lives.

Start simple
Work on things that you likeIf you have no clue what to do, fiddle aroundDon't be afraid to experiment
Find a friend to work with, share ideas!
It’s OK to copy stuff (to give you an idea)
Keep your ideas in a sketch book
Build, take apart, rebuild
Lots of things can go wrong, stick with it
These tips capture some of the core elements of thekindergarten approach to learning. We see it as animportant indicator of success when participants in ourworkshops not only practice a kindergarten approach tolearning but also understand and articulate the core ideas
underlying the approach.
IMAGINE

Iteration is at the heart of the creative process. The processof Imagine, Create, Play, Share, and Reflect inevitably
leads to new ideas – leading back to Imagine and the
beginning of a new cycle..

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank members of the Lifelong
Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab forcollaborating on the technologies and ideas discussed inthis paper. This research has received financial support
from the LEGO Company, the Intel Foundation, theNational Science Foundation (ITR-0325828), and the MIT
Media Laboratory’s research consortia.
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