Why Playful Learning?

By creating experiences that are joyful, meaningful, actively engaging, iterative, and socially interactive, play-based learning promotes healthy child development. Playful learning also enables students to acquire academic content more deeply as well as to develop executive function and social-emotional skills, say researchers at the LEGO Foundation.

Student 'voice and choice' is critical to student engagement, using 'low floor, high ceiling' technology tools that facilitates students' meaningful self-expression.

NSTA: STEM Education Teaching and Learning
https://www.nsta.org/nstas-official-positions/stem-education-teaching-and-learning

" ....Modern STEM education promotes not only skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, higher-order thinking, design, and inference, but also behavioral competencies such as perseverance, adaptability, cooperation, organization, and responsibility (NSTC 2018).

STEM is not a single subject, and it should not replace other subjects. Students need to learn the same concepts and skills in science and mathematics as they did before, and how to solve problems through engineering design challenges. STEM experiences must be connected and support the goals of state science standards, as well as those established in A Framework for K–12 Science Education and articulated in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS),by providing students the opportunity to grasp and experience the relevancy of what they are learning.

STEM is also not a curriculum, but rather a way of organizing and delivering instruction. It is not another “ingredient” in the lesson “soup,” but the recipe for helping learners apply their knowledge and skills, collaborate with their peers, and understand the relevance of what they are learning. This does not de-emphasize the teaching of core ideas, but rather gives students the ability to know how they can apply the content they are learning....

STEM education programs should be grounded in the tenets of constructivism supported by the findings of three decades of cognitive science. Integrated STEM education occurs when

• learning is viewed as an active, constructive process, and not a receptive one;

• student motivation and beliefs are integral to cognition;

• social interaction is fundamental to cognitive development; and

• knowledge, strategies, and expertise are contextualized in the learning experience...."