....she came to the distinction that there was a difference between exploration and play. That joint exploration, what the kids were doing is what does this thing do, how does it operate? Play was taking what these things can do and what can I do with them to take it further, so I think that's an important distinction.
An inquiry allow people get lip service to exploration, but they really give very little time to it. And play happens when you start taking the things, like in design activities, and starting to put together something that's going to work.
My children's book series is really different from most other science book series. A lot science books for kids, it's a different activity on every page.
And what I tried to do is stay with the same phenomenon through the whole set of activities using a limited set of materials.
And showing that with those limited set of materials, you could do a variety of different explorations and experiments. And along the way that would prepare an experiential background for some basic science concepts. And that was related to my pedagogical approach, I think you need to spend time with the same phenomena or the same kind of artifact of technology to understand it.
If you start off with something that's open-ended and narrows down, you can open it up again by introducing new materials. But this is what I call manageable complexity.
In design projects, there's exploration of the materials and possibilities of different kinds of designs. But as you move along, the way design challenge is formulated, you're getting more and more constrained on what you do. And you're playing around with just a few variables and making, finally at the end, minor adjustments to get to some kind of final prototype.
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The other characters that could play is not totally open-ended. If you think about games, all games have boundaries and rules. It wouldn't be a game of it didn't have boundaries and rules. So in design activities, the boundaries are the materials, and the design challenge. And the student or kid or adult are supposed to work within those boundaries and that's part of the fun and excitement of what can I do just within this given situation. People might find that frustrating but the whole idea of play is to work within a certain set of boundaries and see what you can do.