of roots and wings

I was never a creative kid – let’s just say that I needed lots of help in this area when I was young. For example, I used to dread coloring books. I wouldn’t know what to do with them. I much preferred the pre-colored coloring books – the types that were already colored, just that the colors were masked. All I had to do was to dip my paintbrush in water, and ‘paint’ over the image outlines and voila! The colors appeared. Almost magically! I loved discovering colors like that. (perhaps these types of coloring books fueled my intellectual passion for discovery learning! But that is a separate Gears story).

I therefore could never really do much with Lego bricks in my earlier days. They scared me. They stoked my insecurity. While other kids were busy with their Lego bricks, building people, helicopters, cities … I was left feeling bad about myself because all I could manage was a vertical big block which I called a house. Hey – these were just bricks of different colors, shapes and sizes! How was I to know what to do with them? Like I said – I was never a creative kid.

Imagine my delight when my mother bought me my first Playmobil set. Ah – ready-made figurines! Ready-made houses and parts of houses. Ready-made tools. Ready-made automobiles. Everything was ready-made! And I could mix-and-match! I could take the headgear off one figurine, and fit it to another. I could take the wheels off a truck, and try to fix them on a boat that had paddles. I could remove one figurine from a bulldozer, and replace it with another. I loved Playmobil! I started to create scenes with the Playmobil characters. I began to experiment with different combinations of characters and elements to create elaborate scenes. I began to tell stories about the characters. As I was no longer bogged down by my inability to create, I began to let my imagination run wild. My stories developed into mini-sagas. I got my mother to buy me more “sets” of Playmobil, and I merged stories from different eras into epic drama stories.

Playmobil sparked my penchant for experimentation, discovery, narratives and story-telling. Cognitively, what Playmobil did for me was that it removed the stress and the cognitive burden of having to create something from nothing. Before Playmobil, I was stuck at the starting point – I could not create anything from scratch. But I have since moved on from my insecurities. Having removed the stumbling block, Playmobil empowered me to develop other aspects of my cognitive ability – to experiment, to discover, to imagine, to engage, to postulate, to dream.

In his essay “Gears of my Childhood”, Papert put forth his thesis that “what gears could not do, computers might.” In my Gear-language, my thesis is “what Playmobil could not do, computers might.” Playmobil is like widgets and embeddable elements in a Web2.0 world. Computers provide the “ready-made” tools and characters which empower children to create. They provide the diversity of resources to help anyone move on from being stuck at any starting point.

I still can’t draw to save my life. Give me basic building blocks, or colors, or paint, and I still can’t create anything noteworthy. But put technology in my hands, and I’ll paint you a different picture. Feel free to check out the rest of this website. My gears have served me well!