Toolbox vs. Maker Kit

We don’t have anything against maker kits, they are cool, we have a subscription. MindGardens seeks to add something to this maker-movement that is missing in many of the grade school programs. Typically a child will assemble a kit, and be introduced to some good science concepts. All of the troubleshooting and design is done far away, and the experience is of assembling and interacting with the product. If our children are equipped with tools, materials, and general ideas, they can experience the joys and frustrations of building something from scratch, designed in their imagination and worked into reality with their own hands.

This isn’t a new idea. In fact, handicraft and constructing toys has been the way children grew up from the beginning (as in the beginning of civilization) to somewhere in the 50’s when it was realized that profit could be made by mass producing plastic things for children to occupy themselves with. Our civilization was not built by people who grew up opening plastic wrapped toys, rather by people who grew up using tools and trying things. My own children go through about 10 minutes of withdrawal when we remove the screens, then the creativity starts, and it’s wonderful.

From Alice Thomson’s article “Help Kids Kick Social Media Addiction”

“The most sought-after private school in Silicon Valley, the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, bans technical devices for the under-11s and teaches the children of eBay, Apple, Uber and Google staff to make go-karts, knit and cook.”