Object To Think With...

My “object to think with” has been with me for 45 years.  It has been plucked from boxes headed to Goodwill at the last minute, and moved across the county numerous times.  My own children played with it and now are driving their own cars…yet it remains.

This special toy from my childhood is the 1972 Playskool Take- Apart Car with tools and people. This toy provided me with many hours of screwdriver-and-wrench assembly experience. The axles were large screws. The headlights and taillights used smaller screws and nuts, as did the wooden sides of the car. One of the trickier parts was getting the tabs for the hood and trunk in the holes when assembling the sides.  The interesting thing is that this toy came out in the 1970’s when toys were being marketed as very gender specific, I knew that this toy was “meant” for boys, but I wanted it anyway.

According to Papert (as cited by Kafai, 2006), physical objects play a central role in the knowledge construction process.  When I began playing with this physical object,  it was something that I did with my Dad, as I recall I also did Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys with my Dad.  This brings back sweet emotions about time spent with him. I enjoyed building and these toys gave me a place to practice and experience building.  I liked working with the tools and having a sense of accomplishment every time I put the car together on my own (even though I rebuilt the same car over and over). Kafai (2006) writes that “Papert’s constructionism views learning as building relationships between old and new knowledge in interactions with others, while creating artifacts of social relevance.” These ‘old’ experiences with my Playskool car may be what helped me later in life to have confidence in learning to change a tire and check my oil, use my imagination, and explore how things are made. I was never afraid to take things apart and put them back together again, or build birdhouses and candleholders in woodshop as a middle school student.  As an adult, I enjoy volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, could this be a lingering result of my early exploration?  

Maybe the most important lesson I was learning was that that girls can build and they can play with cars!  It went against the dominant messages that society was constructing for me at that time. 

Today, many toys have evolved in ways that allow for more options in building and creating.  This toy was great at the time, but very structured in the ways that it can be built.  It is made for consuming and following directions not creating.  This toy, followed the canonical style, as it was abstract and rule driven( Turkle & Papert, 1992). There is a right way and a wrong way to put the car together and it won’t work if constructed differently than the preplanned way. 

In the future, I hope for toys that don’t have a predetermined structure, rather, that they might allow for the diversity of children’s thoughts and experiences and allow them to design and create their own products and ways to approach the tasks.  Turkle and Papert (1992) write that equal access to even the most basic elements of computation requires an epistemological pluralism, accepting the validity of multiple ways of knowing and thinking.  This acceptance for multiple ways of thinking and knowing should not be limited to computation and subjects of science, it needs to spread to toys, classrooms, social sciences, art, music, and computer designs.  This type of innovation could produce what Papert and Harel (1991) call  “radical change in how children learn.”

Kafai, Y. B. (2006). Constructionism. In R. K. Sawyer (Ed.) Cambridge Handbook of Learning Sciences. Cambridge MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 35-46.

Papert, S. (1991). Situating Constructionism. In I. Harel & S. Papert (Eds.), Constructionism. Norwood, NJ:Ablex Publishing Corporation. 

Turkle, S., & Papert, S. (1992). Epistemological pluralism and the revaluation of the concrete.   Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 11(1), 3-33.