Playful Learning: A Hands-On Seminar
LEGO as a Mediating Artifact

Friday, April 16, 2004

Cathy Helgoe Fett, GSE '84, Senior Project Manager, LEGO Educational Division, Marketing, Research, & Development

A rich collection of hands-on materials can enhance learning in a variety of ways. Participants in this seminar built models using LEGO bricks, gears, and other materials designed for young children. The discussion focused on why mediating artifacts are important to learning and how peers and teachers scaffold learning in this type of mediated environment.

Playful Learning: The Groups Open their Boxes of LEGOs

Form a small group of 3-4 people, choose one of the LEGO construction sets, and build something--anything you want--but it has to move! --Cathy Helgoe Fett

Playful Learning: Getting Started

What allows learning to take place? or enhances it? "Scaffolding can come from a task, an expert, or materials.

Playful Learning: Team Work

Learning can be expanded as a result of interaction with a more expert person.The difference between what a child can do on her own, and what she can do in interaction with a more expert user, is Vygotsky's "zone of proximal development."

Playful Learning: In The Zone