Schools today place a heavy emphasis on sitting still, listening to lectures and memorizing information. What about creativity? What about interacting with the world around them? When children build and create, they are actively engaged in exploring new concepts firsthand.

Researchers from Harvard are scientifically exploring how building and creating affects children’s brains. The initiative, called Project Zero, has explored child and adult learning processes since 1967.

The most recent work of investigating what happens when children build and create is being conducted in public and private schools in Oakland, California. Researchers have teamed up with 15 participating teachers who meet every six weeks so the researchers can give teachers specific activities to incorporate into the lessons they already teach. Then teachers report back on classroom behavior and other observations gathered through surveys and conversations.

One example of an activity researchers asked teachers to include was to ask students to examine an object, looking at all of its separate parts first and then how all the parts fit together as a whole. One elementary school teacher had the children explore objects in the room, such as tennis shoes. A high school technology teacher asked students to examine the inner workings of a Google Doc. Some teachers asked the students to re-purpose the object so it performed a new function.

The Harvard researchers are excited to see the end results of this branch of Project Zero, a three-year project that began at the beginning of the school year in 2012. By the end of it, they expected to not only have academic research regarding how learning improves when children build and create, but to also understand what works and what doesn’t work in a classroom setting.

Give your children a chance to build and create at home with games and building blocks from LiveLoveLearnToys. Then contact LiveLoveLearn for more information.

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