MIT Students Are Redesigning How Kindergartners Learn to Think Creatively — and It’s Working

You might see something that doesn’t quite fit the contemporary picture of early education if you walk into a kindergarten classroom in Cambridge or, increasingly, in a small district in Iowa. No tiny easels with tablets on them. No reward chirping phonics apps. Rather, a young child sits on the floor with a deck of tiny wooden cards and flips them over one by one in an attempt to identify the pattern her teacher has just laid out. The child is unaware that the cards are binary, consisting of ones and zeros. She simply recognizes the intrigue of the game.

The game and its components originated from an MIT Media Lab project that has gradually developed into something more bizarre and ambitious than the majority of ed-tech startups. It’s called Learning Beautiful, and its creator, Kim Smith Claudel, who completed her master’s degree at MIT in 2017, has spent almost ten years developing tactile, screenless tools designed to introduce computer science concepts to kids ages three to nine. A binary tree was constructed using wood that was sourced sustainably. canvas and cork pixel boards. pieces that demand to be touched, snap together, and fall apart.

The contradiction at the core of this is difficult to ignore. These days, the organization most closely linked to screens and software is making some of the most intelligent arguments against giving them to young children. Here, the old MIT motto, mens et manus, or “mind and hand,” has taken on almost literal meaning. The team appears to think that keeping a four-year-old’s hands occupied with an unplugged activity is the best way to prepare her for a computational future.

The project started in 2013 when Smith Claudel started collaborating with Sepandar Kamvar, a Media Lab professor at the time. Eventually, their group started what they called “Wildflower Schools,” which are tiny, open-source, Montessori-inspired spaces dispersed throughout Cambridge that are intended to blur the boundaries between classroom and research lab. In one of them, Smith Claudel worked with children on art projects for a year. She claims that was her Montessori crash course. Additionally, it appears to have permanently altered her perspective on learning, which now views it more as a gradual, sensory negotiation between a child and her surroundings than as the transmission of knowledge.

The materials seem surprisingly straightforward. When a toddler notices that the shapes don’t quite match, they try a different combination after picking up a piece of the binary tree and fitting it into another. Sorting, comparing, and creating mental models are all examples of computational thinking, according to Smith Claudel. It’s still unclear if that will result in better programmers ten years later. Long-term data is still scarce. However, early indications—such as a collaboration last fall with an Iowa school district where 250 teachers received simultaneous training—indicate that the concept is more popular than detractors might anticipate.

All of this is part of a larger cultural argument. For years, Mitchel Resnick, a longtime professor at Media Lab whose book Lifelong Kindergarten lurks in the background of Learning Beautiful’s thinking, has warned that American kindergartens are turning into depressing first-grade rehearsals. Worksheets are in. Paint with your fingers. Until you think about it for a while, Resnick’s argument that the rest of the school should resemble the kindergartens of a generation ago rather than the other way around, seems almost sentimental.

Currently, the company has trained about 500 teachers and sold over 2,000 sets of materials. Since the materials rely as much on touch and sound as sight, it has had early discussions with educators working with blind children and schools in nations without dependable electricity. It remains to be seen if Learning Beautiful will become a mainstay in American classrooms or remain a charming Cambridge experiment. However, there’s a sense that something older and quieter is being smuggled back into the room as you watch the wooden pieces click into place in tiny hands.⁖※⃻⃹⃎