School-Wide Design Activities to Encourage Play |
Cultivate a Design Mindset Through PlayExploratory spaces, such as makerspaces, woodshops and foods rooms in middle schools are a key component of the middle school experience (Bishop & Harrison, 2021). It is in these spaces that tinkering, play, and discovery live and breathe. Students are provided with these key opportunities to explore materials that are not often available in traditional classrooms, and as such they are exposed to new opportunities to tinker and grow as learners. These spaces are critical for middle school students, as they introduce them to skills and ideas that they can apply to other areas of their learning. Instead of adding fractions with pen and paper, students are provided with the hands-on opportunity to work with fractions in meaningful ways, such as doubling recipes and measuring wood. It is in these spaces that learning comes alive and connects to the why that middle school students want answered about their learning (Bishop & Harrison, 2021; D. F. Brown & Knowles, 2014).
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