Toy learning is very right-brained, all about patterns and relationships. Most classroom learning is left-brained, all about labels and logic and rules. There are schools who are finally realizing just how much of the right brain we leave untapped in our schooling process other than the Fine Arts programs, and are now starting to incorporate more discovery in the regular academics.

Neurologists are also beginning to see how previously labeled “disabled or difficult learners” are often right-brained children in a left-brained school. Exercises (both mental and physical) designed to help reconnect the right & left hemispheres of their brains are proving to be quite successful in helping these kids adapt better to school.

It’s been interesting being part of public schools as they transition from “voc ed” to “career tech”. It’s a dynamic where some well-meaning parents and teachers want dearly to bring back the “woodshop” of the past so their kids can have the same fond memories as they did versus the forward thinkers who are excited by all the crazy stuff we can now make on the desktop. 

Back in my high school years I was advised NOT to take any voc ed if I was going on to 4 year college, ie., the future great scientists of the world don’t need to know how to make a bookshelf or door frame. All my making happened in spite of school, not because of it. Ironically in college I found the greatest enjoyment from doing my own science experiments using my own fabricated lab setups. Now I teach two robotics courses as well as my science classes, and my room is lined with soldering stations, 3d printer, motors from disassembled small appliances, etc … and woodshop has been reduced down to one period of carpentry and frustrated parents. We need to fix this chaotic transition, but there are no easy answers in our public school system – our emphasis on multiple-choice test scores, our tradition of community-responsive schools, our belief that “if I learned well this way, then you need to learn this way too” (in spite of our changing world).

Everyone … we’ve got to infect everyone with the maker ethos.
 

I’m not saying that this is the only approach to a toy based curriculum – I’m just suggesting that it is one approach that is not open ended and does have knowable outcomes.