Childhood innovations

Continuing the discussion from Week 1 Activity:

This has me thinking about experiences as a child whenever "bored" didn't seem like an option. This reminded me of when I used to watch television on mute with my brothers while a different television station's sound-only broadcast played from a radio. This sent us into wild cackling at times. It was more just play back then, but we ran through different cycles of the spiral and through this and other play became more and more interested in things like music, video and electronics.

I also remember setting up a circus once, mine was with the pet cats. We found that the cats would leap and bound all sorts of tricks on and through chairs around the dining room table and through mazes of furniture if we dangled toys across desired paths.

I know that childhood resourcefulness is kind of a fairly broad topic, but what are some other thoughts and memories related to innovations in play?

Well is diffcult really talk about innovation in a sense. I mean with a board games, for instance you have some rules and regulation to respect, therefore or you change regulations otherwise everybody would play exactly the same, in the same way.
On the contrary, all sort of toys, sold, available ready toys, leave the child free to use them, even if the child is always a little passive.
Every toy to much sophisticated leave the player too passive.
While, it is my opinion, the games and playing are exactly the opposite: is something dynamic completely, not passive.
My point is that any way of playing or any sort of game decided by the fantasy of the child can be innovative, but innovative in his intimate growth.

I agree with you,I think that children need to be creative thinkers.They need to use their imagination with simple things.Teachers need to teach chldren that they could use any kind of material in order to be creative.Not only using expensive toys or machines

What influenced me as a child? Well I can remember that I enjoyed playing with Lego and toy cars! I loved playing with the hot wheels race track. But what inspired me? Not sure I think I became inspired with technology when I first started playing with a Comadoor 64 and attempted to write a computer game via a cassette tape! (other attempts at coding was in 1980 learning basic).
Other things that inspired me was space and flight! I remember making a book using cuttings from magazines and news papers about space travel and the solar system, now we can use Flipboard with a few taps of the iPad!
Other fun projects, made a chess board, coffee table and a magazine rack! Building model aircraft using balsa wood, then trying to fly them!

Legos were definitely a great kickstarter for imagination. Building the predefined set ups were great, but the real fun came in with the variations.

I even got inspired by some TV shows were the cars would have the ability to transform at the flick of a switch. I would spend hours pouring over all my hundreds of little pieces to find things that could flip out and hide away in the "transformers" shell of my new vehicle.

I would try and reenact the things I saw on TV and computer games.

I think the resourcefulness of trying to "swede" the stories with my own tools, by implication was grounds for innovation. Having a brother or cousin who could share in these experiences meant that I had to verbalize all my ideas.

@ChrispyBacon This reminds me of when I was young and playing with my brothers. I like what you said about having someone to share the experiences with. I place a lot of value in the power of collaborative innovation.

One memory I have when I was young involved action figures. We had a small collection of action figures that we shared, and one day we were playing near a tree. I forget who got us started doing this, but one of us had an idea to make them "parachute" from tree limbs. They didn't actually have any parachutes and we didn't even tie cloth or anything, the parachutes were entirely imaginary and they just kind of free fell as we knocked them out of the tree. Then one of us had an idea to fetch the long rubber bands from a pouch of "punch balloons" we had in the house:

We cut a few of them to double their length and tied them to branches and to our action figures and decided to pretend they were rappelling from helicopters on missions. This was fun for awhile, and then another one of us decided to place small toys on the ground as targets.

After playing around with how to get our action figures to jump down and either knock over or pick up objects, one of the other kids in the neighborhood who had joined us came up with a few rules and ways to score/lose points. What started as one child's simple play turned into a fairly sophisticated game after only a few collaborative iterations.