Creative Learning Activities

Short introduction video to this week's activity:

Activity:

Read Seymour Papert’s essay on Gears of My Childhood and write a short description about an object from your childhood that interested and influenced you. Post your response here by clicking on the Reply button below.

For inspiration here are some additional examples from Sherry Turkle’s books Evocative Objects (2007) and Falling for Science (2008): Cello, Knots, Stars, Blocks ...

Pro Tip:

You can add an image or drawing to your post.

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Continuing the discussion from Week 1: Creative Learning:

I have done my activity of the week. You can read it here: glass

@tonymanzano This is an exciting blog post. I am very interested in different advances in stained glass. It sounds like you had many unique learning experiences with glass as a child, your blog post sends the imagination flying.

@James_B You can find an excellent video training on stained-glass on this site http://www.monkeysee.com/play/5783-how-to-make-a-stained-glass-suncatcher. Its a kit of 12 videos online, that shows detailed explanations. You will be surprised

I cannot yet recall a gear of my childhood. In the meantime, let me link to a 2012 blogpost that involves an image of gears, http://wp.me/p1gwfa-rx. Like gears, you need to "align your questions and ideas, your aspirations, your ability to take or influence action, and your relationships with other people. These concepts can be shortened to head, heart, hands, and human connections.”

With yet another snow day and school cancellation, I took advantage of this new found time and completed this week essay. I decided for this course that I would create a Padlet wall to share my work and provide a place for my classmates to comments. Just click anywhere to comment on the wall, I would love it if you did! Or you can go directly to the essay on my Google drive.

Thank you for reminding me to think of this! I've posted my short vingette to my 17-Mar-2014 entry to share with the kids I teach as well as with you guys.

http://amicalive.blogspot.com/

In many ways, the introduction to a toy sand pail and trowel set changed how I looked at the world. I experienced a change in perception about how sand behaves, and experienced new thoughts about actions I could take to change my environment. I explored thinking about the physical world in different ways with different volumes and densities of sand, I played with wet and dry sand, and I began changing the end result by adding toys like action figures or other objects like seashells into the bottom and along the sides of the sand pail to add new designs, features and properties.

I also struggled with learning about how many efforts like sandcastles can change and even disappear due to other factors than my whims. While I could control many changes myself and I enjoyed playfully experimenting, I could not control the water, wind, and other people and pets playing in the same area on the beach. Even determined efforts to build moats or other defenses seemed to only slow or temporarily deter destructive elements seeming to work against my sandcastles, but by this stage in my many visits to the beach I had let go of some inability to cope with the ephemeral nature of time and a busy world shared with others.

While I struggled at first with attachment to environments I helped shape, I began to understand and accept that even dedicated projects can crumble or become damaged. This did not keep me from playing, however.

I know the topic of sandcastle toys have already been covered related to this topic and not just in LCL, but this had a profound impact on my childhood among my other favorite memories.

By David (Empty Bucket at Punta Del Este) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I experienced the inverse reaction.
I don't remember locking onto anything in my early years though I liked building "short-cut" things in my pre-teen years. My 9th grade year was especially exciting as we'd moved into a new house, and the previous owner - a builder - left behind a cache of riches. Unfortunately, my efforts were not validated or encouraged by anyone - least of all my 9th grade science teacher. Here's a post I wrote about it.

One of my earliest and most vivid toy memories was of my beloved Fisher Price Pop Corn Popper toy. I loved that damn thing and if I think about what it was that made me love it so much, it was the POP POP POP of the balls as they popped all over the place as I pushed and pulled that thing around the house. Why did I love that sound? I never thought about it much as a little kid, it was more visceral then. But I think about it now, and what I loved was the satisfaction that the sound gave me. It was like popping large bubble wrap but this was way before bubble wrap was invented (yeah, I'm old but I'm not that old!).

In my adulthood, I can now make the connection that the things I respond to most positively in life - be it work or play - are things that also give me that same feeling of satisfaction. It can be the perfection of the continuous shot of the Pharrell video, Happy, or it could be being at the beach at exactly the right time for the perfect sunset, or it could be finishing a 5-day learning event and knowing that everyone is taking something valuable and meaningful away with them. That stupid little toy made me a slave to satisfaction, man...whoa, I think I just blew my own mind...I need to sit down...

The other childhood toy that I was obsessed with for years after I graduated from the corn popper, was Tinker Toys. I would go through the instruction example sheet and make the stuff (except the fishing pole which I think is a red herring and impossible to make) and it was so unsatisfying to me. Once I'd run through all the examples, I'd just spend hours and hours playing with various ways to put together the pieces in new ways. I think I played with Tinker Toys for maybe 5-7 years without getting tired of it. It was an amazingly creative toy, and yeah, the word Tinker isn't lost on me as I'm writing this...

I read the Papert´s essay LCL1 and did a small reflection from my own childhood. So... here´s my Gears.

When I was 4, my ant gave me a piano toy as birthday present. She didn't know how much I would like the gift and pass all day long playing that little toy. She didn't know how much this would influence me to start learning classical piano 2 years late. In the beginning my parents didn't buy a real piano for me. It was very expensive and they were not sure that their child would go on with that, considering that I had first to learn a lot of exercises, posture, etc - not very motivating for most students. After one year, the piano teacher asked them to buy the instrument. I remember my mother asking: "Are you going to continue the studies? it's a very expensive thing to buy and give up.." I answered affirmatively. I studied piano, practicing everyday for many years after, many hours a day. Lucky of me that one day I receive that simple toy!

@debbyj18 wrote Learning doesn't happen when students aren't encouraged to demonstrate what they've learned. Especially when the teacher expects that the “demonstration” must look a particular way.

So important and well written. Thanks for the reminder in your blog post.

The toy that I became "focused" on as a child, was actually a toy that belonged to my older sister. She happened to have a white, stuffed dog that had a radio embedded into it. I would sit on her bed for hours and twist the "channel" knob to see what stations I could discover and how far it had to be turned before I lost one and found another. It also was the cause of much discourse between us because I would always leave it on and my sister would return to her room to find the batteries dead. I do think my parents saw my interest, because a few years later, they purchased a Radio Shack electronics learning board for me and I would spend hours developing my own connections and learning about series and parallel circuits. I think that these items really encouraged my inquisitive nature and tendency to "wonder" about the natural world.

I can’t recall a toy that affected my learning experience in particular, I loved soft toys (specially a little lamb that was my companion), scrabble, playing baseball so I loved that bat, and playing hopscotch, therefore a good piece of chalk was important and if it was a colour one, much better. However, I can mention an object that caused a impact on me: a left-handed tablet chair that my dad donated to my school. Prejudice about left-handed kids in Mexico in the sixties was a issue (my elder sister also left handed was forced to write with her right hand) so the fact that my dad gave the chair to the school meant a lot to me, perhaps because it was a way to say that it want’ anything wrong with being left handed. I wasn’t able to use it all the time as we used to move to different classrooms, but when I had the chance to use it , it felt so confortable, it was good to have it there...

I loveed these movies that I saw as a child. Plain concise languaging, visually engaging. I learn this way and these films spoke to the way my brain was wired. enter link description here
Seeing the simplified objected in progress form idea to final product in a few minutes opened up the possibility to all kinds of creative concepts.

In the 1st grade I noticed that there was another way to represent objects other than stick figures. I remember my strong desire to create objects that looks like real things. Wanting my drawings to depict things as I actually saw them forced me to start thinking about the specific properties of each object I was drawing. So pencils and crayons were some of the first tools I used in my childhood.

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In the yellow formica-topped counter that served as storage in the playroom/bedroom of my house, there was always a stack of paper. Faded and blurry indigo of mimeographed printing covered one side. Sometimes there were handwritten notes there, too, but the other side was blank. Perhaps the mathematical equations of my father’s courses left the paper and became part of my consciousness, but it was the other side that captured my imagination.

We didn’t have many toys, but we had enough. My sisters and I had crayons, paint, pencils, scissors, and glue to use on this cornucopia of paper. Whenever it seemed ready to run out, magically it was resupplied. We converted it into cards, book, room-filling spider webs, costumes, and anything we needed at the time. It was the clay of our environment, ready to be molded into any form we chose.

I wrote about my childhood object last year and the post is here. This time around I decided to respond to the other reading for this week and you can read it here.
Cheers!

As a young child growing up in North Carolina, I have always had a fascination with clouds and the beautiful Carolina blue sky. This particular day the air was a perfect transport for the clouds; a light, warm breeze with big clouds and little clouds. Mother clouds, baby clouds. I was really enjoying picking out different shapes of clouds and thinking about how clouds come to be. One puffy white cloud seemed just beyond my reach…if I could just stretch and reach my small hands up I believe I could touch it!

With arms outstretched, the cloud came closer and closer. I looked around to see if any one else could see the approaching cloud, but no one was around. Before long, I was enveloped by the cloud. I was as light as a feather. It was beautiful…there within the cloud. I’m going to stay here forever! As quickly as it came down, it was gone. I ran back to the house to tell of my adventure, but no one believed me.

The physical emotion I had when I used the pen not to draw something but to scratch the paper. So powerful … and so strange that a simple gesture can provoke such a physical sensation of power, desire, and anger !

From a very young age, I followed my father around his workshop, watching and learning, only I didn't know that I was learning. There were many "gears" in that workshop, many of which I wasn't allowed to touch. Of all those things, the most intriguing to me was the small wooden 4-drawer chest where he kept his miscellaneous "junk." That shabby chest was truly a magical treasure chest for a curious kid. It held bolts and screws and widgets and gadgets and a multitude of other unnamed and sometimes unidentifiable objects that I credit with spurring my curiosity about mechanical things and how they work. That would become a curiosity that sometimes caused my father anguish since I was quite fond of taking things apart just to see how they worked and, of course, I wasn't always able to put them back together again. Some things never change :o)

My evocative object?

Mine is more about the experience and setting for the objects. From Age 0-5 my neighbor was a fine arts woodworker. He made wooden puzzles and toys with beautiful grains and finishes. At home our blocks and tinker box was made up of unusual shapes that came from the woodworking scraps. It was interesting to combine all of the mismatched shapes – some Legos, with random blocks, tinker-brand sets, cardboard, paper, dominos pieces, etc. We had a giant table in basement to build on, without need to clean it off.

I could say that I graduated from block stacking to computing at age 5. We had a TRS-80 which I used to create short Basic programs to change the screen's color and play sounds, draw lines. The fact that you would loose your work was upsetting, so I figured out how to save work to cassette tapes with my name on them. I had a book with a cartoon character, with short programming tasks; so I was mostly self-directed.

Not satisfied with these toys, at Age 7, I began disassembling almost any toy that took a battery. I wanted to see how it worked. Instead of putting it back together as-was, I liked to wire in a new piece / create something new – hack it

Today, reflecting on my childhood and seeing value in this form of play, it is essentially why I have supported open source and maker spaces since 1998.

Peanut Brittle
As a young child, I spent a great deal of time at my best friend's house. Her Mom was an incredible cook, and we would "help" her cook. Working with the ingredients was a wonderful learning experience, and I developed a lifelong love of cooking and baking. She had a way of keeping us involved in the process while she took care of anything that would have been unsafe for our little hands.

One cooking project that fascinated me was making peanut brittle. Transforming the simple components of sugar, butter and peanuts into a candy confection was a delicate operation that took careful watching and good timing. Seeing the sugar transform into candy was almost like a science experiment.

The finished product was born of fun and patience -- it was so difficult to wait for the candy to cool down and become ready to taste! Making peanut brittle was a lesson that could be transferred to making other kinds of candy, and also later in life as an adult - for example, when I attempted my first tarte tatin.

A related memory that's poking out... the guitar I rescued from the neighbors' front lawn on garbage day - with two strings. Tom Petty would've been proud of how I played those two strings My mom didn't quite have the same reaction and after a while the guitar made its way back to the front lawn. 40 years later I've bought a guitar and have started teaching myself... with a lot of encouragement, this time around, from my son!! So important to remember to validate and encourage early exploration and interests. Never know whose sitting on the next BIG idea!

This was harder than I thought--I cannot remember my childhood! After much toil, I found a 'memory'--it is actually a shared image, i.e., shared by my mother to me. I don't remember it myself. Apparently, age two, I used to be fascinated with water dripping from the tap, and would stand for a long time trying to grab the droplet as it trickled from the faucet. With apt concentration, or so my admiring mother tells me, I would pinch my fingers around a formulating drop, only to see it seep away from my pinch. And I would try again and again… Was I trying to catch a drop to feel it? To examine it? Or was I fascinated by the process of catching? Or maybe I was just fascinated by how a drop forms? I truly do not know. I do not analyze myself or falsely attribute reasons, but I think this is the closet thing I can think of similar to Papert's gears.
I do like this exercise and I liked reading everyone gears. Papert's gears are one of my favorite reads and I am rather amazed that I never once (till now) asked myself what my gear may be….

My assignment is posted on Slideshare at: http://www.slideshare.net/tpitre/1st-assign

Link to Assignment

"Dad, how can I put this on the wall above my desk?" It was a thick glass ashtray (I wasn't a smoker; I just liked the design.) about 10 inches in diameter. "I don't think you can do that, Bobby; it's too heavy. Two sided tape won't work." Maybe he believed that. Maybe he was busy. Or maybe he knew what he was doing, because his response was not satisfactory to me. I went back to my room and thought about it. Four flat head nails did the trick. Secure and still, I see it on that wall, 40 years later.

This reminds me of many (in my case mostly unsuccessful) attempts to make caramel sweets in my early teens. I endlessly heated sugar, butter and cream in various combinations and then spent hours cleaning the pans. I never got it exactly "right" but I did love the process of tinkering in the kitchen, and I also ate everything, even if it wasn't exactly what I had planned to make.

Have you seen the new bubble wrap? It doesn't pop. It's the most disappointing thing. I, too, was a fan of the popcorn popper sound. I was delighted when my son was given one a few years ago.

I grew up in St. Louis, where a local motto was "First in booze, first in shoes, last in the American League" (or was it National?) The booze refers to beer, but the second refers to the fact that St. Louis was a major manufacturing hub for leather goods. A group of us kids had a peculiar shared hobby - we collected shoe leather samples. Like this:

We would trade them on the school bus and carry them around proudly.
I loved these leather samples! How they looked, and felt, but also the shared activity of collecting and trading. Today I still love to look at color wheels, and paint sample charts. And I am in incorrigible collector of bright colored objects - kind of like a crow.

I remember my dad gave me wooden blocks toys. It's somewhat similar to the picture attached where I can build and make something. I think. I can still "feel" the shape and the texture in my hand. I enjoy the process of building something. It's probably not always come up as I planned but it's still interesting.

Today, I earned my Bachelor degree in Architectural Engineering. I enjoy going to art fairs, museums and travel to new places. Sometimes, I have a burst of ideas... ( need to write it down quickly). I enjoy putting together creative programs and I still play with wooden blocks I bought for my daughter...

My best childhood object was Comic books, objects because I did not know how to read them at that time.
Watching them was full of imagination and thinking about every single stuffs from a story to superhero or dialog or what the character is doing and why.
After some time I started reading them and then It helped me to think from the writer's point of view, what he wanted to tell the reader, how our hero is fighting against those bad boys and how those totally alien gadgets do work.
And after that it made me wonder about different things like why there is no life possible on sun or it's like we are just talking about all the things around us there might be something for whom that temperature is like room temperature or how we can travel from 1 universe to another using black holes and creating our own theories for those things which are like controversial till yet.
And till yet I have imagined stuffs, no matter it exist or not or that is practically possible or not I just think about things.

A red Swingline stapler is, quite simply and without hyperbole, the most evocative object from my childhood. My mother gave me one when I was confined to bed-rest for weeks after I suffered a concussion around age 6. That stapler was handled, explored, opened, closed, re-filled--and used as a stapler--nearly non-stop for days on end. It was circa 1962, so I didn't have dvd's, computer games or even a computer to occupy my time. I had books, a tiny transistor radio and my red Swingline stapler.

I wasn't much into dramatic play then--and so, for example, I didn't pretend that the stapler was a wild animal with jaws. I was fascinated by the real thing, and the real thing was empowering. In the early 60s, young girls weren't as encouraged as they are to fix things themselves, and this stapler was my first foray into this sort of reinforcing and intoxicating experience. If the staples ran out, I knew how to open it, refill, and re-close my little gadget. If a rogue staple bent and jammed the mechanism, I knew how to clear it and "reboot" the stapler. Sometimes, I would just staple a sheet of paper together, dozens of times in a row, at all angles, to see if I could see the precise moment of metal folding.

I have never been sentimental or hesitant about shedding things from my childhood, and I've given away more and more over the years. I'm pretty much down to one object: the red Swingline staper. My young son thinks I gave it to him, but someday, when he's older and he can handle the disappointment, I'll break it to him that it has just been on loan.

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I love this. Great story. I may share this with my students. Can you imagine a kid these days being intrigued by a stapler? There is so much more stuff now than there was back then. Thanks for sharing.

I grew up in St. Louis too, and I remember these leather samples!!!!

*I'm coming home with pockets bulging. I know that I expect yet another rebuke of my mother
I run in the room and put them in a row on the bed; their weight has also broke a pocket.
I take all other, and put around the new ones. I look at them admired and meanwhile I think to things.
They are all different, with strange shapes, and different colors; some striped, others with just a few lines, others with small holes. Putting them on the cheek you can note that some are hot, others are cold. Some are smooth, others are more porous. I look at them, I move them, I play with them
I am the scientist who must discover if they are from another planet, I have to find out how old they are, maybe they are prehistoric. And if they were radioactive?
I need to experiment, but this is the voice of my mother, is yet another rebuke
Just bring all these stones at home!*

If I had to choose, I think my "gear" from childhood is a pencil. As a small child, I was fascinated by writing, taking time to painstakingly practice writing my name and all the names in my family. From there, I progressed to a love of writing, copying things from the teacher's chalkboard. I had a fantasy that one day my teacher would tell me to go to the board and write "stuff," filling it up with my carefully written words. Then I decided, in third grade, to become a teacher so that I could do that myself, without anyone telling me I could. (oh brother, I hate chalkboards now) That same year, I wrote a story one day in school. We'd just had a lesson about Texas' fight for independence from Mexico, and I wrote a story telling the Battle of San Jacinto from the viewpoint of the tree General Sam Houston leaned against after being wounded. I remember my teacher making a big deal out of my story, which I thought was pitifully easy and no big deal. Out of that experience grew a love of writing, and I followed it up with excellent grades in English, involvement in my high school's yearbooks for 3 years, and a minor in English at The University of Texas, where I also served on the staff of Cactus, the yearbook. Out of my love of using the pencil, grew an interest in writing and the written word. I had never stopped to think about this until reading the "Gears" article. Interesting food for thought.

On a trip to the Grand Canyon as a young child I became fascinated by tumbleweeds. Growing up in Minnesota, I had never seen anything like them. The way they would seemingly roll forever throughout the desert was majestic to me. So much so that I brought one home, where it is still in my parent's basement somewhere lol.

Looking back I think this experience causes me to think in 2 distinct ways that are powerful. First, I think it inspires me to look to nature as inspiration. Second, it shows me how getting out of our everyday environments can provide us with solutions to problems.

I wrote for this assignment last year that “street maps held a strong, compelling interest in me.” I still believe this to be true. However, another thing that held a deep interest around age 9 was numbers. It was the time that I began reading newspapers, starting with the Daily News. I looked at the weather page and checked the highs and low of various cities, sunrise and sunset, morning stars and evening stars. I would also check the major league baseball standings to see who led the American League or National League East. I had a standings board containing the logos of all the teams. I also had a Street & Smith’s book containing the biographies and statistics of all the players. My fascination with concrete numbers didn’t end with the newspaper: I would use the World Almanac to calculate sunrise and sunset times and find the times and dates of solar eclipses.

My childhood fascination with numbers hasn’t been extended to algebra or calculus, though. I continue to prefer concrete numbers to abstract algebraic and calculus equations because I find plain old-fashioned numbers more comfortable to work with.

My favorite objects were storybooks.I invite you to take a look.
http://storybird.com/books/my-favourite-object/?token=s8hnq7b246

One of my favorite toys was a wood rocking horse that let the legs swing enough to hit a small block and almost make the right sound for a canter. I used to try so hard to get that clip clop without going too fast to get just noisy clatter. How I wished then that I had the ability to move the block slightly diagonal to get the right beat with the pause in between. Even as I still collect all sorts of moving wood toys and kits today like the notched stick propeller and the piano playing man, I often wonder why wood toys are often "cookie cutter" and more for decoration than play. Why can't one of the toy train cars have the built in whistle? Why can't a Jacob's ladder also incorporate a flip book picture of at least of a stick figure going up and down? It's not that I don't appreciate the simplicity of the design, it's just that when you do see someone add personality and an individual change to their toy such as a bobbing head on a dachshund pull toy, you know that the littlest detail added makes all the difference in deeper play.

In my childhood I was very resourceful, i used to make by myself anykind of toy necessary for my games.
I had good result with cartoon, paper, shoe boxes old cans and all was available and incited my mind to recycle. My fantasy had no limits. I use to re-make everything i found was suitable to duplicate, including a trapeze realized with an old seesaw and a rope, to make circus evolutions. Something that was able to terrify my Granny.
Once i was only 11, i decided to organize a small show, for which i prepared the custumes, and the scenes making some drawing and sketch . I spent most of the time drawing. One of my favourite game was climb up on the trees
.

Reading the paper for this week I remembered two toys to which I developed a long lasting affective link, although long ago forgotten: firstly some big wooden building blocks at Kindergarten and secondly a plastic tubes building toy called Plastican.
I could feel the sensation of manipulating those big wooden chunks, all of the same size, ca. 20 cm x 10 cm x 4 cm, not coloured, to build simple figures on desktop. I've been a profesional cabinetmaker and furniture designer since 1997 and only after reading this week's paper today I did realize the intensity of that daily experience during my first year in Kindergarten, 49 years ago!
I can't figure out how many hours did I spent playing with Plastican. It was much more than just conecting pipes: several kinds of gears, electric engines, wheels,... I got also Lego, but it was different, not worst, not least. Plastican was so important for me that I kept it for more than 35 years to play with my children. Unfortunately it was too late when my eldest son got an appropriate age: plastic was corrupted.

Reflections on a childhood object:
The piano. It stood next to the Buick-sized console TV/phonograph in the family room, and it was my special place. Though it was an object, the piano was so much more. When I practiced stretching my chubby little first grade fingers to reach C to C, it was my athletic training ground. For a kid who tripped over her own feet with every step, this is where I won my trophies. I could play my notes loud enough to drown out my drunken father’s ranting; this was where I found peace. Under the bench was the three bedroom home (now occupied by Barbie’s family) where I invented my future family’s story. Here I learned to imagine and began to create my understanding of all that is beautiful.
At the piano I learned about grit, because frankly, I wasn’t very good. Passion and perseverance carried me through the discordant sounds and stop-start overs until finally, the me in my head became the me playing at our church concerto. Had I quit, my dad’s threat to burn the damn thing would have left my Barbies homeless and me without dreams, and without a concept of beauty. That second-hand piano was so much more than an object; it was my refuge, the source of my super powers, and my very special place.

Loved your reflections on growing up with glass. It's a magical world. I teach 8th graders the art and craft of stained glass, and hope they weave lessons like yours into their future story.

Since the introduction video emphasized how creative learning is becoming a necessity for keeping pace with information and technology it seems relevant to mention my birth year for context (1980). For most of my childhood I had a love of graph paper. It was predictable, structured, and could express relationships. I'd go through pads of graph paper making anything from mazes to board games. It was a medium for my imagination.

Unfortunately I don't have any examples at hand, but here is a rather boring picture of graph paper:

Grids continue to play a big role in my professional life. (web developer / information design)

My childhood image is the 1979 Sears Catalogue. I sat with that book for hours - naming all the models, cross referencing them to their spouses and partners, their children, their evil step-mothers. I would create these fantastic lives for the models. I was 7 at the time.

I can't figure out how to post the picture.

My object is a toy typewriter. I have written a blog post about it which can be seen at:
http://malbell.com/2014/03/20/the-toy-typewriter/

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My mother bought me a copy of Collins English Gem Dictionary to help improve my English. Born in Stromness, Orkney Islands off the North of Scotland meant I learned the Island dilect (for example, pidie is we) and Galic and had to learn English as a foreign language. My younger brother escaped this.

Thinking about the gears of my childhood....remembering knitting and crocheting with my mother and the small miracle of French knitting. Seeing the threads form into a slowly growing multi-coloured tube as they appeared from the cotton spool. And just this month I have rediscovered crochet and the joy of making.

My grandfather, an electrical engineer, introduced me to one of my early gears. He introduced me to the line of Radio Shack electronics kits, and I had one that was basically a circuit board and a set of wires, and by connecting the wires to various pins, multiple projects could be completed involving LEDs and various electronic sounds (stoplight, countdown timer, many others). I could spend a while on a project - the instruction book provided enough of a recipe to be able to simply create the predefined projects, but there was plenty of freedom to experiment and deviate from the steps. One memory is that I went through a number of projects and worked into more complicated ones but not until a little later did I move "out of the box" and figure out to how to create a simple flashlight with wires, batteries, and bulbs. This was a milestone for me because I had conceived the project idea on my own, for once, and had no recipe as a starting point. After a few burned out bulbs and burned fingers, I had a makeshift flashlight that seemed very real to me.

TRANSFORMERS "more than meets the eyes."

1980's Transformers

Excellent post. Very well written, and evocative. I like the way you "think", and look forward to more of your posts.
This sentence is my favorite, for several reasons: "If a rogue staple bent and jammed the mechanism, I knew how to clear it and "reboot" the stapler."

One of my favorite things from my childhood (mid 70´s) was a portable (Philips) tape recorder with built-in microphone. Looked like this:

With this wonderful machine I was able to record music from TV by putting the tape recorder in front of the TV (Our first VCR came to our home in 1982) and instructing the rest of my family to be quiet. (They didn´t always respect my instructions.) I also remember recording (secretly bugging) my parents having a party when an old man played guitar and sang Evert Taube-songs. I also remember building a "box" on my bicycle so that the tape recorder could follow and play music for me (and my friends) while cycling around our small town. For me it was something really fascinating being able to record things, listen later and play things for my friends. Wish that I had saved som of those tapes... or not.

That is so wonderful! My son (5) is totally obsessed with our stapler and now I cant for the life of me see why I keep taking it away from him. Today when he get home from school he will become the owner of this fine tool. Thx!

Wow. You are bringing back amazing memories! My father was an aerospace engineer, and he sat at our kitchen table every night in the early 60s with his graph paper
and slide rule. Awesome example!!

Yes, yes, give him the family stapler!!!!!!

Thanks for the compliment about my stapler essay. But what about your vacuum cleaner piece? That's a classic. It was especially nice that you labeled the parts!
I'm thinking about bidding on one of the vintage canister vacuum cleaners on e-bay, because my son will put it to good use. Thanks for the idea.

Hi Shari, Great graphic of Tinker Toys. I also enjoyed playing with them. Last year towards the end of LCL I ran a successful small Kickstarter to fund an open-source Tinker Toy variant (sort of) called TIN TOY. The latest versions of the hubs are available as files here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:166730 I hope to do something with these during the project phase of LCL2.

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I loved to climb trees when I was kid. There was a big old spruce in my parents' back yard that was roughly the size of the tree in the image. That tree was as mysterious and marvelous for me as Tolkien's mallorn trees of Lothlorien are for Frodo et al.. I think a lot of my interest in form, design and architecture stems from my visual and tactile experiences navigating through the branches of magical arboreal spaces.

Where was my mother some of you might be thinking. Well I was one of 5 children so my guess is she knew she had backup in case of an accident. She also had kind of a Gever Tulley ( http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids ) approach to child rearing. We did all manage to survive and thrive.

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Image credit: Wikimedia.org

I have always had a fascination with planes. In particular, the SuperMarine Spitfire in the image above.
The Spitfire has enabled me to learn about aeronautics, history, technology, space, and so many other things. I dont know why, but every time I see one or talk about them, I have a very deep emotional feeling of awe, respect and happiness.

It's moving to hear about the ways you made a special place, developed your skills, and created your understanding of beauty with (and even under) your piano. I'm curious, when you describe your passion and perseverance, you mention "the me in my head," I wonder if that was how you imagined you could sound?

My Coke machine essay : https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pcHNbukpGYk9pB2D10btm0RsAa1jLO-ohrr90dBNq7Y/view

I loved my tape recorder too I used it to record my brother´s voice with sounds.You make me feel so happy.Those wonderful years....

How to describe the "me in my head"...
I guess she's my muse, mentor and meme all in one. Sound was part, but also a very rich tapestry of sight and touch and even smells. Guilty of the title "over-active imagination".(aka reality's greatest escape artist).

It's easy to understand how that beautiful plane inspires a lifelong love affair. The sound of the Merlin engine alone is enough for me!. Couple these things with knowledge of those "few who gave so much for so many" and you have quite the package.
Hope you enjoy this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6c3v9iihgw

I love your description of the "junk" drawer as "treasure box" The next person who looks sideways at my cluttered collection of eclectic possibility (aka my art room storage closet), will be hearing from you. Great post!

Conny, I had the same wooden block set as well. I used to try to merge these blocks with the Tinker Toys, to see if I could build things using parts from both sets. Honestly though, I found the wood blocks to be more satisfying than the Tinker Toys - I'd forgotten about them until I saw your photo - because they felt more solid and less wobbly when I built things with them. I was obsessed with the half moon arch thing for some reason, it's arc seemed so elegant to my child eyes, though I didn't think of it as "elegant" when I was six years old. Thanks for the memory jog!

@mrssuealexander, hi! I have a different but an important story with the piano too. I understand well the significance of it for you and became happy you have found this way. I'd like to know for how long you played it and if you still play it. If so, what feelings do you still have about it?

As far as I can remember I liked very much to make houses: I liked to build houses using different materials like wood, cartons or even mud. I also liked to build multifloor buildings using Lego bricks. But I didn't only build , I also liked to trasnform empty spaces and make them habitable: the space under the dining room table, the space between the backs of two chairs, or even a box of shoes. Every such residence had its inhabitants , imaginary or real . It could be me , one of my sisters, my little doll, or even a frog I saw jumping in the garden. Houses were absolutely vital for my symbolic game as a child.
As I look this again from a distance and try to ask my adult self "why", I think that the most convinsing answer that I find is : because I wanted to make the space more initmate, at least a part of it. Empty space and its vacuity can be scary sometimes, especially for young children. They need a shelter!
I think that I still keep this attitude towards immense and uknown situations , like new knowledge fields for instance. Imagine that you come for the first time against a new learning space, what do you do? How do you treat the situation? What I do, is try to occupy a small piece of it, personalize it and make it somehow mine. This intimacy of the small part creates a relationship with the unknown and helps me go further, helps me to face my fear to proceed.
So I think that constructing little personal spaces is my strategy for learning (and for learning teaching, as well) , and in that sense houses could be the gears of my childhood.

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Most of my childhood memories are to do with sport - swimming, cross country, soccer then rugby, triathlon, surf lifesaving.... - so it took me a while to think of a toy that really held a fascination for me. In the end, the object that came to mind initially surprised me then on reflection made a lot of sense: an abacus.

When I was 8 we had 2 Japanese students stay for a fortnight at our house. As a gift, 1 of the boys gave me an abacus and at school the Japanese students taught us how to use them. I had always enjoyed maths and had just recently realised that it was something that I was good at. So to be presented with a completely different way to do maths was intriguing to me. I practised continuously at using the abacus and was soon doing long division of huge numbers and having a ball.

25 years later and as a Geography/Social Sciences (and recently robotics) teacher, I wonder if this was the start of my real interest in different places and cultures. Growing up in New Zealand we were quite isolated from different cultures and I really enjoyed learning about others when I could.

Then i think back to my childhood, 2 stories pops up.

1: my dad have a huge workshop and is a big DIY man, with a love for old cars and motocycles. Working with white goods and household eletrics, most of the workshop was filled with all kinds of spare parts, many not working, but might could be fixed. Then i was old enough (around 5) to come work/play in the workshop, he asked me: Do you want to help me fix things? and of course i would, then he told me something that sparked my curiosity: Before you can fix things, you must learn to take things apart.. From that day i loved splitting things in atoms, i might not be able to fix them again but thats another story..

2: Back in kindergarten we had a real hippie as a pedagogue, he made us think in some alternatives way often. But i will never forget one day that i sat down beside me and asked me what i was drawing. I answered him nothing because i didn't know what to draw. He then told me something i never forgot; on every piece of paper where is a story waiting to be told or an idea who want to be showed to the world, its your job to get it out of the paper.

Since that day a blank piece of paper has been the most valued gear of my childhood.

Love your essay! It reminded me of our woods and a tent we put up in the summer for a playhouse.

This activity has reminded me of a recent experience at a Global Issues Network conference for secondary school students in and around Hong Kong: GIN852 (check it out on YouTube). Cesar Harada asked his audience to participate in an exercise to track our jobs, passions, locations, and important people, over our lifetimes so far, and use it to help us figure out what's important and what to let go of. You'll find a video of the process here.

I could easily trace where I'd been, what jobs I'd had, and the important people in my life, but, sadly, when it came to identifying passions in my childhood, I came up blank. Papert writes about falling in love with gears. I don't recall falling in love with anything to the point that I developed a passion that I've carried throughout my life. Cesar's exercise made me realize this gap, and whether it is a gap in memory or experience, I don't know yet.

I think more than anything, I keep returning to what I learned in the first offering of LCL because I don't want my daughters and students to look back and see that same gap.

I enjoyed your toy piano story and especially the picture. Today, I'm heading out to the flea markets to see if I can find one for my granddaughter. I hope you still have that joy in your life.

The next chapter in my piano story is hard to tell. Time passed, as the terrible writer wrote, and ivory keys met cast iron frying pan. But that awful drunken rage was no match for the piano's legacy. Beauty is appreciated so much more in its contrast with ugliness. The Renoir sketch tells the end of the story. My hands turned to pencils and brushes, compositions changed from notes to brush strokes, and the music played on in different key.

The first toy I fell in love with was a magnetic theatre set. What caught my attention was the fact you could create infinite stories based on a quite small set of items (five figurines, two theater wings and one backdrop). Putting up a play was something I got tired of quite soon but I never got tired instead of playing with the idea of theater itself: is it the figurine of a knight or of somebody playing the role of a knight? what if the figurine is a knight but is not aware of the fictional nature of the castle printed on the backdrop? For me it was as powerful and sometimes as scary as breaking a spell and at the same time learning how to use it. It was like getting the key to the secret toolbox of storytellers, it really felt like for the first time I had the power to play with the idea of playing itself.

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Dice and patterns have all been what I've used to aid my learning and processing of information. I always look for patterns. When I learned to count I used visual aids, like many children, but as I got older and didn't need tangible objects, I would envision the pips of a die as I counted. I still occassionally catch myself bobbing my head or quickly moving my fingers while counting, as if I was imagining myself jumping between pips on a die. When I help students with math I always use objects to physically make sense of problems. Visual aids were so important to me as I learned because I needed to be able to visualize the problem. I often find that students are able to grasp concepts if they can literally put their hands on them.
If I couldn't use an object to assist me, I'd find myself looking for a pattern. One simple example I remember vivdly was remember multiplication facts. The nines stumped me for so long. I didn't know about the "finger trick" until I became a middle school teacher. What I did figure out was that every time you added 9 the tens place increased by 1 and the ones place decreased by 1.

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This was so beautiful to me!! (and still is )

Here is a link to my Week One Activity. I tried to just bring over the code but kept bumping up against the 4,000 character limit. I lost too much meaning getting down to size.

http://jgregorymcverry.com/narratives-that-surround-us/

I was fascinated by gears, too, when I was young. I remember getting a "Mr. Machine" as a present when I was four — a see-through, gear-filled, wind-up toy that came with a plastic wrench and screwdriver so that you could take it apart and put it back together again. I've always had a love, the kind that Papert talks about, for small machines with lots of tiny parts in them.

Another toy I remember very well was one I got when I was about seven — a Digi-Comp I, a (very) simple binary computer made out of plastic, soda straws and wire. Considering that I went on to work in computer technology, I guess these had a pretty good influence on me...

One of the stories I used to tell kids started with holding up a square piece of paper and asking, "What do you see?" It was an origami demonstration as well as a story. Perhaps the potential in a blank sheet of paper is why I enjoy writing so much.

I think I may have cheated a smidgen, but here's mine nonetheless.

Thinking about my childhood toys I found two, not really toys, that were my favorites and, afterwards I knew their influence in my personality. They are my tap dancing shoes and my box of crayons! I just loved them! I stared using them “almost” at the same time Perhaps crayons a little earlier as I started tap dancing at 3. How they influenced me? The use of crayons had influenced my creativity and organization (arrange them according to the order of colors was a game). The tap shoes, and the tap dance, “made me” a person very disciplined, a workaholic and an art lover.

I think that my experience with a childhood object is somewhat different from Seymour Papert's, in that I didn't go on to use this object as a model for other concepts in my life, though it seems that many people feel the same way in that their experience is unique. My post is here, thanks to whoever came up with the idea of blogging these things.

Thanks Madeline, it so good to see you here! How are your Scratch lesson's going with your grandchildren?

I moved a post to an existing topic: Week 1 - Activity

Oh my you brought back a memory that was long buried---Mr. Machine!

When I was 5 years old, I've spent few months in bed for a problem at my leg. One day I got a book as a present (it was Walt Disney's Bambi) but I couldn't read yet. Having a lot of time, I decided to try to learn by myself, starting from few capital letters that I already knew and "decoding" the rest.

Now I realize how much that book was important for me as a learner: I was driven by the curiosity to understand the story, it was a funny game to play and I felt extremely satisfied and empowered when I saw the letters becoming meaningful, my mum couldn't believe it!

I think the best learning experiences look like that: they are playful challenges to decode the world and make it meaningful, enabling us to learn more and more.

The lessons went well. I'm going to be mentoring Scratch and other things in a YWCA spring break camp.

Roller skates. A pair that clipped onto the bottom of my shoes & tightened with a key. I skated up & down the
sidewalks of our suburban neighborhood. These were wearable "gears," requiring no extra mental step for projecting myself into a different abstract/sensory world.
Movement is still very important to me: I love robotics, hiking, dancing, ice skating. And I tend to believe that the mysteries of the universe & the answers to difficult problems in math & physics are best approached from the perspective of movement.
We're starting to see more innovative wearable technology: some of the Crickets projects mentioned in the class materials, Google Glass. Human movement-related "gears" are a bit different -- maybe a separate sub-category -- in how they encourage learning and associate with the learning spiral.

Two objects came to mind when I read "Gears of my Childhood." The first is a book about Pablo Picasso my mother got in a PBS pledge drive when I was really young, maybe 4 or 5. My twin sister and I spent hours looking at the pictures and copying them. The other is Ed Emberley's Book of Drawing Animals which we received around the same time. Again I spent hours with that book as well, making lots of drawing of animals that started with simple shapes.

Because of them, of because of my relationship with them I have always considered myself an artist, though I never took any formal art classes until well into adulthood. My view of art was formed by my experience of doing it on my own and figuring out myself or using books to guide me, so I never felt the need to go to a class and learn from someone else. I remember studying Monet and Manet in 6th grade art class and feeling like I understood something essential about them, because we were all artists.

I became a teacher because I considered it an opportunity to apply my creativity and continue making things though I never became an artist for a living. I've been deeply influenced by these books and how they made me think about being an artist.

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I like that idea of playing with playing itself. What a profound think to learn.

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What I learned from this childhood experience is that the tools we use learn is very important. We humans by nature are not very good at dealing with abstractions, We need proper tools to help us see things and understand things. For example, we can't see electromagnetic, but we can use tools to help us.

I have many recollections of childhood objects that were meaningful and important to me, but one stands out as being, perhaps, a premonition of my future career: My childhood chalkboard. This particular green chalkboard was perched on a ledge at the bottom of the basement stairs.

I would sit for hours on a metal stool in front of that chalkboard pretending to teach a variety of subjects to my imaginary students. I would put the students into teams and have them report on findings from whatever project they were assigned; I would have them approach the chalkboard to show how they performed calculations; they would write poetry and practice spelling lessons. I loved school and I loved my early teachers; I am sure it was their influence that led to my "playing school" for entertainment.

Seymour Papert's essay discusses not only the cognitive assimilation of the gears of his childhood (e.g. how we bring old knowledge to understand that which is new), but he also addresses the affective aspects of the objects. For me his referring to the "magic" of the gears resonated loudly; the chalkboard represented my magic. Teaching was my passion. Teaching was my love. Though all by myself in that dim basement (it was an unfinished space with half the floor nothing but dirt) my classroom came to life as my imagination would run wild with all the wonderful topics my "students" and I would study that day.

Does it, therefore, come as any surprise that in my career today I do whatever I can to dream up or select lessons and activities that are engaging, interactive, fun, practical, relevant and applicable? I was drawn to this LCL because I am always seeking ways to improve my pedagogy - my methods for helping my students have successful learning outcomes. For me, learning creative learning IS the very heart of what teachers should be doing; I am just hoping to learn to do it better!

I can present here several examples. But for instance, the image that I want to share is from a bakery.
Since I remember I've living in bakery of my family business. I always work/help my parents and grandparents.
For me, is that image of work-business hat influenced me in my decisions and turn me an entrepreneur in my daily life.
Thank you family,
Sérgio Leal.

Rollup Board

Born and raised in a middle class family in a semi rural place secluded from the cosmopolitan lifestyle of the urban cities of India, one of the cheapest and affordable stationery items of those days were a box of chalk pieces and roll up blackboard (cost - almost one-fourth of a dollar). These were indeed my favorite artifacts of those times. I often used to replicate the role of my school teacher by a fake classroom setting with no kids in it. This classroom setting usually consisted of some worksheets lying around, textbooks, a beating stick and fake kids. But one of the most favorite object was roll up board and one of its nicest features was its rollability, allowing me to hang it in anywhere in the house. By imitating the role of a teacher, solving mathematical problems on the board and speaking them aloud while performing them, used to give me a feel that someone around is listening to me and I am learning in this process of sharing with others. No one will probably believe, but I continued to learn in the same manner till I finished my high school. On top of that, this self-learning approach refrained me from joining after school tuition centers all through my school years. Read more about my other childhood objects here

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Glad to know about your childhood object, similar to mine!!!

hi, i've written about a globe. please find my brief response at my blog:

http://deklayton.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-globe-lcl2-week-1-activity.html

"I´ve never tried this before so I´m absolutely certain I´ll make it"

After thinking for a while I decided on Pippi Longstocking to be the most important "gear" from my childhood even if it´s a character not a thing. I wrote about it here:

http://mycreativestudies.wordpress.com

I love the beauty, simplicity and elegance of the many patterns of 9s. I particularly like the "palindrome pairs" - ie. starting from the top and bottom, each pair has the same digits in reverse order.

Your post made me think of another fascinating phenomenon (that can be explained with 9s):
the online crystal ball mind reader http://www.flashlightcreative.net/swf/mindreader/

If you've never seen it before, notice/remember your psychological reaction the first time you see it work! (I remember having the feeling of wonder and amazement of a child.)

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It's challenging to remember everything from my childhood which started 6 decades ago (and is still going strong), but I don't recall focusing on one particular object. The objects that made the strongest emotional impression on me included: magnets (especially the invisible force repelling and attracting each other), gyroscopes, yo-yos, tops, paper airplanes, Frisbees, boomerangs, homemade handkerchief parachutes, etc. It's only after making this list that I realize that what these objects share in common is they involve physical motion (both on my part and the objects themselves) and they seem to defy physics, gravity in particular. I was fascinated by tossing a spinning hula hoop, or snap-spinning a ping pong ball, so it would come back to me. Also Newton's Cradle (the 5 ball pendulum. I mean how did it KNOW when you launched two balls instead of one, making two balls launch from the other end? I played with a long row of pennies on a desk top.)

As Seymour pointed out he “fell in love with gears.” It's not just the objects, but how I felt about them – the kinesthetic feeling of the force between magnets or feeling the snap of the string and the increasing angular momentum as I launched a gyroscope. And also the emotional feeling, admiring the intricately beautiful madras patterns on the Duncan yo-yo (not the Imperial, but the other narrow one with the sharp edges that cut into your hand!) When I was a child, I felt as a child, but now that I am a man, I've tried to put away childish things... and failed. I still play with yo-yos and paper airplanes, but my favorite is Frisbees (and my new invented sport – Frisbee Skiing).

not sure why but it says I am a new user so I can't upload images? I'd really like to..

Hej! Love Pippi - my husband is from Gothenburg. Anyway, how were you able to upload your image? I had an error message saying "new users cannot"

What do a Prussian Vase and a Donny Osmond record player have in common?

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I hope you still get a chance to build, it's fun lifelong learning! Besides Radio Shack, Scientifics Online, Hobby Lobby, AC Moore--all these have great kits. I justify these educational toys or DIY products by seeing how they teach the concepts (usually I like the ones with snap together circuitry or magnets). You can also "invent things." One Christmas toy that combined my interest in wood toys had a ricocheting Santa coming down to a rooftop chimney through a pegged background. When the weight of his star shaped body touched a folded index card in the roof the circuit of wire and aluminum foil completed and a light turned on in the wooden house door. Sad thing is no one bought my creation at the church bazaar so I brought it home as one of my "failures" even though it worked. I guess building for self is best although you can still burn yourself with 9v or D batteries when you use science book to make other cool stuff (like Morse code machines)
.

When sifting through my memory of objects of my childhood, my mind flashes past Barbies, Strawberry Shortcake dolls, porcelain miniatures, a tiny piano, and wooden blocks. It comes to rest on a Band-aid tin full of magnetic letters. I see myself small in my my dad’s over-sized black vinyl chair building words on the side of that tin: CAT, BAT, SAT and feeling smart and proud. It was the beginning of my love affair with reading and learning. While I love formal learning and will jump wholeheartedly into learning almost anything, I also recognize the organic nature of learning, the importance of intrinsic motivation, and the power of learning within a relationship. That tin box full of letters was influential because it grew out of all three of those roots of learning.

Hej!
I can´t believe it, is your husband really from Gothenburg? That´s where I live (if you haven´t noticed already).
The pic was not difficult, I think I just dragged and dropped it and there it was.
;-D

Hi, Madeline! Glad to see you here! I loved your Coke machine! What you said, made me remember that I used to play a lot with little pans pretending to make food to my dolls and today I also love cooking for family and friends! Interesting, I never thought about it! Thanks!

In thinking about my childhood, I spent a lot of days just playing outside. I really enjoyed, when I learned how, reading. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother and her sister, who lived together. I looked forward to going to town on Saturday and if I was lucky, getting a comic book to read. I can remember the first time I went to a book store and got a copy all my own of The Bobsey Twins. Books took me to places I could only dream of. As I got older whenever anyone was looking for me, they only had to look as far as the living room chair or my bed. There I was with a book in my hand. Today, I still enjoy reading. My work is with struggling elementary students to help them develop their skills and instill a love of reading.

Wow, thanks for sharing! Oh that vase--how much fun to get something from a place that doesn't exist! I really liked how you tied in the last 'artifact' with Steal like an Artist. When we know how we create we can always un-learn too! Very fun read!

One of the neat activities I tried once was to ask teachers their favorite books growing up and then to see how these in some ways influenced their careers and interests. For example, one person loved the Hardy Boys mysteries and taught hands-on science experiments--another loved Amelia Bedelia and worked with small kids and still had a love of poetic language to make up stories with the kids.
Thank you for sharing your gears that were in some untraditional shapes--I was seeing how these animal heads, bodies and legs might look put closer together like cogs in one big machine and it works, even if the bat and frog might be a little jumpy in the revolutions!

For me, one of the gears of my childhood was sidewalk chalk. Although I'm not particularly artistic, I would use the chalk to create roads and towns all over the driveways and parking lots near my house. This had an interesting effect -- it made me realize that the roads and towns are exactly what WE make them, nothing else. This central idea, that people build things, became an idea at the core of my being. Now, I just "make things up" and continue to build and build and build. I strongly believe this started with the gears of my childhood (of which sidewalk chalk was one) many years ago!

Photo credit:

It was fun reflecting back on what really inspired me as kid. Not surprisingly, toys seemed to evoke the strongest emotional reaction.

My gear can be found here:
http://www.vikischrager.com/gears-of-my-childhood

I built all the Thunderbirds Are Go models, and hung them from my my bedroom ceiling with string.

My favorite object from my childhood was a Fisher-Price Movie Viewer. This was a handheld personal movie viewer which you cranked by hand and pointed at a light source for illumination. It had replaceable cartridges that each contained a few minutes of footage. These cartridge contained clips of PBS kid's shows, such as Sesame Street and various cartoons. Since the mechanism was manually operated, you could control the playback speed by turning the crank. I would sit there for hours, turning that crank fast, and then slow, to the point where I was watching frame-by-frame. I would then sit on a single frame and just study it, scanning the whole image for as many details as possible, and then I would repeat the whole process in reverse, watching The Cookie Monster regurgitate cookie fragments until they amalgamated into a complete cookie. I loved the sound of the mechanism as it was turned. Varying the speed of the crank was like playing rhythm on an exotic mechanical instrument.

I finally got curious about how the mechanism worked and cracked open one of the cartridges. Inside was a fascinating mechanism with a gear and loops. Most importantly, I recognized that the film contained within was the same gauge as the one that my uncle's projector used: Super 8. Upon discovering this, I borrowed my uncle's projector, cracked open the several Movie Viewer cartridges I owned and spliced them together onto a master reel. I played this reel over and over, each time the film unfailingly break and spool off the projector and spill onto the floor. I would then have to splice it back together and re-spool it. When it was projected, the order of clips would be rearranged. With each successive re-splicing, the juxtapositions would become more incongruous and amusing. Eventually, I would randomly cut up the film into strips of varying lengths and splice them back together in random order. My friends and I would delight in watching Burt and Ernie mutate into Daffy Duck and then abruptly cut to The Three Stooges smacking each other around.

It was this experience with the Fisher-Price Movie Viewer that started my obsession with the moving image and put me on the path toward my career as as first a film/video/media artist. And when I first started teaching middle school students, I created a found footage video assignment based on these experiences called Cut + Paste Video, where students assembled video collages from a variety of disparate video clips. That shutter of the Fisher-Price Movie Viewer, like the gears from Seymour Papert's childhood, keep on turning in my head to this day.

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I got the biggest kick out of this! I used to look at JCPenney catalogs with my brother. We'd huddle together on the couch under the same blanket like it was story time, but I don't recall attaching a mythology to the models -- er, "characters." I think what I love most is that you took something that exists for advertising and sales purposes and completely transformed it.

My dad made the mistake of introducing me to adhesive tape in those early years before the classroom took center stage. I can’t remember the context of our first meeting, but I do remember falling in love. Scotch tape, particularly the matte “Magic” flavor, might as well been a favorite crayon.

I fixed it! Tragically I took this picture last week.

In my mind, there was nothing tape couldn’t make or fix. It was accessible, refillable, impermanent, and instant. First I played conventional and incorporated it into my paper crafts. Then I started to wonder what else tape could stick to. One Christmas, I decided that I too could participate in the gift-giving tradition.

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It got even more out of hand when my dad showed me how to roll a piece of tape so it can sit sandwiched between two objects.

While my experiments with tape don’t seem to have impacted my ability to reason mathematically or master the written word (I fell behind in these subjects and was assigned a reading tutor), I like to think no amount of Goo Gone could slow the development of that special skill in which we weigh how seemingly separate and unlike ideas might work together.

It occurred to me today that I spent a lot of time from 4 or 5 years on climbing trees, including moving form one tree to the next (or onto roofs) whenever I could without dropping down to the ground. Now I have to think about whether that was a Papertian thing. If not, I would ask: What different kinds of learning come from different kinds of childhood focus? For example, I know someone who dropped in on old people in her neighborhood and made cross-generational friendships....

Later, having read Fred Bartels's post on tree climbing, I can see a Papertian thing in climbing, namely, exploring possible routes forward. In recent years I have been teasing out senses of scaffolding that might be traced back to the tree climbing times of my early years -- see http://pjt111.wordpress.com/2012/10/30/scaffolding/

I just posted about climbing trees but not being sure it counts as a Papertian gear (http://discuss-learn.media.mit.edu/t/week-1-activity/636/122) Then I perused other postings and found another tree-climber!

(I led my younger siblings into tree climbing and one day my 6 y.o. brother, climbing by himself, fell and was in traction for weeks with a broken femur...)

When I think deeply, I remember 4 things that I engaged with so much,

1. Lego Bricks; I remember that Lego was one the most interesting things to me because I first used to make things by its instructional pictures (in the package) then destroy it and rebuild it from beginning but the second time a new thing, they were interesting to me because they were a great tool for creating my imagination, and bring it to existence and create and build everything I like, actually as a tool they have broad context that make it a rich tool in your hands.

2. Kettle: The thing that I remember like flashes in my mind because I was 3 or 4 when I was play with it was kettles, maybe it is the reason I love tea and coffee these days:

3.Video Games (teenage mutant ninja turtles) on Micro Genius: Although I may even play games on Xbox and other new consoles now, the very first video game I remember was this game, I loved to play it with my brother, the two things that inspire me to play it so much was that they were 2 player to finish a mission together on the same side with each others cooperation, (They were not against each other) so it make me feel the solidarity and group work, the second thing was that they were kind of heroes for me when I was child, they were four different characters with positive vision to help others and they had power to win, this game let me to play them, besides they were a bit funny and the original cartoon was interesting to me.

4. Electronic Components: I remember that I was destroying all my electronic toys (not all but many of them), and the main reason was to hack inside the toys to find out how the actually works and what is inside of them, most of the times I ended up with electronic components that I took them out then make new stuff with them which I think they were meaningful to myself only

My object from my childhood that I can say was always around me was a tape recorder. Old school tape recorder with a handle and one speaker with a built in mic. I could use it to record myself doing interviews with family, music off records, Arsenio Hall show performances, In Living Color and Transformer cartoons. (You have to remember that portability was the name of the game. Handheld TV’s and VCRs were crazy expensive. ) Once watching it I could form the scene in my mind. My sister and my cousin would do news reports. I remember a car trip from MD to Florida and my cousin and I did a radio station with commercials and music. And check-ins from where ever we were on the road. I can see that the love of creating sound dramas started the first time I realized that I could record my voice and play it back. I can look back and see that it has been a part of my life since I can remember. Collecting records, DJing, blending records, making up your own lyrics to songs, finding sound effects to send your recordings over the top, using a four track for the first time. Listening and analyzing music. I can look at podcast I listen to and I see why I listen so intently to it. Once I got my first Walkman I could listen to my tapes but I still needed to the original to record.

I feel the same. I have a box of old tapes and I know I will find a gem of yesteryear in them once I sort them out.

Okay...a little late to the party! Here is a link to my discussion of an object...and in my case a person. http://thinkingthroughmylens.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/making-biscuits/

Hope I am posting in the right place!

Kim

Interesting to hear how you provided students a way to experiment and create by putting together video clips from different sources, too.

I used to have this very set. It inspired me so much as a child.

Lego! Me too! I find it was one of the first non-gendered toys I could get access too. I loved that it was about creating and configuring! The kettle is such an interesting object. I have no memory of this but my mother tells me that I played with pots and pans lots and explored the kitchen when I could. Kinds in N.America these days are sheltered from real objects, and are instead given plastic toys, but I think interaction with real objects helps build a curiosity.

I want to find one o these. There is something so amazing about this toy. Magic. One of my first memories if my dad coming back from a trip to Germany to bring back slides and a projector. Slides that would act like a movie to tell a story.

I have struggled and struggled to think of one object, but all of the objects that I think of—a plush raccoon, a pile of leaves, a careful collection of acorns, books about living in the wilderness—were all facets of my fascination with nature and the wild. I remember carefully collecting all the leaves in my backyard one winter into one pile against the corner of the fence, imagining it was snow that I was shoveling into a pile. (I lived where there was never snow, so as a child I had never seen it, and imagined I was missing out!) I also remember gathering all the acorns I could find into a giant horde under one tree, examining their colors, textures, shape, and weight, feeling the holes, taking the caps off and putting them back on, and then leaving the whole pile to some fortunate squirrel (with a note, just in case the squirrel was experiencing some understandable suspicion: "Deer skwirrl thees nuts ar not poyzin." I also translated my note into pictorial language, in case the squirrel hadn't done well in reading class).

I am still forever collecting objects found from nature—a buckeye with a particularly interesting shape, a grey stone that turns green when wet, a feather from a species I don't yet recognize. I think it's this habit of collecting and treasuring natural objects that is most like my "gear". The objects I find concentrate, focus, and recall my emotional connection to the natural world, just as they did in my childhood.

I don't remember a single toy thta captured me, I know I was fascinated with Lincoln Logs and would build houses and forts, I loved baking in my Easy Bake Oven, or spending time at my mothers school in the corner playing with clay as she taught her classes. My father showing us how to build roads and dams in the yard. We were always encourged to be creative, to build and experiment. Guess we were pretty lucky.

This is a hard question, but the answer is beach plays, I guess.
I used to go to the beach a lot with my parents. And there, I´ve seen a lot of different things happening that made me experience "how small things work" and "how these things coexist". For example, building castles with sand, I´ve learned that if it´s too dry, it´s not going to work. On the other hand, if it´s too close from the water, one wave would destroy your buildings.
I remember that when I was older (11 to 15), in school studying physics or math, I´ve always thought: "hmmm... that´s why the sand behaves this way" or "that´s why the water behaves this way".

@ecl I didn't say it in my post, but my creations often involved Lincoln Logs, too. I will never forget the smell of the wood. Even after 20 years!

"Once upon a time a child lived in a black, grey and white country. He played around with his pencils, sketching on white sheets of paper. He imagined how the world would be if he could only use different flavors other than black, grey and white.

He eventually felt so sad that a tear spilled from his eye, reaching out his cheek and flying to the ground.

But a young fair lady, looking at his affliction, touched the tear and an awesome, colorful rainbow sprang from the drop and the world around the young child became red, green, yellow, blue, orange and full of all the colors his wild imagination had ever dreamed of."

**Have you guessed the object?
Hope you liked the story, and colorful learning to everybody!**

Rocks. I love them. When I was growing up I studied rocks and minerals in books, collected them whenever I could, and imagined how they came to be. It was a way for me to learn about world geography and what was underground. It gave me a sense of geologic time. They were my connection to dinosaurs, those huge mysterious creatures that I could never truly know.

I created a rock collection. It was made up of my personal favorites both purchased and discovered. I organized them based on color, or texture, or the story of its finding. I brought them into kindergarten for show and tell. I cherished them as my trophies. I don't remember which Astronaut visited my 3rd grade class but I still think about the moon rock he let me hold.

Owen

I enjoyed your blog post very much. This was clever, captivating, engaging... I especially liked how you tied the four images together. Thanks! Myra

The ball

In a similar exercise to this, in the last edition, I mentioned other gear from my childhood , which was really important.
Still, this time I need to mention the ball as gear of my childhood. After all, I am Brazilian and this year the soccer world cup is in Brazil.

The performance of a boy in soccer, or their street versions, is something highly valued among Brazilian childrens, and be valiant is especially important to the gaucho , the southern Brazilian.
I've been a "gurizinho ", a gaucho boy very thin, less than the boys of my age. So much more bravery than soccer skills was necessary in my childhood...

I and my buddies were poor children and had no quality toys, and was not always available balls minimally like a soccer ball. Nevertheless, I and my comrades invent many ball games, structured like sports but pretending something unusual, occupying the spaces that we could, as gaps in land or unfinished buildings.

Was with the ball that I learned that I can have personal victories over who is bigger than me, and also that defeat is never complete.

Comrade, you brought me good memories of similar experiences!

I love Ed Emberly's Drawing Book. So glad that popped up here.

I have read Papert's essay. In my childhood, I loved 1) a shadow picture and 2) stars.

1) My mother showed many shadow pictures and made shadow puppet for children in my hometown, then I played with her.

2)The reason why I loved and interested stars was that, if I walk then stars follow me.

These things tells me…what I can see is not its true essence, but something apparent. So, I loved knowing science in my childhood, maybe.

I've read through many of the other responses, and I'm finding it difficult to choose one hallmark toy as my "gears". But as I think of all the toys from my youth, the ones that stand out most to me were those that I performed with -- whether my dollhouse, my Playmobil castle, my puppets, or my costume chest.

That costume chest, in particular, held me over well into my teens. Filled with dance costumes from my mom's childhood and castoffs from Halloweens past, I loved to dress up and put on shows, whether for my parents or by myself. I don't consider myself a particularly theatrical person in my adulthood, but I have been very conscious of how I present myself aesthetically since as long as I can remember, and in my adolescence my DIY-bleached jeans and homemade t-shirts became my costumes, adapting to serve the needs of my self-expression du jour.

Now, I find myself reading more and more in my spare time about subversive representations of gender and power through makeup and clothing. I am always looking for meaning in presentation. The ability to transform oneself through styling alone still fascinates me and is never too far from my mind.

Hi Sandy, I loved your Padlet Wall and you made a wonderful scratch project about LCL. I found your essay on secret spaces very intriguing and engaging. I am wondering if there were any other common elements about each of these places that established your sensory and emotional relationship.

My stuffed Bunny was the way that I processed and understood human personality types, characters, and movement. Bunny was the ultimate shape-shifter: it could be male or female, my grandmother or my child, or a vagrant who needed a warm place to stay at night. It could dance in a maniacal way, or creep slowly like a striped burglar. I used it to create stories, amalgamations of my family’s life and my experience at school, with scenarios I had seen on TV, from Looney Tunes to Murphy Brown.

My interest in observing people and social interactions translated to an interest in theater in High School. I was in a production of The Crucible when I was in 9th grade (I got to play Abigail, who encourages the other girls in the town to dabble in witchcraft, has an affair with the main character, etc.) My English teacher coached me in playing “evil” in a subtle way – not threatening the other characters with anger, but with sinister, smiling quiet. It was so powerful to play with different interpretations of characters because it was like inventing and learning about someone through stories, and translating that into body movements and gestures, much like I had done with Bunny.

I’m now an artist and I make watercolor and ink drawings of anthropomorphized animals. The drawings are highly narrative, and some of the best moments are the deep moments of play; diving into a character through their expression, posture, body type, etc., much the way that I played with Bunny as it would tap my other stuffed animals on their shoulder and hide, or deliver grand speeches and thank an audience of two.

I want to share some thoughts on three childhood objects, so it is a bit long (full report is in my blog here: http://thingswork.blogspot.co.il/2014/03/learning-creative-learning-week-1.html)

The main question that came up from this exercise, for me, was: aren't we missing on the role of models/teachers/guides/experts when we talk about 4 "P"s? Peers, after all, are equal partners, but what about teachers?

When I played with mechanical Lego, I first built the models as they were described step by step in the elaborated booklets that came with the kit. Only after, I tried to change the design to try out new ideas. If I got the Lego without the instruction booklet, would I ended up with as much knowledge and ideas for experimenting?

Same experience with regards to my first computer (a Sinclair ZX Spectrum) - to get games, I had to code them in, copying line by line from a printed magazine. This is how I learned to code. Would I learn as much without these examples (made by experts)?

These are the gears of MY childhood. I got a few Mechanical Lego kits, more complex as I grew older. The kits came with very elaborated instructions booklets, which guided me through building a few different designs from each kit.

The kits contained gears of various sizes and shapes, including the flat gears we see here, in this forklift model. The kits also included shafts, fittings, joints and other parts, that enabled me to experiment with mechanical engineering, designing various simple machines, testing them out and improving (similar to what Mitch Resnick describes as "imagine-create-play-share-reflect" spiral, but with less sharing, as this was an individual activity mostly).

I especially liked to build steering mechanisms (you can see one in the picture, on the bottom-left side), which turned a circular motion into a straight motion, and that straight motion into change in angle of the wheels. When the vehicle drove and i steered it, I learned how the vehicle body acted when steering while driving forward and backward. Understanding these motions, not only in my mind, but also in my body, so to say, helped a lot when i learned to drive and had to deal with parallel parking.

Maps were a big part of my childhood. I had an atlas that featured maps of every country in the world and key information about each country's government, natural resources and cultures. From a young age I was always curious about exploring new places. By opening up my maps I could be transported to anywhere in the world instantly. As I've grown up, the maps I've collected represent the cities and countries I've been fortunate enough to travel to. They remind me of my passion for traveling and the many memories I've collected along the way.

I grew up next to a dry stream which probably saw many years of prehistoric human activity. Along the stream you could find many flint stone tools like those. I collected them, tried to use them and make more (which is very hard). In "gears of my childhood" the author speaks about how his love for gears based a model in his mind that later helped him cope with math. I do not know if I can find such a straight relation about flint stone tools. I do know this: tools can be created wherever you are, whatever you have.

When I was 12 or 13 I got my first computer – it was Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I learned to program it in Basic, and created all sorts of graphic and sound based programs. Getting games for it was not simple at all – I could buy games on tape cassettes, but that was expensive, so a few friends bought and shared printed magazines (no internet in the 80s) which had printed code of various games. I had to type in the code, run it, fix it and run it again. This experience taught me how to program.

@ofer
the ZX Spectrum was the first computer even for me. I was 19 when it was released. Great fun and great learning experience. I had great fun and great learning experience, my first steps in coding that helped me in become a tinkerer (at that time didn't know about the word "tinkering" that I learned during LCL1)

Story of my needle and thread

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The needle and thread stayed on and prompted me to observe the world around. A new relationships with other objects with needle and thread was founded. Dry leaves were sewn ,embroidery on paper appeared and I even tried to poke holes with needle in अाटा (bread dough) and took the thread out. Forms of needles and threads changed gradually and I was still joining things together, making connections, creating new forms and adding beauty. My neighbors constantly got curious questions from me and clarifications and requests to teach me what they did with needle and thread. Crochet,jewelry design and other innovative handcraft like book making became my passion as years passed by. Textile and fashion school taught me various forms of traditional embroidery, saw how threads interlocked with needles in frame and performed Warp-Weft play to make fabrics, and actively engaging in shaping fabrics into garments without being visually dominating in the design. As an educator I kept reminding myself to actively engage in collaboratively shaping new forms of learning with youth and not be very dominant teacher in the classroom.

To observe,connect make and add beauty are at the core which is a life long endeavor and exploration. It may sometimes be the soldering iron and the wire joining electronic components together to make circuit boards, other times it becomes a 3d printer with ABS filament to make personalized products, or many a times it just stays with the needle and thread to make soft circuits with microcontrollers

I love maps. It always made me curious about unfamiliar places. When I was a kid I wanted a map where I could see the faces of people residing across the world.

A garage full of fun!

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And more words here at my blog post

It took me some time to realise that the gears of my childhood were WORDS; breaking them into syllables, combining them and recombining them. I wrote about it here: http://bit.ly/OULYyd. image http://www.flickr.com/photos/kacey/4308127897

My current memory:
I did not find a love or disdain of fly fishing. I chose to read and draw and be. It is the shared time with family members along the river bank, or in car rides to and from the cabin, that I now treasure. Unlike my older sister Jennie who ended up making a living out of fly fishing, I became a dedicated fisherperson only when my little brother would venture back to the parked car to tell me his catch number. I would then put the book or drawing pad down to go out on a mission to surpass. It is in my later years that I realize the minor details of the catch. The study of entomology, the cycle of life; and yes I tied some Woolley Buggahs that caught plenty Rainbow Trout!

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Gears from My Childhood

It is funny. I read Paupert's affinity for gears at age two, and my first reaction is, "Gosh, I don't remember age two. I certainly didn't dream of gears. He must be brilliant. I must be no one important or of worthy sharings because I must not be a prodigy like him."

And then I pause. Gears no. Color yes. I have always seen light. I remember squinting my eyes and seeing the color spectrum floating like molecules all around me in little 'u' shapes. I told my mom, "But yes, yes you can see air."

Whether or not you can 'see air' this was an ah-ha experience. I still look for the rainbows. It is funny. We are all so different. We all have a slice of prodigy.

My parents always had a computer at home (i'm born in 1981, so we had a Commodore 64, a Vic 20, etc.). When I was approximately 8 years old, my mother (who worked in a school) brought for the summer a (brand new) computer, the one with the blue and white screen, not like the old black and orange we had.

I've passed the summer playing at some games on the computer, like “nibble” :

Source : http://shiar.nl/projects/dos/nibbles.gif

One day, my father told me "aren't you bored to always play the same levels?". Then he asked me where I would like to put the obstacles (like walls).

After this, i saw him doing a few manipulations and he created a new level! I was thinking : "he his a magician!" That summer, I understood how it was powerful to know programming. I understood that there's no limit about what you can do with a computer when you know how to speak with it (it's a bit esoteric!). We were at the end of the 80's, a lot of my friends didn't even had a computer.

Now, I'm a teacher in web development and I try to transmit this feeling of power to my students!

What a nice surprise to hear from you. Thank you for your comments!

Our Gears: http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/19795078/

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Wow!!!! This is amazing.

Whaoo Ana,

Amazing. Sorry, I missed to send you my gears.

Play with dolls was my favorite activity in childhood. But I really liked when I had the possbility to make my own paper box house. I did like the boxes. It wasn't so sofisticated like this one in the picture, because I imagined all the things out/inside the box, according to the moment of the playing, for example, I could imagine a house If I wanted or I could imagine a school too, If I wanted to play as a teacher. So the possiblity to change roles according to my imagination it was amazing when I was playing with dolls. But, actually, the best part it was when I had a friend to share the imagination with me. I used to be a leader in this games. I think this kind of playing influenced my adult life because I continue playing a role as a leader (I'm a teacher) and I continue like to imagine lots of projects, diferent activities in class and also change the roles everytime I assume it's a good oportunity to experience a new thing. Thank you to this activity because I've never stopped to think about how the games in my childhood have been influenced my adult life as the way it is.

I loved LEGO. I could create things, be myself pirate, astronaut, scientist or anyone, and tell a story.

I grow to be an inventor and computer scientist. It is surprising to find out LEGO experience of Design, Build & Experiment, Communicate & Collaborate, Persevere similar to Programming experience.

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One of the first memories I have is of pulling around a wooden duckie. My grandmother worked at a toy factory in town and we always had the rest wooden toys on the communist block. I remember being so fascinated with how it's head moved as I pulled it along. The second memory I have is related to postcards which in me developed a fascination of places outside of my own. At first they came from my aunt living in Canada, and then when my father immigrated and waited for our papers. Postcards would arrive from him from another place that was to be my future. To this day I carry a curiosity, sprung forth from this duck, about how things work and come together. My wonderlust too goes back to these postcards and the act of moving across the globe as a young child. I've combine these two ideas into one illustration.

Maps for me too, but as I got a but older. I would spin the globe we had and land on a place and imagine a world other than my own realities.

I love your photos and memories and that this activity brought you to reflect on them! I'm still trying to remember - your story inspired me.

well as a kid I was given a big bike of my older cousin and I happily accepted because I was told that riding a big bike meant that I was a grown-up kid. Well now I know the truth. None the less my bike was my freedom, i felt paralyzed with it.
Oh boy! and was I good at riding it, I was excellent. By age of six I was riding it down the stairs, skidding and making flowers with tyre marks (thought my crush was not that impressed )
In someway it gave direction to my life.
Today my bike is replaced with motorbike

One of my favorite gifts as a child was a spin art set. It was basically a turntable that you put a small square sheet of paper on and dropped paint on to form splatters and swirls. I loved that it looked different each time you tried it and that it was both messy and beautiful. I tended not to like art projects that were "supposed" to look like something so the randomness of it was really exciting to me. My greatest disappointment was that it was kind of a "one trick pony." You were supposed to use one size paper, a few colors of paint and there weren't a lot of ways that you could play with it and make it different that I could see.

Thirty something years later, I became friends with a tinkering, making scientist who rigged up a giant spin art contraption out of a drill and oversized canvases. I had so much fun making huge spin art in his shed, bringing along my favorite colors and watching them splatter all over. Here was spin art with room to play. That's when I realized the power of tinkering.

One of those canvases is attached.

My favourite childhood toy was a small purple teddy bear: Dan Dee (that I could pronounce Dandi). He was a present from a nurse that had to give me shots for my cold as a little girl. So I wouldn’t cry, she gave me Dan Dee, a precious gift. He was my first stuffed toy, as in the beginning of the 90’ they were quite rare in Romania. With his dark eyes, pink nose and lovely bow, Dan Dee gave me a lot of joy. I liked how fluffy he was and his joyful colour. He soon became my favourite and all the pretty puppets were left aside by me, the 5 year old girl.

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I used to play with him alone and then together with my older brother. He liked Dan Dee, but he didn’t think he was so right for a boy so we plaid all kinds of heroic adventures with him. I loved that Dan Dee could have different roles and he always smiled. I remember once I dressed him up as a princess. I gave him a dress from a doll and even some earrings. He was so sweet. As the years went by, I plaid less with Dan Dee, but he always had a place in my room and would be there for me. As I moved away and grew, I gave my toys to other children and Dan Dee was one of the last to be given to another child to play with.

Dan Dee was important for me because he represented something new, something soft and volatile. He could play different roles and give me comfort. From that moment I became a fan of stuffed toys. Even now my favourite word is “fluffy” and it reminds me of stuffed toys and cuddly baby blankets. Just as I am writing I realise that I always liked stuffed toys and I still do. I also like “fluffy” people and conversations. That means for me people that are warm, friendly and open. And conversations that are filled with passion, meaning and sincerity.

Dan Dee was flexible, welcoming and joyful. And those are also things I appreciate. So many things started with a teddy bear, Dan Dee. Thank you for the chance to become aware of this.

Objects of My Childhood
by MaryLee Heller
25 Mar 14
LCL MOOC w/ MIT

An important object of my childhood was books. Since my dad was in the US Navy, we moved around a lot. Even after he retired, we continued to move every two to three years. By the time I graduated from high-school I had attended somewhere between eleven and fourteen schools, if you include the fact that I was in preschool/childcare before I was a year old. Obviously, I felt alone. There wasn't time to establish relationships with people. If I did make friends, they were gone all-too-soon. It didn't help that my parents were often physically or emotionally unavailable much of my life. So, I turned to books.

Books became my friends. I could turn to books for relationships. I could get to know 'new' people with a safe distance that didn't offend them. The relationship could move at my own pace. Most of all, I could observe them thoroughly and completely. This also helped me to develop my own social skills and thought patterns. I'm also grateful for how books taught me to consider that other people could have motives, either good or bad, that are different than my assumptions.

Best of all, when I needed to escape, or feel in control of my world, I could open a book of my choice and be where I wanted to be; with people I wanted to be with; doing what I wanted to be doing. Even as we moved and were encouraged to dispose of belongings for the sake of 'traveling light', there was always a library to find a book that I could return later.

Books also became tools of education and hope in my life. Book upon book, experience upon experience, thought upon thought, they all come together to form a virtual staircase that I've learned to use to climb to new areas in life. If I was depressed, I could climb from dark despair back into the light. I went from understanding to understanding, improving jobs, gaining the ability to teach and share what I've learned with others, and encouraging me to connect with real people now. Coming full circle, I've begun to write my own books and share what I know, feel, and experience with others be it literally or figuratively.

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How wonderful that your parents were able to take a leap of faith an buy you a piano.

I would have to say my object(s) are smart devices. The knowledge I could ever ask for and they opened the door for my creativity and social activity. That was when I knew I wanted to do something with technology.

Thanks It was hard to get the "one" gear that changed me.

Honestly, it was one of my most successful media art projects with middle school students. It's funny to think that I can trace it back to a beloved childhood toy. But, I bet if we really reflect, we can trace back many things that are fruitful and meaningful in our adult life to experiences from our childhood. And many of these would involved toys, I'd bet.

They are for sale all over E-Bay. I am planning to buy some for myself. And what I would really like to do is shoot some new Super-8 footage of my own and replace the films in the cartridges with my own.

My first guitar completely opened up a new world for me. There was direct and immediate feedback based off the amount of time I put into traditional practice (finger exercises, chords, etc.), but also a rewarding feeling from just "noodling" and creating a new "riff" or "song".

The duality of experiencing joy from playing solo OR in a group was also very liberating. To this day, playing guitar remains an activity I can do solo, or in a group setting and receive a sense of relaxation that is unparalleled.

The idea of a "toy" that can provide this level of joy whether you choose to follow the rules (playing a solo within a scale) or just "jamming" makes its appeal everlasting for me. This has influenced my view on how to balance my own life, adding a bit of the "rules" and a bit of "jamming" into the mix as too much of either can "spoil" a song.

I feel so included! I love it, @Pagliuso.

Very nice story. This just brought up for me as I was watching slides together with my brother on the projector as children. It was so nice and I wanted to see the story again and faster. Such a warm feeling!

Thank you Alisha. Good question, gave me a chance to reflect further and gain some additional insight. All those spaces were small. They were all created new or were areas that we remixed and used in a new way. Most of them were outside. They all required collaboration from others and all where design and used for a specific purpose, no wasted space and very simple. All of these elements, I am still seeking today in my life and bring me great satisfaction when I find all of these elements present in any given situation or personal space.
And some day this will be my dream home: Notice the wheels, giving my the ability to live anywhere and relocate on a whim! Funny, now that I look at this picture, it just occurred to me that this tiny house resembles that playhouse my father first built for me when I was 3! I guess I am going full circle!

Here is my Padlet wall for LCL2 - including my Week 1 Activity.
Jenny
LCL2 Jenny Kostka

I spent most of my childhood making do with my notebook and loads of writing and drawing. Coming from an Indian middle class family, where it was not uncommon to live on the first floor of a house, while having your cousins on the floor below, I always had companions to play with and sometimes, to be annoyed with. The childhood gears I particularly remember feeling fondly for are:

1) A cardboard computer that we made with my cousins. This wasn't very fancy, and I am not even sure if my sister remembers this TV(I made her sign up to the course), it was a small cardboard box that opened and closed, but it was our computer, and it was fun.

2) Clay. Not play-doh, but real brown clay that we worked with during art classes after school. I learnt how to make a hollow fish - basically make two oyster like curved discs, but only more curved, actually I think two curved discs like hollow half-coconut shells, put them together and smoothen the end where they meet, leaving a small hole for the mouth, around which we then rolled out thin cylinders of clay for the lips of the fish. It didn't end there. We made the eyes of the fish on a round piece of clay which was then semi-pierced with pen refills of varying diameters. So, we'd keep our used refills and use them to pierce the round discs to get several concentric circles, and there it was, our pretty fish with dreamy eyes. We also learnt how to make other snimals and tinsel, once we even made a cast with plaster of paris for a mural of Goddess Durga, and went on to make our own clay murals of the Goddess. Working with the Arduino has somehow always brought back fond memories of clay.

3)Kolam powder. As a young child, besides being mostly curious and confused, I also spent a vast amount of my time wanting to be a grown up. So, imitating everything my parents did and pretending to make grown up decisions was not unusual. My mum used to draw these patterns outside our house everyday in the morning with white rangoli poweder, and on occasions with a mix of white and red powder(from bricks). I spent a lot of time trying to master the art of drawing with powder. While I was okay with chalk and other solid stationery like pens and pencils, the trick of mastering the use of something as slippery and difficult to hold on to, like powder, was hard. Besides that, the lines had to be thin and straight and the dots had to be proportionally placed. I think I learnt a lot about geometry just through kolam.

I can't just pick one.

Tracing paper - Because my mother was a seamstress she always had a stash of tracing paper in our kitchen. I loved to trace pictures from the newspapers or magazines and add word bubbles or thoughts to the images. I was always surprised by how much better the tracing looked than my own rendition. Perhaps this was my first experience with Remixing.

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Speak & Spell: This was one of my favorite toys. I loved how it talked to you and I spent many nights under my covers with earphones spelling away into the wee hours of the morning. This to me was my first computer. It provided a long of things electronic that lasted through the years.

Aruna, can you tell me a bit more about the Kolam powder tradition. Did the drawings in power have special significance to your mom or your family. I have never hear of this and am absolutely fascinated by the geometry and skill.

I had one of those and I loved it so!

Wow! So many hours of my childhood spent with the Sears and JcPenney catalogues. I wish that was still apart of childhood.

As a child, the Apple IIe had a great influence on me. My elementary school had a few Radio Shack TSR-80's, but having my own computer opened up a new world of possibilities. My parents would never purchase any games, but I remember the day my older borrowed a book of BASIC programs from the library. We methodically typed in pages of programs, line-by-line, working through countless syntax errors and typos. The thought of making our own games was fascinating and worth the hours of tedious typing and debugging. Even though the games were text and the monitor was green, the sense of accomplishment made the games fun.

Overtime, we became more familiar with the BASIC syntax and were able to modify the games and even write our own simple games. I remember using graph paper to draw out pictures and mapping them to the screen using "plot" commands. Being able to create something on the computer was so engaging and I'm sure we still leverage the mental models we formed during those times.

I grew up with tinker toys as a young tot, but the most interesting objects were around the farm tools and machines like our irrigation pump motor that I had to turn off with a wrench which was a bit intimidating. We also had an old fashioned water pump we pumped by hand for well water for drinking. We also had a rototiller and an old fashioned wooden wool wheel to turn wool into yarn.

Cecilia, I do not know if you listen to radio lab but it is a wonderful podcast often related to science. There was a recent show that included a fascinating piece about lefthandedness. The whole podcast is fascinating, but the piece I think you might be interested in starts around 40 minutes in. Here is the link: what's left when youre right.

When I was 5 years old my parents bought me a huge yellow tub of LEGOS for Christmas. I spent hours in my room creating buildings, cars, and other objects out of the LEGOS. I would even use the big yellow bucket as a display for my creations. I would borrow my sister's big pink bucket of LEGOS whenever I ran out of my own. I think what fascinated me the most about LEGOS was that I could build anything I imagined. If I wasn't satisfied with my creation, I could always take it apart and start over. I remember thinking about the sewing machine my older sister had that I wasn't allowed to touch, and building my own out of LEGOS.
When I was 12 I began attending the Computer Clubhouse in Tacoma, WA and was amazed at how many different sets of LEGOS they had available. I took an interest in the LEGO robotics, and even began teaching at the middle schools as a junior and senior in high school.

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My parents had an hotel so I used to play outside with lots of children and foreigners but I remember three objects of my childhood
At that moment all good Spanish girls had a blonde doll called Nancy I never had. What I had was a black doll called Fanny (1) which I liked very much and that made me feel I was different.
Then, the classic, I played a lot with Exin castillos (2), a sort of Spanish Lego, of course
And finally, my bicycle (3) that teach me If you want you Can even with your knees completely destroyed!

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I think that on that days were more difficult to the parents buy things and maybe, because this, it was a little more difficult for children change "toys" over and over. What do you think?

Great post! Thank you for participating!

I don’t know if there is a special object, that impacted my childhood, but I do know for sure that building huts in trees was definitely my favorite activitiy.
I would often do it with friends, for several days and weeks, and I can still remember this rush of adrenaline when we would start the process. First step was to pick the place; we would go find the trees that looked like the most interesting for us. Usually I remember that they were not the one adults would pick for different parameters (practicality, strength etc.) but the ones that gave us the greatest sense of freedom, away from adults, surrounded by fields and forests. They had to be secret and difficult to access. You understand: this project was our thing, our treasure.
Then we would start imagining the different parts of the “house” to be built in the trees. This often ended up in arguments, and lively discussions but the decisions were always made with pleasure at the end, as we were really eager to start.
The next step was to actually start building. We would run or bike away to find the best wood, and objects to build our castle: branches, leaves, ropes, baskets, linens… I remember clothes peg were really handy. Our mothers were always mad when we took a bunch ☺ haha
I clearly remember that in the end, when our castle was “finished” we would play in it 5 minutes, but the playing part was not nearly as fun as the building part. I was completely bored when done building, and so we would always find improvements to bring to our constructions, and imagine things we could do.

One thing interesting I noticed later on: my uncle had a hut built in a tree by professionals for their kids. It is beautiful and has a perfect rope ladder to climb it etc. But their kids never play in it.

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I think that it was a good idea for your mother to ask you if you would commit to study. That seems much better than a parent trying to force a child to learn. I also think you understood the piano was a privilege. I'm not sure if it is different today, but there are a lot more distractions today.

I wrote a similar reelection myself for my childhood gear. For me it was the community we were creating free and developing autonomy.

When I was a child I were used to play at my granparents house. They had a lot of strange objets like carillons and ornaments of their vacation trips. The one I loved more where a matriosca. I was fascinated about the fact that there was always a smaller doll one and that I could put them all one inside the other.

Kolam is an Indian tradition. it's also called rangoli, and probably a few other names too in Indian languages I don't know. It's freshly drawn in most houses everyday in the morning. Traditionally, kolam is seen as a sign of welcome, both as a pattern, and also because it is actually supposed to be drawn with rice flour, so that the ants and other insects can eat of the kolam. Probably a sign of togetherness among all species. I am not sure how many houses still use rice flour. In the city, most houses use simple kolam powder, which is sort of grainy and white. The bigger the kolam, the more likely that there's an occasion in the house. While kolam is mostly drawn with white powder, rangoli is more colourful. Brick powder is also used to give a nice contrast to the white, on special occasions.

Sorry about the late reply, work kept me on my toes all week!

Matryoshka imitation dolls are also made by Indian wood craftsman. We have some at home!

This reminded me of the treehouses in Calvin and Hobbes! Would you happen to have any pictures of the houses you built? We often made houses using Indian cane mats that were strong, yet flexible and objects that would hold our house in place. We too were always a little at loss on what to do with the house once it was done, so it usually became the doll's house for a day or something like that.

I guess the subject of childhood that has shaped my life is: pencil and paper. I come from a family of limited financial resources, so I could not get all the toys that any child would dream. So, I drew and wrote everything I wanted, dreamed or imagined, from ice cream to a bicycle. Right now, when I need to think clearly, put aside my computer, mobile or tablet and I'm alone with a pencil and paper and my imagination.

A spring, a spring a marvelous thing.

Almost anything inside the house or outside the house was raw material for our childhood imaginations.

We played until dinner, ran back outside after dinner until we were called back at dusk by a familiar call from our home. We had time to think, to create, to design, to develop skills that we needed, and to improve our childhood inventions. We shared what worked and what did not work.

Our two-family house was small, but I had found a wonderful place to play while my mother prepared our meals, the stairway that began in the basement and led up to the apartment above ours.

Did I mention it was the Sputnik era?

One day, my dad came home with a slinky. I held one end of the slinky in one hand and the other end in the other hand and stretched my arms apart as far as they would go. But, there was still plenty of coil left to be stretched. I quickly jerked one end to see what would happen as the slinky “slinked” into my other hand.

The result was chaos and a tangled mess if the timing, angles, and tension were not just right. I ran to the stairs and spent hours trying to get my slinky to launch off the top step and move down step-by-step perfectly down to the bottom step. Not so easy, not so simple. Why did it stop? Or progressively skip steps and then slide down on its belly and tangle?

Slinky’s perfectly coiled spring often got stretched beyond its limit! The wire would become misshapen and refuse to recoil. But I had more questions and ideas for trials.

50 years later, I still have a slinky on my game shelf, this particular one was given to me by two MA NASA Challenger Teachers, Gisele Zangari and Caroline Goode. At the time I was involved in a professional development course based on the NASA curriculum titled: Toys in Space. In front of us were many of the toys from our childhoods, and yes, there was the slinky, now made out of plastic. The Shuttle crew had brought these toys into space to show how gravity would affect how they work. The teachers at the workshop played with each toy and talked about how they thought each toy would react in zero gravity. And then they watched the video of the NASA space crew lifting the slinky, extending the Slinky’s coils, playing with them, pushing then forward and backward and watching how they work. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX1uX_3ovyc

I did not know that on the backstairs as a child I was experimenting with Hooke's Law, spring physics, resisting forces, waves, and the science behind coil springs. I do know that I connected those experiences to my learning when these concepts were brought up in school. As a teacher for the last 40 years, I drew on the wonder and thinking involved in these childhood experiences to design innovative learning experiences for my students that combined inquiry, imagination and play, and content.

Aruna, I'm also a big fan of Calvin & Hobbes.
Laura, your story about the planning and building being more fun than playing with the finished "castle" reminds me of Will Wright talking about Sim City. At first they were surprised how much time and pleasure kids invested in designing their cities before actually running the simulations. Design and building is an important and satisfying phase in itself. That's when your imagination can roam freely. Reality can be a bit boring.

"if you want you can": it's a strong learning that came from a profound reflexion! Congrats

Hey!In México I played with Exin!!!

Really geraldiux64??? it was amaizing, itsn't?

Yes I loved it!!! It´s so nice to remember

I also have had a fascination with glass and also other transparent mediums. here is a video of the science of glass that i found when my child asked the simple question why she could see through but not walk through glass. http://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-is-glass-transparent-mark-miodownik

I've enjoyed reading about others object from childhood. I have noticed the absences of two of my and now my kids favs missing so I decided to post about them because I think their relevance might be overlooked. crayons and play-doh

Thanks to this course I have started blogging on my inspiring creative play site again. I welcome any comments or articles if you want to enhance the related discussion there too.

I recall this to be an early memory as well. The memory was triggered by your response and brought back sunny afternoons in my grandmother's 12th floor apartment overlooking the city.

My favourite childhood objects have been sports and movies.. sports considering cricket bat and ball.. while movies peeking,sneaking,capturing little bits of precious moments.I never enjoyed learning unless someone told it in a narrative story form. Hence the cricket commentaries and movies animated stories have always sticked around with me.I could easily skip school or skip studies or even skip any essential things for things I liked .I have grown up with these different forms of communities around these activies .I kept both these passion into my adult hood where I have always continued watching,playing,imagining,reading,blogging.thinking , idolizing,cursing,hating and loving ... the videos,audios,playing experience is things I remember from my childhood.

Well, It's been a while but Lego (wooden blocks) and matchboxes (small cars) are probably the toys that I remember most. I built projects that is now called "mixed-use", pretending I'm an architect. However what strikes me most is the "radio theater" I used to listened every morning. It was so professional and excellent that each story/play took me different place. It was great for imagination

I narrowed my favourite toys to three.
Lego: I had a large box of mismatched legos my mom had bought at at garage sale. I would make dog pounds. I made lego dogs, lego dog houses, an elaborate house for the people that would come apart at different levels so you could see the furniture I made for the inside. I made these over and over again. Each time more elaborate than the last. I was proud of making strong buildings that did not break easily and created stories for the dogs to go on adventures.
An encyclopedic dictionary- a dictionary that is about 5 inches thick. I received this as a present when I was 12. I still have it at 34. I looked up so many words. Sometimes I flipped through to find a new word I didn't know. It opened a whole world of learning.
A big tree: two big trees actually. One in my grandmother's yard and one at a lake my family would visit in the summer. I would climb these big trees and sit as high up as I could and watch the world below me.
I still love watching the world around me, I still look up words I do not know and I still create adventures for myself. I think what these three things have in common is that they offered me a way to explore and understand the world around me.

Yes, caramel sweets would be very similar - and just as tricky! I'm imagining quite a bit of pot scrubbing made worthwhile by the new/unexpected creations!

I love bicycles and they are such a great metaphor for learning. I sometimes talk about the four Ps in the context of learning to ride a bike.

As a kid I rummaged around bins full of scrap parts/electronics as my father serviced our bikes in the basement.
I vaguely remember clipping components off of circuit boards(what I thought were little cities at the time). I spent much of my time with PCBs like this one as my parents had upgraded the home security system a few times.

A few years after the PCBs were long gone I found an old Bell telephone in the same scrap pile that wouldn't work when plugged in.
After a bit of rummaging around at online at school and the library I found a webpage on how to rewire it to work on an updated landline.

If it wasn't for getting curious about old circuit boards and playing with tools I probably would've never fixed that phone or be working on the type of projects I do today!

Short version: Two gears, closely related-- BASIC and my piano.
Long version: Gears of My Childhood

Great story - thanks!

I loved my Speak & Spell as well. I used to try and get it to say bad words with its speak function and it would always reprimand me for trying it. Here is a link to a great bit that comedian Albert Brooks did with the Speak & Spell, way back on the old Carson show. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6uFHC9lfzk

I posted about my experience with a toy sand pail and trowel. After considering the reading materials, Hangouts, and other LCL experiences I wish I had learned the value of and embraced the concept of sharing earlier on. For my first few visits to the beach at a very early age, I saw the wind, other beachgoers, stray animals, and even the surf itself as obstacles or enemies to my ambitions. I wish I had thought to include others in my creative processes earlier on as a child. This reflection also reminds me of ways that I can do a better job of sharing as an adult (e.g., not just share my stuff for feeback and solicit cohorts for my projects but also better embrace what others share and have as interests as well as how projects and interests can network and become mutually beneficial). Thanks for this, LCL. A neverending gold mine, this place.

@James_B Your post prompted me to read a piece in the NY Times today called, "Hello, Stranger" on the benefits of connecting with others even in small ways: http://nyti.ms/1lMMCwY

One of the readers commented that she recently participated in World Book Night, where you give away copies of a book you love (she enjoyed connecting with others around the book she gave away in the local bus station). It does seem easier to connect around something of interest (as David Hawkins wrote in an insightful essay called "I, Thou, and It").

Your post prompts me think further about how to invite others into creative processes and projects. And like how you think creatively about potential collaborators (including the wind, sun, and stray animals, as well as beachgoers, whom you previously may have seen as obstacles).

Interesting how people asking others to take a photo is one small way people make a connection to people they don't know in public places (a potential connection lost by "selfies"!)

@natalie Something I have noticed is that sometimes when I try to get friends and family out to my local hackerspace I get a variety of hesitant reactions. Sometimes, people assume they will be intimidated by people in a tech-savvy environment that expect them to know how to build laser cutters and robots. I think some people even get an impression that a tech-oriented creative learning space is for braggarts to "rub it in" about seemingly inaccessible and secret technomancer knowledge. Despite openly expressing we seek creatives of all types and that it is a shared learning environment with no expectations besides basic respect for others, a few people have even told me they can't escape the feeling they are expected to show up with severe tech savvy or be prepared to keep their mouth shut unless to praise the tech savvy.

I bring this up because after reading the NY Times article you linked to, I saw a relation. The friends and family that I have successfully convinced to come out generally walk away relieved and glad they showed up. There have been meaningful connections and projects journeyed upon from this, and I am reminded of how hesitant subway-goers in the article were surprised to find themselves wrong about the assumption that sticking to themselves on the subway would be a more enjoyable experience.

This also reminds me of the first time I took a bus to visit a friend in DC. The bus ride took out a good half day for me, and my friend had recently sent me a huge artist's sketch book for my birthday. An hour into the bus ride, I got a wild urge to try something out. Seating was free and open on this bus, you basically could just sit in any empty seat you wanted. I spent the rest of the bus ride changing seats so that I could talk to new people each time before inviting them to help me put art in my sketch book. Most people declined, but a few people helped out and seemed to really enjoy the experience after it was over. One person sketched the bus driver for us, another person co-wrote a poem with me, and someone else offered to tell me a short story about their life so I could write it down. For me, the whole experience was therapeutic. I am much more comfortable online than in person, and it helped me break the ice and make a few meaningful connections.

I think my biggest takeaway here for both (getting more people into creative learning spaces and getting random people to collaborate) is that I need to invest in a lot of Starbucks gift cards.

Read Seymour Papert’s essay on Gears of My Childhood and write a short description about an object from your childhood that interested and influenced you.

For inspiration here are some additional examples from Sherry Turkle’s books Evocative Objects (2007) and Falling for Science (2008): Cello, Knots, Stars, Blocks...Find even more extra reading resources here.

Post your assignment by clicking the reply button on the bottom of this post. If you scroll up, you can see responses from other LCLers. If you want to engage in conversations or start new topics that aren't related to the assignment, you can have a look at the Introduction Category Page and jump into new topics, or start your own!

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I moved a post to a new topic: What is the next start date?

With this essay i reflected over my own experience on primary school. The most important learning experience i have had was in 6th grade, at chemistry lab. Our teacher show us how sulfuric acid disolve almost anything, and with that we learned not only chemistry, but also responsability. Now i'm studying chemical engineering because since that moment i was fascined by things that were amazing to see and powerful to manage. Chemical Engineering is awesome but very dangerous, so the moral dimension of this work has to be central in professional development.

When I was about 9 or 10, our next door neighbor in Cincinnati, Ohio worked at IBM. He invited me to come with him one day to see the computers. I have a vivid image of a row of huge mainframes. If I recall correctly, he didn't show me how anyone interacted with these machines. But I knew this was a special event--my first glimpse of a computer, up close and personal. In high school, my boyfriend showed me his punch cards he'd made in class. I didn't even know such a class existed until after the fact. No wonder discovering Seymour Papert's Mindstorms was rain after a decade-long drought.

I forgot all about spin art until seeing this. Great tale. Thanks for sharing.

You took me back a little bit with your image and story. Punch card machines are still out there in the wild but they are quickly dwindling out. They are fascinating to refurbish. This time ten years ago, I worked for a company that still serviced some models. Your post is a blast from the past for a lot of people, I'm sure. I was born in the early 80s but your post reminds me of different experiences I had around 9 and 10 and then again in high school. At 9 and 10, my neighbors were showing me text editors and text based games in DOS. In high school, I was tinkering around with multi user "dungeon" (MUD) text based roleplaying games on dialup. One of the few computer classes offered at my high school at the time was a programming class in QBASIC. It is amazing to think about past electives that were offered and today's subjects offered by some schools. Thanks for sharing such a cool memory!

I didn't start playing the violin until age 9, but since I hardly remember any important objects in my life before or after the violin, it seems like a good choice. If someone had encouraged me, I bet I would have been curious about the physics of music-making, so delicate are the acoustics of the slim wood body of the violin. But instead, I explored the violin primarily as a mode of puzzle-solving: every new piece or level was like a labyrinth to explore. I imagine video gamers in the 90s felt the same way playing Super Mario or Goldfinger 007. I was lucky to have teachers who would lead me just far enough to connect the dots myself... a true gradual release method that I never experienced in school. Most of all, the violin spoke to me in ways that people never did; just like Papert says he fell in love with gears, I fell in love with intervals and the sensations of tension, release, fulfillment and anguish between two notes that mirror people's experiences in everyday life.

like others posted before the gears of my childhood were lego bricks. the infinite possibilities of the things one could build were only limited by one's imagination. i guess that's how i started down the path to becoming a designer… shop class in high school > product design > environmental & wayfinding design and now i help build startups…

For some reason, all I can think about is this popcorn machine that my first grade teacher used in our classroom every time we had a holiday party. The machine fascinated me, and not only did it pop the corn--there was also a spot to place a stick of butter to melt over the popcorn! I think that is when I really got into how machines work and I would often take small appliances apart to see how they functioned. The popcorn machine was a fairly simple device, but it created such wonder in my imagination. I've included a picture to illustrate my object, however, the machine I remember looked more like a character out of Star Wars and definitely from the late 70's/early 80's.

When I was a little girl I loved reading, but specially a set of magazines that my father kept about doing stuff, bricolage. I loved all the wood toys that you can do. I also remember a book, about materials to work with your children at home, Montessori´s materials for home. I read that book like 50 times.
I use to buy or make didactic materials for my courses, I design activities, and I enjoy to challenge people.
I never taught before about this as my "gear".

Wonderful description of the elements that drew you in. How do you think your experience with the violin continues to reverberate in your life today?

Do you think this stood out because of the additional sensory connections: taste, smell, feel? Did the specialness of getting popcorn add to it? As I read your piece, I smelled the buttered popcorn from similar experiences (though never in school). Thanks for that reconnection to very happy memories.

Absolutely. All of those sensory connections came right back as I was typing last night. Although I didn't make that connection until I read your response. Thanks! The nostalgia also made me think more about my childhood and what made me happy. That's easy for me to forget! It also reminded me of the importance of slowing down, especially with my own kids, and focusing on how these types of tools work.

The popcorn popper of my childhood was a heated oil one. There was a ritual of time that had to pass after adding the ingredients and before the popcorn started popping. That, too, added to the specialness of the event. I think I'll go get one of these machines so that my kids, 3 and 6, can have these memories, too. I like the type you showed here over the oil ones because the popcorn comes pouring out.

Such wonderful memories related to popcorn! I remember now that I use to watch my grandmother make popcorn for us at the country side. This would happen on Sunday afternoons and she'd make it with oil or duck lard at the stove. It was quite an adventure to hear all of the sounds. And it tasted delicious. I still love popcorn and consider it to be part of very pleasant moments. Thank you for the opportunity to remember it.

As was not uncommon for a young child, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. One Christmas, my mother bought me a 6-foot long styrofoam model of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton. The act of building it appealed to my maker’s nature and I assembled and disassembled it countless times. But over time, I found myself constantly repairing the skeleton bones as they fractured and crumbled, the styrofoam material of the toy being rather frangible. I then became a sort of child paleontologist, cobbling together the broken bones with Elmer’s glue and masking tape. Eventually, my reparative efforts were futile and the toy was mothballed–just about the time that my interest in dinosaurs began to wane.

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Childhood object:
I don’t have a single object—what inspired me and has persisted as an interest into adulthood is the potential of recycled materials. I have always enjoyed making things with my hands and have trouble keeping them still. As a child, many of the library books I checked out were of the “how-to” variety. I would get a book on origami or making doll furniture or kitchen chemistry and would do things first “by the book” and then would create my own variations. Since I came from a working class family, and there was never much disposable income, I would scrounge materials to use for my products and experiments. Both my parents smoked and I loved getting the leftover large and small match boxes. You could stack the little ones and make a chest of drawers. The larger ones would make a nice bed for a small doll. I also used left over fabric (my mother sewed many of our clothes) to make little dolls and doll clothes. Old newspaper was great for origami and topological experiments. I would use my little sister as my “subject” for my science experiments—like “does an onion taste like an apple if your nose is closed?” As I came to teach teachers, I would find simple forms they could do for or with their children. For example, you can fold a paper cup from a square of 8 ½ x 8 ½ notepaper. You can use the leftover strip to make three little finger puppets of the same design and a double fold of newspaper to make different kinds of hats and holders. For 15 years I worked with teachers from rural areas of Central America and the Caribbean and my explorations with beautiful trash became even more important. Many of them had no potable water, no electricity, no books, etc. The natural environment and recycled materials came to be major resources for them. My colleagues and I helped them use beautiful trash to make props and games for math, original books based on their own lives and cultures, puppets to retell stories, airplanes to test scientific hypotheses, and even products to sell to raise money for their schools. I still play with beautiful trash—e.g., at a restaurant, I’m twisting the papers from drinking straws to make little people or flexi-hexagons while I wait for my order. I love raw materials, finding their possibilities, discovering how just changing scale or making slight modifications can create new forms.

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Lots of memories, but I suppose the 'toy' that had the biggest influence on my adult career was the Texas Instruments computer I had growing up. I remember playing a game that taught me how to type and spending hours typing in BASIC programs I copied out of a programming magazine. Quite a far cry from programming tools like Scratch that kids have access to today. http://oldcomputers.net/pics/ti-994a.jpg

I also 'fell' into the violin around the same age and it was an important part of my life until college when I became distracted by other things. I still have my high school violin packed away in the back of closet and wish I'd kept it up. Now I sound almost as bad as when I first started. Did you keep it up?

I wanted to look at your post. However the link seems to be down. I remember using the color classic ...what a great computer.

"Popples are pals that pop out of pockets. // A soft, fuzzy ball that turns into a friend. // The fun keeps building and the laughter never ends."

At the time, I didn't know his name was Touchdown — or that there were others like him (Party. Pancake. Potato Chip. Pretty Cool) — or that he was manufactured to cross-promote a crudely-drawn animated series that would only last two seasons (yet, evidently, will be revived in 2015 for Netflix.) When I received him as a gift from my great-grandfather ("Boppop"), I was three years old and his TV show had been off the air for twice as long as I'd been alive. He was soft and I was teething so I carried him around everywhere by his tail, which looked like a big meatball attached to a single strand of spaghetti.

By all measurements, his appearance was strange, charming, nonsensical with his blue hair, hard plastic nose, heart-shaped ears, and eyes that somehow expressed cross-eyed wonder or bottomless sorrow depending on how the light bounced off the plastic. He could turn into a football — but a soft, lumpy one that couldn't be thrown far. When you squeezed him, you could feel the cheapness of his stuffing and the stickers peeling off his uniform. But he was mine, my avatar, my Spirit (stuffed) Animal. I called him Monkey Man for no other reason except that it was the most creative name that I could imagine and it didn't use any of the letters that would have been garbled up by my speech impediment

If I was forced to, I could define the imprint Monkey Man had on my aesthetic consciousness, tracing a line from his visual style to my current preoccupations with kitsch, pop art, and outsiderism. Even when he played the role of the hero in my imaginative games, Monkey Man was an outsider. At the time, he existed, to me, outside of a known pop-cultural context. My other toys were all recognizable tie-ins: Clifford, Fozzie Bear, Stretch Armstrong, but Monkey Man was a blank slate. With him, unlike with the others, I had to invent a story, a purpose, an identity.

I moved a post to a new topic: The value of self guided imagination

Lost here a bit) Well, that was really challenging to remember "the gear of my childhood", and i will be honest it took time. But finally i remembered... Once, when i was 5-6 years old, my mom took me to her friend's work, and first time in my life i've seen real typing machine ... That was fantastic. I loved everything in that, size, designed and especially sound. Unfortunately i've seen it only 2-3 times and even been honored to type something.I was begging my parents to buy me one to home, for to play, but answer was NO. I born and raised in USSR and to get something like that "magic" machine was impassible. No i still dont have one, because i am adult and can not see reason to spend money on it, we live in modern time, with pc, laptops, notepads. But i still love typing. Maybe thats why most time in my life i dedicated to Publishing. This is one of the biggest impressions in my childhood:smile:

When I was at primary school I loved to play with these kind of maths sets:

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I used them not only to improve my maths logic, but also to build interesting (for me...) colored houses.

Love this. My dad, a math professor at a local university, brought stacks of used copies home for us to play with. The blurred purple mimeograph lines and incomprehensible equations were just patterns as my sisters and I turned the stuff into room spanning spider webs, paper airplanes, and so much more. Paper is so versatile.

Love this! I typed my highschool papers on my dad's typewriter which I now have at school where I teach technology. Each year, I introduce my students to the magic of typing directly to the page. The mechanisms and the sound are entrancing to them.

My father taught me how to play chess at a young age. We had (and still have) this wonderful old board that was owned at one point by my grandfather. It was a simple but substantial wooden board, and each smooth piece had a circle of green felt underneath. You never heard any sound from the board while playing unless a player was emphasizing a kill by clanking their piece to topple an enemy piece.

From my early interactions with chess, I developed the ability to visualize space and rotate objects in my head. This has proven very useful in any mechanical work I've done. Built on this foundation is what I learned from chess about identifying a goal and working backward to determine the best course of action. If I see a weakness in the opponent's game that isn't immediately exploitable, I have to go through a process of backward design to understand how my next move gets me a step closer. This is as critical a life skill as I have. As an educator and a designer, I'm repeating these patterns over and over in my professional life. Define desired outcomes, think back until I understand what the next step should be. All I need is the goal and the next step, because the circumstances (and indeed, the board) will constantly change, and I'll need to constantly adapt. The goal and the process are excellent guides.

What a wonderful keepsake with such powerful learning attached. Do you still play?

I do! Not as much as I'd like, but there is nothing else like playing a deep game with serious focus.

I actually went to a conservatory for college and played until an injury prevented me from continuing in that career path. I haven't found another avenue for the same type of learning, unfortunately.

Wow....you just brought me right back to first grade. I completely forgot these things existed!

@Marco_Vigelini
I found the kit used by my daughter when she was at primary school

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When I was 2 years old, my little brother was born. In preparation for his birth, my mom got me a doll that was supposed to be "my baby." I treated this doll with the utmost care, modeling after how my mom treated my baby brother. Caring for this doll, I believe, led me towards knowing how to care for children in the future.

As a child, I was a tinkerer. I loved creating collages, cards, plays, shows, books, menus, clubs, games. Give me magic markers, glue, scissors, magazines, sparkles, tissue paper and paper and a bunch of assorted knick knacks lying around the house, and I was completely content. I often had no idea what I was creating before I created it. There was always a social component where the show was performed with my sister, my parents came to my "restaurant," and/or my friends would check books out from my "library."

It was difficult for me to pick an object from my childhood that represents my version of Papert's gears. Like many other posters, I was really engaged with building things with legos and creating narratives stories around the characters and scenes. My brother and I were also big fans of matchbox cars. We would draw cities in the carpet of our living room and then manage the city and all the related services (keeping traffic moving, stopping bank robberies, etc). Both of these activities encouraged me to tinker and build, helped me understand the world around me and make sense of the adult world that I was starting to become more aware of.

The creation with legos and matchbox cars would often blend together, with my brother and I building gravity-driven race tracks and then hosting competitions to find the fastest cars. What we learned from these mini race tracks would then often be applied in other parts of our world (building faster sledding hills in the winter, tinkering with our bikes in the summer, etc).

I have such strong memories of air popcorn poppers from my college room mate, thanks for activating the memory banks!

Being the third LCL edition for me, I have the opportunity to think again to my childhood objects. This time I have remembered that I loved to play with symbols, inventing new alphabets and signs on a sheet of paper. Ok, it was not really childhood, but during the middle schools.
In my game, I was a scientist who had discovered a mysterious formula, and this formula was made with symbols I had invented. Sometime, I added some text describing the formula, again using an invented alphabet.

It seems that I still have this idea in mind

One of my favorite objects from my childhood was a knitting mushroom (see picture). I loved how the knitted rope would emerge out of the bottom of the mushroom, sort of like magic. I loved making different things with the rope that I produced, potholders, headbands, I even tried making hats (unsuccessfully). Eventually I remember getting frustrated that I couldn't see the rope forming as I was making it, so I figured out how to do the same process using my hand/fingers (see other picture). That made it easier to experiment with different yarn weights and tensions, etc.

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Interesting how you could correlate the childhood experience to what you do now!

Wow! Memories unlocked. We had a thread spool with four nails on the top that served the same purpose. At the time, I thought it was a cheap version of what you pictured, but now I realize it was a 70s version of the tinkering ethic as well as the anti consumerism piece. We also didn't have a lot of money, so those ideals fit very well with our family budget.

The object of my childhood that have most influenced my life were stuffed animals, I had a very wide collection (bears, tigers, seals, elephants ecc..) that covers entirely my bedroom's couch.
Initially, when I wasn't able to read, I spend my free time searching pictures of animals, wondering how they looks like in the real world, then I start to study them with books and tv documentaries.
This passion lead me to study Geography and Earth Science 'cause I needed to know where they live, what was their habitat and the way the climate works.
Then my interest focused on their behavior, why some of them lives in groups and others don't? Why some male exemplar fight one another for love? How they learn how to hunt?
At that time I always thinked that I would become an ethologist or a veterinary and, if my questioning doesn't focus more and more only about one specific species, the Homo Sapiens, perhaps I'd be really an ethologist right now.

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this concept is really interesting to me. Meaningful activities we make in our life, like learning, are as a voyage for discovering the unknown, but really a voyage inside us, I think.

I found my grandfather's Hermes Baby about 3 years back and discovered so much about typewriters and mechanical objects within a short span of time. I really enjoyed learning to change the ribbons, understanding how the impressions on paper were formed, and was incredibly fascinated by the typewriter for a long while. I quite expect that the annoying typing sounds weren't too pleasant to my family, but well.

I completely agree! My father brought back sheafs of used paper from the office too, and I remember being more open about cutting it up to make paper-chain dolls or simple origami creations because it was used paper. We often worked out fresh equations on these sheets, since some of them would be empty on one side.

I'm agree with you Adriano, I found very usefull to think about people as in constant exploration of their lives.

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According to my mom, this was my absolute favorite toy. She says I would take care of it like a real child--mind you I was still a kid myself. It's quite an interesting concept. Kids taking care of kids. I strongly believe this is one of the reasons why I love people so much. I've been helping others for as long as I can remember.

Timeless Books [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], by Lin Kristensen from New Jersey, USA (Timeless Books), from Wikimedia Commons

It is difficult for me remembering my early childhood. I have no memories of objects of those times if not books. Right from when I was four years old I devoured comics and books. Literally. Reading and gnawing the corners of books was to me the same thing. (Today I can't even underline a page). I was in love with books, or rather, stories and worlds that were enclosed in their pages. My highest aspiration was to become a librarian. Keeper of the library of a lunar base (these were the years of Space: 1999), but still a librarian.

But the years pass and you make new discoveries. The home computer in my case and, more, that the stories contained in the computer tapes adapted themselves to the actions of the user (me) and that writing new ones was not that difficult. Long, tiring, endless and complicated but not that difficult to be able to make me give up.

When in his essay Papert call the computer the Proteus of the machines I had a vivid Image of what I was just feeling in some corner of my ten years old boy brain.

A computer can be a window of infinite ever changing worlds always new and shaped by those who know how to describe them. Who just use them is forced to live the dreams of others. It is fun but in the long it is tiring,

It is for this reason that I choose books and computer as my favorite gears.

On the other hand, the screen of a computer at that time was a section of crystal ball. The age of flat screen tv was long to come. A piece of crystal ball with surface stormed by electrons generating tiny flashes of light. This was magic. It was to me to look into the gazing ball as a wizard or as an ordinary person.

In my first few years, everything was about cars. Cars cars cars. I would sit on my porch at night and call out the names of cars just by looking at their headlights coming down the street. Between 3-5, my daily bedtime reading with my parents was the 1986 Consumer Report, a 400 page catalogue of all the cars that had been manufactured that year. As soon as I could walk, I ruined many a beach day running from the water back to the nearest parking lot.

Of all my car toys there was one that stood out. For Christmas one year, I asked Santa for a purple Saab. A purple Saab. I have no idea why that is what I wanted. Anyways, my mom....errr...Santa bought the only model Saab she...er...he could and painstakingly spray painted it purple, where it awaited me under the tree.

Note: the picture below is illustrative. I did not get a real car when I was five.

Anyway, the car (which I still have) was my favorite toy - I rode it through imaginary streets, it solved imaginary crimes - if all my other toy cars were typical Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars - this one felt like it really belonged to me. When my mom and I had the Santa discussion a few years later, the first thing I asked her was if it was she who painted the Saab purple. She just smiled.

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Wow, I love this story. I remember working with punch cards early on and they register such a strong visceral memory for me: paper cuts, their weight, the faded ink to no ink, the fear of dropping a big deck of cards that could go out of order! I had a real identity as a guy who could carry the box of cards and be a real programmer. I loved using them as book marks in my text books.

Thank you for the great memories.

Hi, James. I think it is why I jumped on the opportunity to use Hypercard when it first arrived. I could finally "program." I think it is also why I loved writing html for my first web "pages" back in the days of Mosaic. Glad my little post triggered some good memories for you too. The text-based roleplaying games were amazing. I played around a little there too. But eventually I was more drawn to building worlds in 3D.

Hello comrades! In the first edition of the LCL, I indicated that my childhood gear was the crucifix, pointing to human knowledge about the sacred that one can have in a Pentecostal family. In the second edition, indicated the "balls" as my Brazilian boy gear, 'cause the physical and spatial knowledge driven to play with such objects, and because we created "alternative sports" with balls.

In this third edition, point out something that is not just an object, but geared what makes my life turns around. It is a mixture of "being" and "place": the guava tree. I was a boy very much liked to climb trees and the highest and firm tree where I lived was a leafy guava tree, where I climbed for several games of make-believe, to understand this being, to understand the behavior of associated fauna (ants, slugs, birds...), to think about the problems of a boy's life, watch the sunset and feel the wind. So many times people found me in that tree, so nicknamed me Jae, the name of a character boy from a television series about Tarzan. Always swinging in the canopy of trees like Tarzan, but very tiny and thin, then it must be the Jae, a yellow one in this case (i'm a German-descendant blond) ... the sense of humor of Brazilians.

Today I understand that both moments of action on the monkey jokes or marine storm plays, and also moments of focused thought, added the meditative moments of release the diffuse thought were essential to my intelligence and personal self-construction.

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I had several favourite toys in my childhood, lego bricks, little cars, comics, but now I want to tell you about a very simple object that I remember I used as a land for the adventures of my toys when I was about 5 year old. This object was the wool blanket of my bed. I remember I changed the shape of my blanket to create valleys and hills and caves, where I could set many of my toys's stories. I changed the flat shape of my blanket, giving it a tridimension, and it was the start for my imagination. I played with my little toys in this fantastic land and when I wanted to create a new world I had only to move my blanket. If you can see different shapes for what you have around, for the objects you touch, for the thoughts of the people you hear, for your thoughts, then you can start creating and when you want to create something else, you have only to move the blanket again.

So cute! Now you're an ethologist of H. sapiens

In my childhood I had many ways to spend time playing, one of them has tightly connection with motor skills. I loved skating, artistic gymnastics, ballet and dance.
I had also many objects that had a lead role in my games.
I loved to make drawings therefore coloured pencils, watercolours, and poster paint, were always with me together with paper sheet. I spent also time playing with books. In my house, there were even too many books and my mother decided to put some of them in my room into a shelf. They were classic of literature, I was a very tenacious reader, but I started to read them later when I was older. At that time I used to play learning all the titles and the authors, one of the game i used to play; was be able to connect any title to his author. I also was a great tinkerer; I used the old catalogues of the book post, very common at that time. The game consisted in realizing cartoon dolls, I chosen one of the nicest model and after have carved out of shape her body, I pasted it on a cartoon with the same shape. This was to make it rigid, after I use to cut all the dresses necessary. One other of my favourite game was sewing dresses for my dolls.

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