Speaker 1: 0:15

Welcome back to another shifted podcast. I'm so happy to have both Stern-Thompson here from LEGO Education. Head of Education Impact is his title, and I've been waiting for this conversation for so long because you and I jive on play. Play is my game, so, bo, thanks so much for hopping on here and talking to us today.

Speaker 2: 0:49

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, chris. It's a really exciting topic that is very dear and near to my heart, so thank you for making these podcasts.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Great Well, bo. I love these kind of like laying the foundation a little bit. How did you come into working with LEGO Education, like what was that moment where you either found the job offered the job, found it through people? Can you kind of fill those lines in as to how you came into LEGO Education? Absolutely, yeah, into.

Speaker 2: 1:21

Lego education? Absolutely yeah. So my background is and my aspiration throughout my life has been around designing, playing, building, making things. So I was originally a designer and architect by background and I figured out that actually being creative and designing things is some of the most effective ways to learn, because you're really trying to figure things out, you're trying to come up with new ideas, you really persevere through challenging problems and so forth. So throughout my education career I had a PhD in technology and learning, which brought my awareness to MIT Media Lab and the development of digital learning technologies that are more constructivist, more creative.

Speaker 2: 2:09

And after studying that and doing a trajectory around robotics, I was looking at something called the Lego Learning Institute in the Lego company. The Lego company has had for a decade or so a learning institute to bring together research, experts and educators to really shape how we can do the best for children in the Lego company. So I came into the Lego company almost 15 years ago to lead that Lego learning institute to better figure out how we can create better experiences for children. But that has been grown over the past 15 years. So being head of research in the LEGO Foundation to bring together expertise and examples on this relationship between play and learning, which sometimes can be a little controversial, but from a science point of view, from a child's point of view, it's completely natural. So now what I'm doing in liquidation is try to scale that ability to fully integrate playful learning into the classroom and to educate this natural ways of teaching.

Speaker 1: 3:19

How did you play as a kid? I'm just curious Do you remember times of play when you were young, growing up, that marked you as a human?

Speaker 2: 3:29

Absolutely. I think most people, when we speak about play, can recall these moments where they had the freedom or the agency to test and try things out. Usually it's sometimes with friends or it's a particular sport you have or hobby you have. My passion for play was brought about a lot of freedom and agency to explore nature. I grew up in a quite remote area of Denmark where I had opportunities to build and make things in the forest or in my garden and then I did a lot of sports. So really this opportunity to give freedom and support and trust in building small things with wooden things and materials, all playing a little bit, obviously with liquid bricks also, as we had that at home, but it's really this idea to build and make things that was foundational in my childhood.

Speaker 1: 4:22

I love your connections to outdoors as well, because oftentimes when I ask teachers about can you recall your childhood play, it always connected back to nature somehow yeah yeah, you find that that has changed um how kids play nowadays than it did, you know, a couple decades ago I think the research is pretty clear that the children's domains of play has changed.

Speaker 2: 4:51

So when we study how children move around the neighborhoods and in cities, it's been smaller distances, more closed neighborhoods, and most of that kind of freedom and exploration have moved to digital spaces. So I think what we are seeing right now is that children still play and explore and meet friends and take risks and so forth, but it's in spaces that it's a little more difficult to relate to because they jump between different kinds of social networks and digital spaces. So I think there's certainly opportunities to remind ourselves that the physical play and the physical environment and the hands-on learning is still important and we see a lot of opportunities to blend that more and more and also to emphasize that actually there are good forms of digital engagement that benefits children a lot when they are creative and social. So it's important to kind of have a more nuanced perspective on how play has changed and really how different ways that children still benefit from it.

Speaker 1: 5:57

And as LEGO education, what's your mindset around play? How do you guys define what play is when you are thinking about the learning process and the tools that you bring into this, these creative tools being LEGO? How do you see play? What is your definition for LEGO as they look through that lens?

Speaker 2: 6:24

That's a really good question and something we really have spent a lot of time and work with our research network educators to formulate what that looks like. You know, always important and always a benefit. And if you look at the research on children's play, it's a main mechanism of how they develop and learn. So, because we have a lot of uncertainty and children, you know, don't know to walk and talk and, like you know math and language, they just throw themselves into it. Right, they experiment, they jump out from heights and they try to turn around the plants in the house and so forth. Because playing is a mechanism to explore the unknown and to learn about the world at the same time as they learn to socialize, to keep attention, to learn about math by manipulating objects, to learn about language, to do role play. That form of play is a lot about individual agency and about having choices and freedom, but that to fit into education systems. What we have identified is that a few things that needs to be in place to make that work in a collaborative, more outcome-focused environment. So place is still important, but it's more like a guided play and the reason why this can become more relevant right now is because we have realized, education systems are teaching children the same thing in the same way at the same time. So basically, everyone are treated the same and there's quite a lot of stress being built up, a lack of belonging, lack of support for children with very different needs. Also and this is where play really can benefit that opportunity that we actually have much broader outcomes and expectations to what our education systems should deliver. So we need education systems that have like a fundamental you know, well-being approach, that deliver towards the outcomes uh, you know, in terms of mathematics and and language and science and so forth but also that the new reality of education is that civil need to be more creative and supported in their resilience and collaboration and critical thinking. And that's where play comes into play, basically. But it's not play as we think about it as just the freedom of choosing whatever you do, but more guided play.

Speaker 2: 8:47

Guided play means that as an educator, you still set the outcomes. You say, like we're going to teach about mathematics for right now, or we're going to teach about the language of a particular book, so you set the outcomes and you do that through an approach that could be similar to inquiry, like you have a big question that you prompt children with. I wonder how this bicycle moves uphill and how it gains energy. Or I wonder what this character in the book might look like or could be different. So educators would guide the kind of learning objectives and the starting point of a lesson, but then they give children choices. So for instance, I say, like this particular book, I've read a little bit about the introduction how might it continue? And children go into individuals and groups to explore, how might that story look different? Or what are the characters? Or they ask to say you know, I wonder how, what gravity actually is, I wonder how we can make things turn upside down and they invite children to build different modes of balancing mechanisms where they can test out gravity. So for us that's really a guided play approach, because you set expectations, you have to deliberate focus on materials that are relevant to that learning outcome, but children within the first five, ten minutes are given agency and choice to explore that topic.

Speaker 2: 10:07

What research indicates is children actually not only learn about the mathematics and the language and the science much deeper. They remember it much better because they have hands-on materials that relate to the particular topic that are being taught, but also because they have choices, they can actually develop their own ideas. And if educators then bring back to a classroom discussion, you know okay how did these characters actually look like? How might the story end? What are the different ways that gravity looks like or balance looks like?

Speaker 2: 10:39

Children have so many different ways of seeing that and expressing it so they remember it for longer. But they also are supported in their creativity to come up with different ideas, the critical things they reflect on whether this is gravity or not and the ability to be engaged, because they had much more ability to make abstract concepts concrete and observe and see it. So basically, play has often been thought of as like free play and then instruction, where you have to sit still and look, and we are creating this dichotomy between these two. But actually the most effective ways of learning is a balance in between. It's a guidance and it's something we can use in education systems, but also generally in our workplace, that we give more agency and focus and support creativity and collaboration, but it's within the scope of the outcomes we're hoping to achieve.

Speaker 1: 11:36

Great. So wise words there I mean really loving what you're saying, right. So wise words there, I mean really loving what you're saying both. Now, as we move higher up into the levels, into you know, middle school, high school play evolves play tools where you could tinker and iterate, and those were particularly Scratch, minecraft and also the Lego Mindstorm. Can you elaborate a little bit on that evolution? That play can continue in Like it's not?

Speaker 1: 12:26

just held in kindergarten or preschool that this playfulness, this choice, this agency can have legs throughout all of one's learning career. Can you talk to?

Speaker 2: 12:35

a little bit about those tools and how they can be integrated into a higher school and still maintain that playfulness Absolutely, and I think that's a very good point and that's something that we should emphasize much more. That play exists, you know, all across from early childhood into school, into adulthood, and the characteristics that aligns with that type of play, that children learn and develop through play, is it needs to be able to physically represent things that you are being taught. You need to have choices. You need to be active in making choices. It needs to be opportunities to test and try out different ideas. We call it iteration.

Speaker 2: 13:11

There's not only one way of just saying this is kind of a solution, now figure out how we got there, or it's meaningful. It's something that relates to a children's passion and their interest, not just something that is in the curriculum. But how do we relate the curriculum to interest? So there's a few key characteristics about that support for curiosity and like how might we do this? And that's actually similar to whether you are a young child in school or whether you're an adult. It's the same kind of characteristics we ask in our workplace Are you actively engaged? Are you passively sitting, observing? Is it meaningful to what your capabilities are and what you're interested in. Or is this something you have to do just because you know we have to get it done? So these characteristics, you know, are similar all across age groups, but we need to support it with different types of materials. So what the Likud system does, as the Likud bricks and the system is, you know, at a young age you have Likud Duplo. You have large bricks that you can easily manipulate as a young child Actually. Then you have the Likud system, the smaller bricks that fits on top of the Duplo, and then you have, like, increasingly more advanced building systems, like Technique, you have more advanced use of robot motors and sensors and so forth. So basically, the point is to build a system that has a low floor it's easy for people to get started young children but a high ceiling, which means that anyone can keep building, creating something more and more complex, keep being challenged, even when you get into higher education, or whether you really want to engage in a really difficult challenge as a grown-up.

Speaker 2: 14:47

That kind of mindset, as a creative system that supports a child and adult at their level and keeps growing with the person, was Godfrey Kier Christensen's vision. The second generation Lego family member, and it's the same way to think about digital technologies also. So when we looked at these characteristics and said, how does these characteristics of play actually align with educational systems?

Speaker 2: 15:13

It actually exists in many different types of approaches, like problem-based learning or project-based learning, where you should build a physical prototype of something, or inquiry, where you explore an idea, or experiential learning, where you go out and find a topic that's interesting or visit a site, and so forth, but there hasn't been a lot of ways to scale and systematize it. So then we have now said well, actually, through guided play, we can provide the right materials for the right learning objective and then give children opportunities to explore that. And if you do that in a digital world, it is much more like Minecraft or the Scratch community for coding, where you not only have the coding platform or the online platform to build and make things, but you provide that scaffolding to say how we might build the tallest tower and see what would it take when it falls, or how might we create our little own village that you find meaningful to live in and how would you relate to your neighborhoods. So, basically, provide these guidance in these open-ended platforms that provides a support for learning objectives.

Speaker 1: 16:17

And I see this in the evolution of the mind storm into the spike, where it seems like there was a shift in mindset a little bit. At Lego, Is that is that accurate to say, Bo? Was there a conscious decision to kind of keep like a little bit more open ended and more manipulation of the parts could be entertained, and is that is that accurate?

Speaker 2: 16:47

It is like the Lego. Education has been around for 40 years and we started based on the MIT Media Labs collaboration on, you know, constructionists and students who create ideas that are meaningful and collaborate on them. And then it became Mindstorms, which was based on a book from Seymour Papert. We became the first product that explored this kind of open-ended approach to learning and we have gradually evolved that from Mindstorms towards Spike, that is, a legal education product right now. The key thing that keeps evolving for us is getting closer and closer to this being easier for educators to facilitate in the classrooms and a part of lessons. So not only is it now based on the science of learning, it's a guided play approach.

Speaker 2: 17:36

It makes it easy for educators to get started in five, 10 minutes, but they can actually facilitate these types of activities within 45 minutes, one hour, and the key things that make that work is they are aligned to standards and learning objectives, so educators can see ah, if I'm going to teach this kind of concept of gravity, emotion, of force and so forth, you know this is actually a physical manipulative I can use.

Speaker 2: 18:01

It's then simple for them to use. So there's a presentation they can use and they get the prompts with questions and they easily get supporting, easily can support students to represent these ideas in groups and they can conclude the lesson by sharing the ideas and experiments and talk about the concepts or principles that are there. So it's relevant, it's simple and it's inherently child-led in the sense of giving agency an opportunity to explore that. So, yeah, I think we have learned that it needs to be open-ended, but it needs to be sufficiently structured in the beginning so educators know they're achieving the outcomes. And it's actually. It's not too. It's not chaotic, it's not complex, like with traditional creative approaches where you have to bring different types of crayons and Play-doh together and hope for the best but it allows them to build towards the objective, take it apart and pack it onto the shelves again, what advice do you give teachers to get going with it?

Speaker 1: 19:06

You kind of touched on something that, until a teacher feels comfortable with whatever they're bringing in tactile, where it's more open-ended and less structured, it kind of gets teachers to anxious a bit. When you are bringing in Lego with content connections, what kinds of tips do you give to teachers to kind of get their mindset around that I don't have to be in charge of it all, I can offload some of this stuff and the kids are still learning, because oftentimes I think teachers think, oh, it's just an extra thing I have to do or I don't have time for that have to do or I don't have time for that. Can you speak to some advice you give teachers on the benefits of integrating and maybe a little bit of the struggles they'll feel, but it's okay.

Speaker 2: 19:58

Absolutely. We've had quite a lot of conversations with educators from all over the world, also done quite a lot of studies around it. The main thing that is difficult for an educator and for an adult in any situation, sometimes for a parent, is the risk of failing. Like you know, teachers want to see their children succeed. They want to see engagement, they want to know that they are scaffolding the child to be more and more competent in any of the topics they do and they are usually afraid of new approaches where it's more difficult for them to get familiar with these approaches when they have been taught in a different way. So the first thing is to acknowledge that they actually need to take risks and experiment with the materials, so giving opportunities for them to go hands-on, try materials and they realize that actually this approach to understanding mathematics or science is actually more effective, because children would be able to articulate this better, these notions and concepts and so forth, when they get it hands-on. But actually they need to try it themselves. So our teacher professional development workshop starts very hands-on and reflections around that kind of fear of failure. Workshop starts very hands-on and reflections around that kind of fear of failure. The way that it's scaffolded is around, giving teachers confidence that you're achieving the learning outcomes, so you are actually teaching towards the standards and outcomes and objectives. You can literally see it among the children much more practically, but you can see that demonstrating force and gravity or articulating a language of a book and so forth, so you actually have a better you know, almost like a real-time assessment in the classroom compared to children studying passively. It's also very important in the times we're in right now for educators to minimize preparation time. So what we've been trying to do is to say well, these are the outcomes, these are the materials, these are presentations you can use. So give confidence to this being something that relates to children's interests and passions and you actually have some support for guiding that in the classroom so it doesn't get messy and complex, but they are guided through the lesson plans, through the lesson plans. So I think that's kind of this kind of be mindful that sometimes it's kind of that uncertainty or the mindset of failing that keeps being the barrier, but we're providing scaffolding in terms of the outcomes and facilitation all along.

Speaker 2: 22:22

I think, at the end of the day, what we have seen is particularly right now. Educators as well as administrators and others are seeing disengagement, like children are not necessarily excited to go to school, at least not to learn. They don't necessarily feel a sense of belonging, they don't feel they're challenged and they may not even utilize technologies in the best way. So so it is addressing kind of a key gap. We're seeing right now that not only are children not necessarily learning the most effective ways, but they're definitely not engaged in school. So, leaning into that kind of main objective of what educators are hoping for when they become a teacher was to see engagement and joy of learning and excitement and collaboration, and that's really what you can see when you bring in hands-on learning.

Speaker 1: 23:12

Totally agree. I love the idea, too, that let the teachers try it first, give them some time to explore and have that anxiousness happen.

Speaker 2: 23:20

Get it out of your system.

Speaker 1: 23:22

And then they come to the realization that maybe I was thinking too much about that.

Speaker 1: 23:27

And it's just a matter of getting going with it. Well, just to kind of bring things to a close here again, thanks so much for um taking a bit of time out of your day. I mean, we could just talk on and on and on. I know um I still have a million questions, but we'll stick to the the time frame. Um ai is now um becoming more and more of an issue in schools and we're talking more about it. You recently put something out how AI transforms education in 2023, looking at how it's more equitable and inclusive learning. How do you see the future of education that has an AI lens?

Speaker 2: 24:12

That's a very good question, yeah, and thank you for mentioning some of these resources here. With any kind of new technologies, it's always challenging in the beginning, I would say, and the first and foremost in our work right now is safety and security, because we're dealing with children, we are dealing with data sometimes that children take from the internet and educators trying to figure out good sources. So most of our fundamental work is on responsible innovation and digital play. So we work with a range of different experts to make sure that we are not asking to save data and expose data and so forth. So that's fundamental in AI, because AI has not been trained on what children learn the best.

Speaker 2: 24:55

But then I think what we're seeing as a beginning shift is hands-on learning becomes more important because much more is getting digital, and what I mean is that when you begin to have much more automation and prompting things with AI, you know getting not only knowledge but discussions with technologies people will be longing for and what we're seeing for hands-on real life experiences. That's what AI cannot generate. They can't generate that kind of relationship to something you are truly passionate about the relationship to what actually happens in the classroom. You are truly passionate about the relationship to what actually happens in the classroom. So there's a point of confusion right now in terms of what are the best materials to use and how can we use it, what are we allowed to use?

Speaker 2: 25:37

But if you lean into that form of safe experimentation which we're doing right now, I believe we'll come to a point in three, four years where actually AI will greatly help our ability to scale the forms of learning that we are most excited about, like guided play, inquiry-based, problem-based, project-based learning, so actually the forms of learning where you're asking difficult questions in terms of knowledge and expertise areas, but then you are giving opportunities through processes of addressing a problem with physical materials or creating a project that's meaningful to you, to create a real-life project working with the community, which AI cannot do. So not only administratively, but really helping to facilitate a really good learning process. So I think we'll get there right now. Right now, it's a matter of supporting educators and communities to find good ways of integrating that in their work and, when it's really helpful, I think that that pivot will come soon.

Speaker 1: 26:34

I mean I compare it sometimes to the calculator. When the calculator first came in, we could get rid of these mundane additions and multiplications. That took time. Ai seems to be able to get us to places quicker. But yeah, it won't tell you it loves you um, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 26:56

I think that's a good analogy.

Speaker 1: 26:58

Yeah, absolutely well, this has been so wonderful. Thank you so much for for joining us here today. Um, some of your words have just been really um reflectionary and I'll have to think about it as I re-listen. But thanks again. This has been great and I hope we do this again one time. I have so much more we could talk about.

Speaker 2: 27:20

Absolutely. It would be my pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you.