Kindergarten For Our Whole Lives | Mitchel Resnick | TEDxBeaconStreet

Today’s kindergartens are becoming more like the rest of school, with children filling out math worksheets and drilling on phonics flash cards. Mitchel Resnick argues for exactly the reverse: the rest of school (in fact, the rest of life) should be more like kindergarten. The needs of today’s society would be ideally met with kindergarten-style learning, based on the “Four P’s of Creative Learning:" Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play. Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, develops new technologies and activities to engage people (particularly children) in creative learning experiences.

His Lifelong Kindergarten research group develops the Scratch programming software and online community (scratch.mit.edu), used by millions of young people around the world. The group also collaborates with the LEGO Company on the development of new educational ideas and products, including LEGO Mindstorms and WeDo robotics kits. Resnick co-founded the Computer Clubhouse project, an international network of 100 after-school learning centers where youth from low-income communities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies.

Resnick earned a BA in physics at Princeton University (1978) and MS and PhD degrees in computer science at MIT (1988, 1992). He worked as a science-technology journalist from 1978 to 1983. He is author of Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams (1994), co-editor of Constructionism in Practice (1996), as well as co-author of Adventures in Modeling (2001) and The Official ScratchJr Book (2015). He was awarded the McGraw Prize in Education in 2011 and the AACE EdMedia Pioneer Award in 2013. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx