How children learn to be creative problem solvers: the significance of play

Any review of children’s learning has to begin with the work of Piaget who revolutionised the way psychologists and teachers think about this area. Perhaps the most significant contribution made by Piaget, however, was the establishment of the idea that children are active thinkers who learn by constructing their own understandings. Learning is thus seen as an essentially creative process. The example is often quoted of the way in which children learn language. They do not simply imitate and repeat what they hear in adult language, but typically produce a constant stream of completely novel utterances (in my family we even have words and whole phrases which we now all use, but which were originally invented by the children). Many of these novel words and phrases that children produce, furthermore, are clearly the consequence of misapplying patterns and rules which they have constructed for themselves. For example, you will hear young children say that yesterday they ‘goed to the shops

GAMES AND SIMULATIONS IN THE EARLY YEARS

and buyed something’. They will not have heard an adult say this; nor has any adult taught them that you create the past tense by adding on ‘ed’.

In fact, what emerges from a wide range of recent and contemporary research is that children learn predominantly by processes of induction and analogy. This involves detecting patterns or regularities within the variety of their experience; neuroscientific evidence has also confirmed that it is this kind of process for which the human brain seems to be peculiarly well adapted. In the case of language learning discussed above, children detect patterns and regularities from the huge variety of their experience of spoken English. Within the brain, learning has been shown to be a process of making new connections between neurones and build- ing up ever more complex neuronal networks. As it turns out, this under- standing of the nature of human learning has confirmed the fundamental importance of play.

Psychologists have been researching and developing theories about the nature and purposes of children’s play since the middle of the 19th century. It has been suggested as a mechanism for letting off steam, providing relaxation, relieving boredom, practising for adult life, living out our fan- tasies and many more. That it is important in children’s development, however, has never been in doubt. As Moyles (1989) demonstrated, for every aspect of human development and functioning, there is a form of play.

It is only in the last 20–30 years, however, that the brain’s significance for thinking, problem-solving and creativity has been fully recognised. Bruner (1972), in a famous article entitled ‘The nature and uses of immaturity’, is generally credited with first pointing out to psychologists and educationalists the relationship across different animal species between the capacity for learning and the length of immaturity, or dependence upon adults. He also pointed out that as the period of immaturity lengthens, so does the extent to which the young are playful. He argued that play is one of the key experiences through which young animals learn, and also the means by which their intellectual abilities themselves are developed.

The human being, of course, has a much greater length of immaturity than any other animal, plays more and for longer, and is supreme, of course, in flexibility of thought. Play is significant in this, Bruner argues, because it provides opportunities to try out possibilities, to put different elements of a situation together in various ways, to look at problems from different viewpoints. This accords very closely to Craft’s (2000) recent definition of creativity as ‘possibility thinking’. In this excellent book, Craft demonstrates that creativity in this sense is not, as it is often con- ceived, a process confined to the arts but, a fundamental aspect of human learning, properly applicable across the curriculum.

Bruner demonstrated this relation between play, creativity and problem- solving in a series of experiments (Sylva et al. 1976) where children were asked to solve practical problems. Typically in these experiments, one

How children learn to be creative problem solvers: the significance of play