On 6 November 2013, I visited the open day of the Creative Learning Lab. For me, the essence of the Lab is playfulness, that covers both playful and intuitive learning and learning by making.
The opening presentation by Karien Vermeulen, gave an overview of the role of technology in education and modern society. Technology is often still viewed as complicated and scary. The Creative Learning Lab wants to make technology comprehensible, by using a more physical approach.
NumHop - A multi-sensor interactive playful learning game
At the open day, participants could get acquainted with several installations. Like the MaKey MaKey, used to program objects with Scratch software by MIT. A simple programming language for kids to assign functions to keyboard combinations. One of the demonstrations used bananas or cucumbers to create an electric circuit that can be used to connect pieces of fruit to a computer, each of them representing a piano key.
Of the many Embodied Learning installations it can be said that one really has to try them out. The Mood Room (COMMIT/Play), uses the Kinect to express feeling in images instead of words. NumHop (see the above video) and the game Superhelden Eiland are both installations that use the body as an interface. One being a game to learn simple maths, the other for language learning in a playful way.
(For the complete blog, please turn to the Dutch page).
The photos can be found at Flickr.
