'Play Science' is Making Learning Fun for Kids

On a recent afternoon in June, a line of kids between the ages of 5 and 13 snaked back from the door at the edge of classroom at St. Anthony's Catholic School in East Oakland, California. Some jumped up and down, others chattered with their classmates. They were clearly in a playful mood. At the front of the line, a teacher addressed a 10-year-old boy, with a backpack slung over his shoulder, waiting to exit.

"Ready?" she asked. "Okay. What is 36 divided by 6?"

"Six!" the boy said, then gave her a high five before heading out. The next kid stepped up to take his turn.

Standing in a long fluorescent-lit hallway just outside, Mara Mahmood smiled at all the enthusiasm. Mahmood, a psychologist, is the executive director of University-Community Links, a network of "play-based" educational, afterschool programs, which emphasized the importance of play in cognitive, social and emotional development. The programs take inspiration from Lev Vygotsky, an influential 20th century Belarusian developmental psychologist and early advocate of play in education, as well as a host of scientific studies that confirm the importance of play in learning.

Play, she says, encourages children to explore the limits of their imagination, problem solve, hone the capacity for creativity in a low-stakes environment, and exercise all the higher level neural structures unique to humans. Perhaps most importantly, she says, play helps children develop a sense of agency to "be one foot taller than they actually are." Which is the reason Mahmood and her colleagues believe it so essential to engage when learning.

"Think about what you're doing when you're playing," Mahmood says. "When you're a kid, you're imagining things. You tell your friends, 'okay, now you're going to be the firefighter' and 'you're going to drive the firetruck,' 'you go get the hose, I'll grab the water bucket.' You don't know how to be a firefighter, obviously, but you're trying it out anyway. You're doing it collaboratively. Play allows us to get outside of what we do on a regular basis and imagine and create and to try out new things we might not otherwise be able to experience. It makes anything seem possible."

These are skills Mahmood argues that will become increasingly important as more jobs become automated as advances in computing and artificial intelligence continue to disrupt society.

"What we will need are people who can think not just outside the box—but who aren't even imagining a box," she says. "And one of the ways you can learn to do that, I believe, is, is through play – or these informal-learning kind of environments where kids are reaching beyond what they already know how to do, and using their imagination and creativity."

The Oakland program, in which kids learn science and math through games, baking (it's good for learning ratios) and a whole host of other activities, is designed to foster STEM learning. But the focus differs at each of the roughly 30 programs operating under the UC Links umbrella. Each one is linked to a nearby university, an arrangement which allows facility, graduate students and undergraduates to gain teaching experiences, and perform research on the power of playful learning and related concepts, and the children to get low-cost top quality educational opportunities in a nontraditional manner. They all draw from the ideas of Vygotsky, who argued learning just like play is most effective when it happens in an environments that are co-constructed in a social way among collaborative partners, takes place within a real-world context, and is self-directed.

That means the UC links programs are structured so students have choice – usually they are given several options and can choose which activity to participate in, are usually hands-on, concrete activity, rather than passive, abstract rote learning. They usually allow space for creativity and experimentation. And they are collaborative, promoting the development of the social skills that, hopefully, will make them less likely to suffer from the epidemic of isolation and loneliness at the heart of the teen mental health crisis.

Beyond that, the programs vary widely. In San Luis Obispo, partners at Cal Poly are experimenting with ways to use play to teach local school children about microbiology; activities involve a tag-like game where the kids pretend to be viruses and infect their classmates. The goal is to learn about herd immunity. In Irvine, graduate students at the local UC campus are experimenting with playful, informal ways of teaching math through informal learning strategies. Another program out of Oakland is focused on urban planning.

Simply by making these modifications, Mahmood argues, children engage more active learning, as shown by a long list of research published by study participants, starting with a 1997 research from Appalachian State University professor Bill Blanton suggesting among other things that third and fifth grade children who participated in play-based after-school programs outscored their person on measures of reading, math achievement and language comprehension; a 2004 paper from UCLA in which after-school program participants demonstrated more fluency in their writing skills, more sophisticated use of vocabulary, and better control of syntax and grammar; and a recent student from Professor Glynda Hull, of UC Berkeley, which found that 86 percent of high school students participating in a UC Links program in West Oakland maintained or improved their grade point average and had significantly better school attendance (95 percent) as compared to their non-participating peers (68 percent).

"It's fun cause you have the thrill of learning without being forced to learn," said one participant, 13-year-old Serena, a 7th grader who enjoys Kung Fu. "In school, you're forced to learn this or you have to do that. But when you're in your free will, and you want to learn by yourself, it's better. We get to hang out with our friends most of the time, and we have an option to do the activities that we want to do."