An insightful and carefully crafted post by my NS 202 students.....
People play in many different ways. Most often, people like to play with others, whether its your friends, parents, kids, pets, siblings, or your imaginary friend is unimportant. You can play with toys or use your imagination to play a make-believe game. Either way, whenever you play you make some pretty interesting discoveries. If you’re playing “house” for example, you take on imaginary roles that you otherwise wouldn’t experience at that point in your life. You discover what it’s like to have the responsibilities of that role and it enhances your understanding of the world. If you’re playing with legos then you discover basic architectural laws. For example, you discover that you need to build from the bottom- up, and you need a strong foundation for the rest of your building.
Not only do you discover incredible things during playtime that will stick with you and come in handy in the future, but you also come across some things that are surprising. When you’re playing with your dog and it bites you, it’s surprising. Of course, it’s not a pleasant surprise but it’s good to learn early on that not all surprises are good. But you can learn from those surprises. When your dog bites you, you know that you did something that was unfavorable, and you become better adapt to handling dogs and other animals, as well.
During playtime, your brain gets excited and stimulated. You use parts of your brain during playtime that you don’t use during other times, such as your imagination. Imagination and creativity can enhance your learning process and it can show you that learning doesn’t always have to be hard, boring work. Unlike popular opinion, there is no one way to learn. It doesn’t have to involve sitting obediently at a desk while your teacher throws information at you. Sitting at a desk can actually be counterintuitive to learning important skills that traditional schooling doesn’t teach you.
To be successful in life, you must, for instance, have problem solving skills which are developed on the playground more often than in a classroom. When you’re playing with your friends and you run into a problem, you have to solve that problem or stop playing. And no one wants to stop playing, so you’re really only left with one option. Solve the problem.
Today in lab, we had to build a planar molecule as a group. Obviously, as is true
whenever you work in a group, we ran into some problems, for example, some people got bored and wanted to create cool sculptures outside of the guidelines. Others were very focused, and got annoyed with people who were having too much fun. Creativity and focus shouldn’t be a bad thing, but sometimes too much of it can be. We realized that if we mesh the focus of some group members with the creativity of others, we could be successful and achieve the perfect balance of the two.