In our fast-paced world, children are often considered empty vessels to be filled with knowledge rather than explorers and discoverers who learn how to use information they find in new and exciting ways.  Play = Learning and years of research support the claim that children learn best in playful, meaningful environment.  Ironically, we have become so fact driven even with children at the earliest ages that we are losing our creative edge and preparing children to be worker bees rather than the problem solvers of the future.

To help reverse this trend, our work in the last 5 years has been geared to sharing the fruits of science with parents, teachers, policy-makers as well as informal learning settings (e.g. museum, media, toy industry) to help spread the view of a child as an active discoverer and creative thinker. To that end we have partnered with children’s museums (Children’s Museum of Manhattan, Port Discovery in Baltimore, The Chicago Children’s Museum), toy companies (K’Nex, Fisher Price, Mega Bloks), and media (Sesame Workshop, eebee, Cartoon Network).  We have given public talks to state agencies, teachers groups and business people. And we have written popular press books (Einstein never used flashcards; How babies talk) all in an effort to reach beyond the halls of science and into living rooms and classrooms with the findings that teach us about how children learn. Working with community partners around the world, we can use developmental science to guide practice and can offer ways to test some of the questions that emerge in real world contexts.