Framing open-ended and constructive play with emerging interactive materials

In the materials sciences there are great expectations for how future nano-scale materials such as Graphene point towards a merging between digital and physical materials unseen before. This in turn provides new opportunities for framing open-ended and constructive play. To explore these opportunities we have conducted a large-scale workshop where several hundred children built music instruments using "conductive Lego" in the form of Lego bricks, copper tape, Makey Makey boards and a PC providing musical instrument sounds. Based on experiences from the workshop we conclude that emerging materials can provide multiple entry points into constructive play. However, we highlight that it is key to find appropriate sweet spots between structured and free play in order to engage children in meaningful activities. We provide a set of concepts serving as analytic lenses for reasoning about such sweet spots.

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