How Playful Technologies Can Build More Meaningful Schools

A podcast from Teachers College, Columbia University focusing on work in higher education that aims to improve our world.

Pursuing the Public Good is connected to a broader initiative at Teachers College focusing on efforts to tackle crucial challenges in Teacher Education, Mental Health and Wellness, Sustainability, and Digital Innovation.

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Thomas Bailey:
Welcome to Pursuing the Public Good. We have conversations about work that connects higher education with making change in the world. I'm Tom Bailey, President of Teachers College, Columbia University, and your host. This week, we're talking about digital innovation. What we mean by that isn't just keeping up with the latest trends in technology, like generative artificial intelligence or virtual reality tools. Although that's important. It means thinking about how digital tools can help us make a difference and impact the public good. Sometimes that looks like things you might expect, tools for reading and writing or helping get past difficult math problems. Sometimes, with the work of today's guest, it looks like making spaces for young people to build, play, and explore. Our guest today is Nathan Holbert, Associate Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technology Design. He builds playful tools and learning environments for and with kids, with the help of some of our graduate students in his Snow Day Learning Lab here at Teachers College. He's also the host of his own podcast, Pop and Play, with fellow Teachers College professor Haeny Yoon. Thank you for being here, Nathan.

Nathan Holbert:
Hey, thanks for having me, and thanks for shouting out the podcast.

Thomas Bailey:
Oh, yes. I'm a faithful listener to it.

Nathan Holbert:
You're a poppernaut? That's great.

Thomas Bailey:
I'm a poppernaut. That's it. So, all right, welcome, and let's get started.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Thomas Bailey:
When people hear digital innovation, particularly in an education setting, they might not think about play first of all. So tell us about your work with playful learning environments and makerspaces, and why you think that approach is so valuable to learners.

Nathan Holbert:
I think learning and play are intimately intertwined and hard to tease apart. I think we know that learning happens best when people are actively engaged in doing things that they believe matter, when they're exploring things that they're excited about, or when they're tackling topics or issues that matter to them and their communities. I think a lot of that is about play. It's about creating places where we can explore a space where we can tinker with ideas and see how they work or see how they don't work, where we can get excited and passionate about something and see where it goes. So when it comes to the relationship between this idea of play and digital innovation, to me, the digital innovation is just a way in which we can create really rich play spaces where we can create opportunities to play around topics that might be difficult to play with without digital tools, or it might increase the range of materials that we get to work with or the types of questions we get to ask about.
So there's a couple of different ways in which we approach this. In the Snow Day Learning Lab, for example, one of my students, Isa Correa, began this project that she called Fungitopia, which itself has a playful take on it. This was explicitly about how do we change the relationship between humans and the environment. She did a lot of work designing these sorts of informal learning experiences where young people would go spend time in our local parks around here, really getting close to and paying attention to the critters that were crawling around, the fungus that was growing on the trees, the smell of the earth, and invited them to then start creating and designing objects and artifacts that could exist within that space. The unique thing about this project was that this really changed one's relationship with the materials that were now not just these what we think of as static or dead materials, but these were living organisms that you are collaboratively making with. So that was a really cool opportunity to see this playful design and how it might change how young people thought about their position in the world around them.
Another project that we've done in the Snow Day Learning Lab is something that we called Remixing Wakanda, and the idea behind this was how can we invite young people to think about and design new societies, new future technologies, new relationships with one another by thinking about futures where they might be centered, where they might be represented in those spaces. So it's about imagining futures where you've solved some of the problems that we identify as existing today, and then working backwards to see how would we solve them. What technological innovations would we need to solve them? How would we have to think differently about how to build a city, how to use energy, or how to use our natural resources in different ways?
This was really an opportunity to use this speculative design process, this future thinking process, to start asking questions about not just what the future could be or what would be possible in that future, but what's going on in today. How can we be critical about the issues and the challenges that we face today and get serious about how we could solve those? All good learning should involve play to some extent, and I think digital innovation and technology are just tools we can use to create more rich and more complex, more flexible and dynamic, playful learning environments.

Thomas Bailey:
So let me ask you this question because, when I think about my grandchildren, I have a two-year-old, and she's doing things and playing, but play doesn't seem serious. As we get older and we get into third and fourth grade, we have serious things to do. Then you have play. You can go to the playground for recess, but you come back into the classroom. So how do you bring together the notion of unserious play with the serious work that we have to do to learn?

Nathan Holbert:
Have you asked your granddaughter if that work that she's doing is serious?

Thomas Bailey:
She thinks it's serious, but she's two years old.

Nathan Holbert:
But her perspective matters, and I think we agree on this, that we're being a bit tongue in cheek, that there's this difference between play and serious. Certainly, I would, and I think you would agree with me, reject that distinction that there's somehow or another work that has to be serious and serious work can't be fun or can't be playful. I also think it's totally fine to play for no good purpose, to play just because it's fun and not feel like you have to be doing something important to the world. So I tend to think of play as being the big circle of a Venn diagram, where play can be a lot of things and learning is a circle that's inside of that. But I definitely reject this notion that there's serious time and then there's play time. That's partly, I think, what drives the work that I do. It's certainly part of what inspired our Pop and Play podcast is to really start challenging that conversation about school needing to look different than play.

Thomas Bailey:
I don't disagree with you there. I just wanted to push you on that.

Nathan Holbert:
Yep. Thanks for the nudge.

Thomas Bailey:
Certainly, we'd like to think that the learning that we do is fun, creative, and other kinds of things. So yes, I agree with that. But looking at it, I think it's important to make the point that learning isn't necessarily some kind of serious... That has to be serious, where you're frowning and have a knitted brow over your...

Nathan Holbert:
It has to hurt, or it doesn't count.

Thomas Bailey:
Yes, exactly.

Nathan Holbert:
But to push on that even a little further, I think that assumption or that vision that we often have, even that representation of learning that we see in media as being something where your brow has to be furrowed, that has to be serious, it has to be intense. I think that's a problem. That's partly why we fail to have the imagination to think differently about what a science class can look like, or we fail to have an imagination to imagine that kids are having fun playing with a book, and they might also be learning in that context as well. So that popular image of learning as being something difficult is, I think, keeping us from really imagining worlds that we could have.

Thomas Bailey:
No, I agree. When I look at my two-year-old granddaughter, she's working really hard at putting something together, but she's smiling or giggling about that.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Thomas Bailey:
So that's an image. So okay. What does it look like to use technology and digital innovation to support this kind of work in schools and out-of-school programs?

Nathan Holbert:
So it can vary greatly. I often think of my work as not really being about technology. It's about building useful, interesting and meaningful learning environments. I think of technology as a tool in the tool belt of how to do that. If we have a situation where I have an idea in my head and I want to bring it out into the world, maybe an idea for a gadget, an idea for a game I want to create, or an idea for a story I want to write, we need tools to help us bring those things out into the world. Technology is a really rich tool for that. It could be anything it needs to be. So we can use laser cutters, 3D printers, we can use computers to bring ideas out into the world that might be hard to bring out into the world otherwise.
So that's one space, and that can happen in things like makerspaces, which are places I do a lot of work in, which provide young people and educators and teachers rich tools for making things. But it can also happen in game-like environments. I've done a lot of work where we built games that would invite kids to play with ideas that the teacher wanted them to play with or that allowed them to play with ideas that they wanted to play with. It can involve play that doesn't involve technology at all, or maybe it's play that involves low technology. I've done a lot of play and making that was just glue guns, scissors, and paper. That can be a really rich space for design and experimentation. It's certainly a rich space for play, but the technologies are pretty basic. So tech is great, and I love to use it as part of my work, but it's a tool. It's not the end in and of itself.

Thomas Bailey:
Are you incorporating the concepts and methods that you're dealing into actual classrooms that are going, and tell us a bit about how that works?

Nathan Holbert:
So I've done work in classrooms throughout all of my research. One nice example of this that I think resonates with our conversation here was a project where we were trying to help new computer science teachers that were just beginning to teach computer science and data science to middle school students. So oftentimes, these were math teachers that were now being tasked with becoming the computer science teacher in schools throughout New York City. So we built a game that was a playful tool where kids got to think about and play with data, represent data, explore data, and through their play and through their exploration, it produced information that the teacher could then use to understand what they were doing well, what things the students were struggling with. So it became a formative assessment tool, it was something that was meant to be used in a classroom, and it was incredibly playful.
The game is called Beats Empire, and the game itself was a music management game. So the kids acted as if they were the manager of a music studio, and they were trying to hire artists, make songs, release songs throughout the city. They were just having fun playing music manager, playing music manager with their classmates, creating little competitions for each other. But in that exploration, in that play, they were also thinking about data. How do I make a decision? What data would I use? How should I represent that data to know which is the right decision to make here? And then that generated information for the teacher to use, and that all happened in a classroom.

Thomas Bailey:
So that's good. You've just given me a good example, but tell me something that you're doing with technology and the world of play that you're particularly excited about. If you want to give a great example of what you're doing, what would you bring forward?

Nathan Holbert:
I'm excited about all the new stuff all the time. I can give you two quick ones. One is a project we're doing right now, funded by the National Science Foundation, called Connected Spaces. This is in collaboration with some colleagues at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. This is specifically about how do we bring makers together that might be geographically distributed. So maybe these are kids that live in rural areas, or maybe these are kids that live not near a makerspace that they can get to, or maybe it's two cities and we want to bring these makers together. So we've designed a suite of technologies that would connect them. So it connects through things like video conferencing, but it also connects through AI tools that help refine and support things like prototyping or debugging problematic code. We also have a set of tools that help for help-seeking.
So how do I know that you are the right person to go to if I have a problem with my LED not working, or how do I know that really I should go over to this person because they've done it before and they had the same struggles that I had? So we built a set of tools to help find help from people that aren't in the room together. Then another area that's kind of going in to take this conversation a slightly different direction is just around this notion of future thinking. I used to be a classroom teacher, and so much of school for a teacher is, I got to teach them the things that we already know in the world. When I was a chemistry teacher, here's a list of things that scientists learned in the 1950s. Now you have to learn it.
And that's great, and that's sometimes a really important thing to build up knowledge. But a lot of what a scientist does, an engineer does, or a mathematician does is to try to think about problems, challenges, or issues that don't even exist yet. We have plenty of big issues that exist now, but I think solving those is partly about imagining futures where they're solved and trying to figure out how do we get there. How do we go from where we are today to get to those places, those futures where those issues are solved? So we've been doing a lot of work around speculative design, engaging young kids in making artifacts that represent future technologies or making cities that represent different social arrangements, different arrangements between humans and nature, and then using those to be critical about the state of the world today and to try to imagine different ways in which we might coexist with one another, with the environment, and with technology.

Thomas Bailey:
You mentioned artificial intelligence there, but...

Nathan Holbert:
I snuck it in.

Thomas Bailey:
So now we're all, I guess since November 2022, that's become a huge issue.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Thomas Bailey:
So in your work, do you see that as an inflection point, a place that really is changing what you're doing, or is it just another incremental piece of technology that you can incorporate into the other things that you're doing?

Nathan Holbert:
It's a good way to ask it. Is this a massive shift that's going to transform everything, or is this just another incremental change that we are going to either incorporate or not? I don't know that we have an answer to it yet. I think people have been very quick to say it's a seismic shift. I think I get why, if you play with these generative AI tools, the image generation tools or the chatbot tools, it seems absolutely magical when you first start playing with them. But it doesn't take long when you're really investigating or exploring these tools for you to start to see the cracks of it and start to see its limitations. The generative AI technologies, as they're coming out right now, feel to me to be a little more superficial than people are kind of shouting on the rooftops, and I think they're not quite as powerful as we might hope they will be one day.
That said, I think that there's a real possibility with these things. So, just like before, I see it as another tool in the tool belt that has all sorts of potential of what we could do with it. So I'm really excited about thinking of existing challenges that we have in education and how these generative AI tools might help us. So, for example, we know what good learning looks like and we know how to build good learning environments. We know that collaboration's important. We know that feedback matters. We have all this knowledge about how to build good learning systems, but a lot of them are really hard to do, and a lot of them are really hard to scale. A lot of them take a lot of money, a lot of time. I think that there are ways in which generative AI might help us chip away at some of those challenges to implementing things that we know are good to do.
My fear though is that with the excitement around it and with the superficial understanding of these generative AI tools, what's happening is we are using them in the worst possible way, the sort of like, "What if instead of having a teacher, we just had a chatbot you could talk at?" And I think those attempts to sort of use AI to just replace already not great teaching strategies or not great learning moments is likely to be a big failure. But I think there's some real possibility here if we get creative and we think about what we already know about good learning and teaching, to use these tools to support that.

Thomas Bailey:
We, along with many, many other educational institutions, are thinking more about online learning and doing more outreach to more students. What are the implications of your perspective on play and technology that could really be useful as we think about going to a more online learning modality?

Nathan Holbert:
I think this is a real challenge, and one that I'm not super optimistic about. I think there's possibilities here. I mentioned the Connected Spaces project that started during COVID, so we were explicitly trying to think about how do you support makers when they can't be in a makerspace together. I think we're finding a lot of really important information about what the affordances of these digital tools might be. That they won't replace what it means to make together in a makerspace, but they can provide a different set of experiences that can be rich and powerful too.
I think there are possibilities for play across a Zoom screen. There's possibilities for play using digital technologies to talk, connect, and make in separate locations. But I think the key here is that it's different and attempts to try to replicate things that happen when we're in a place talking to one another, when I see your face, when I'm interacting with you, when we're just in the same room, not talking about the work or the topic, but we're just having a conversation about going on in our lives that doesn't replicate as easily in those digital spaces.
So we have to think differently, "What does happen here? What is new here? What is a playful experience you can have in a digital environment that you can't have physically?" And then we need to lean towards those. So whether that's leveraging actual virtual spaces as places we can play in that we could never play in the real world, instead of having us all sit together in a virtual office and have a meeting together in a virtual office instead of a physical one, let's go have a crazy meeting in a weird place where we get to be inspired by our environment or we get to think differently about a problem because we're inside the phenomenon that we're trying to solve. Those, I think, can be intriguing, and those, I think, open up possibilities that you don't have in the physical world. But I do think there are some challenges for creating the right types of technologies to support that.

Thomas Bailey:
So when I go out and talk about Teachers College, what can I say that is unique about the approach that you're taking?

Nathan Holbert:
A real power of Teachers College is the fact that we have so many different perspectives and disciplines represented in the same institution, and that, I think, is really unique. I think the interdisciplinarity is almost built into the fabric of Teachers College because we're all thinking about education, but we're thinking about it from all these different ways. I think specifically around play and designing progressive learning experiences where people can really explore things and make things that they're passionate about, where we can design and innovate technologies to change those learning systems.
I think we have this really exciting collection of people here at Teachers College that are doing this in ways that aren't happening in other places at all. It's happening between myself and colleagues in Curriculum and Teaching, between myself and colleagues that I share in the Communication, Media and Learning Technologies Design program. It's happening with people in Art Education. It's happening with people in Health Education, and we have lots of conversations about the importance of play and how to design and create opportunities to support the whole learner. That, I think, is a really exciting feature of this place that very few other places have.

Thomas Bailey:
I think that's a great point. Can you give some examples of how you've been able to combine and work with colleagues from several different areas that give a sense of reality to the benefits of interdisciplinary work?

Nathan Holbert:
At Teachers College, it's happened in a couple of different places. There's one really exciting initiative that I've been a part of over the past few years that we just call loosely the play initiative, which has been made up of myself, Lalitha Vasudevan, who is running the Digital Futures Institute here at Teachers College, Haeny Yoon, who's my co-host on Pop and Play, but also associate professor in the curriculum and teaching department. Then we have a collaborator, Michael Preston, who's at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. Together, we've been bringing researchers, not just from Teachers College but throughout the city. We've been bringing teachers, K-12 teachers-together. We've been bringing game designers, people from various media companies, and tech companies that exist in New York City to have conversations about what does play look like throughout New York City and how can we change the conversations about what it means for adults, for kids, for parents, for teachers to incorporate play in their lives.
The fact that we're drawing these perspectives from different areas of expertise, different domains of knowledge, different industries has really changed the way that we talk about what play even is. We've been challenged about, "Not everybody has the opportunity to play. Play can sometimes be a privilege." So that becomes part of our conversation. Thinking about the role of technology in play becomes part of the conversation. Thinking about the physical municipal architecture of a city changes the way we talk about what play could look like for New Yorkers.
So having all of those perspectives into the conversation has allowed us to think really differently about what's possible here. From that, we've started creating these little mini projects where we've started experimenting with creating spontaneous play throughout Central Park, and how do we build play where you accidentally find yourself in the middle of a game and didn't even realize when you were walking down the sidewalk that you were a part of it? Or we've got a group that's working on supporting elementary school teachers in building play experiences for schools throughout New York City. So that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't drawing on a wide range of perspectives and methodologies.

Thomas Bailey:
So think about, if your perspective were fully embraced, what would education look like if this were really incorporated and taken seriously as a fundamental way to push us forward?

Nathan Holbert:
There are a few simple things that I think would make a massive difference, and that is if we took children seriously and we took their lives seriously. We were joking earlier about whether or not play matters to a young child, whether it's serious, whether it's work, and I think part of the answer to that comes from asking children and from watching children and paying attention to children, finding what they value, and then trying to value that too. I think we can do that in classrooms. I think we can do that in informal spaces, but just listening, appreciating, valuing what children value and appreciate when it comes to changing learning environments. I think it starts with that and then start to imagine what does it look like in a science classroom to value the perspectives, the experiences, and the interests of this room full of eighth graders.
What do they actually care about? How is that related to the kinds of things I think they should be thinking about? And then building opportunities for those perspectives, for those interests, for those community concerns to show up in the classroom. If there's something going on in our neighborhood that we all are stressed about, worried about, or care about, why shouldn't we be investigating that in our science class? Why shouldn't we be investigating that in our humanities class? So bringing those kinds of things into the classroom and trying to build systems where young people are working together, they're working across age groups, they're creating things that matter to them, that matter to the community in which they're in. That's not a small ask, but I think that would make a massive difference in not just how people like me find their way through the school systems, but how all people in our communities can find their way through these systems.

Thomas Bailey:
That would make a major change in the school system.

Nathan Holbert:
Yeah.

Thomas Bailey:
So I'm sure you've inspired some parents and educators to think about the importance of play. So do you have a recommendation to help adults keep centering play in the lives of the young people they care about?

Nathan Holbert:
It's the simplest thing to say. It's actually super hard to do in practice, and that is to just listen to children, pay attention to them, and try to value the things that they're valuing. That turns out to get you really far in some of these big questions. Instead of me assuming that the things you need to care about are the electrons and their relationship to protons, and I used to be a chemistry teacher, so that's what I care about, instead, if I ask what my students in this classroom are thinking about, what are they interested in. As a parent, when my kids are playing a game, there's a temptation for us parents to be like, "Oh, that looks bad. I got to shut it down."
But instead, I often advise, "Go play the game with them. Try to engage with them around a thing they're passionate about or they're having fun with." And it really transforms not only your understanding of this thing but also transforms your relationship to them. That's what good learning is. It's about building relationships. So I think it starts with really valuing young people, listening to them, paying attention to them, and taking them seriously and their play seriously.

Thomas Bailey:
This really sounds wonderful. I'm hoping that these podcasts will demonstrate to our broader community, they've certainly demonstrated to me, some of the really exciting things that we're doing here at Teachers College. Yes, we're about education, but this brings out a whole set of new dimensions about how to approach it and interact with it. So is there anything else you'd like to say about this that we haven't covered so far that you think is a crucial issue?

Nathan Holbert:
I guess the thing I'd add is, I talk about it often from the perspective of children because that's the area that I spend most of my time studying. But it matters for adults too. When's the last time you got out and played?

Thomas Bailey:
With the grandchildren.

Nathan Holbert:
Right.

Thomas Bailey:
I got to say, those are the play times for sure.

Nathan Holbert:
That's good.

Thomas Bailey:
So listen, thank you so much, Nathan, for being here. As I said, I think this was really interesting, and I've learned so much. I've been at Teachers College for many years, and it's amazing all the things I haven't learned so far. So this was certainly a very interesting and wonderful time to have this conversation. Just really, thank you so much.

Nathan Holbert:
Hey, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

Thomas Bailey:
So thank you for listening. Next week, join us when we talk with Professor Douglas Mennin about how he and his colleagues are working with technology to develop just-in-time interventions for mental health support. So thank you, and see you next week.
Pursuing the Public Good is produced by the Office of the President, the Digital Futures Institute, and the Office of Institutional Advancement at Teachers College, Columbia University. Take a look at our show notes for links to learn more about the work of our guests and the public good initiative at Teachers College, access transcripts, and see our full credits for this episode.