Strawbees are not only about making things, it’s also the environment in which they are made. We want to create a learning environment that helps children engage in projects that reflect their ideas and how they see the world.

Inspired by the work at Lifelong Kindergarten at MIT Media Lab and Strawbees resources and materials are for helping teachers to facilitate situations where students can engage in creative thinking. Children continuously iterate their projects as they travel through the Creative Learning Spiral.

A classroom with Strawbees transforms into a dynamic and collaborative playground with opportunities for students to interact, experiment, and create overlapping projects. In this imaginative space of making and playing, children refine their creative thinking while building projects they care about. As they build, their process is reflected as the Creative Learning Spiral.

It is essential for us to cultivate creative thinking in younger generations, which is at the heart of Creative Learning Spiral projects. We want to live in a world where children, "..must learn to deal creatively with uncertainty and change – not only their work lives but also in their personal lives (how to develop and sustain friendships in an era of ever-changing social networks) and their civic lives (how to participate meaningfully in communities that have ever-shifting needs and boundaries).”[3] Through creative and collaborative project-based learning, this is exactly what Strawbees aspires for students to engage in the classroom.

The criteria Strawbees uses for creating tools and resources for learning environments is following the room metaphor by Mitch Resnick and Seymour Papert . The path of the Room is for students to begin projects easily from the floor with rising complexity toward the high ceiling. However, a single path isn’t enough to cover all groups of learners and therefore requires another dimension to the room. Students are diverse ranging in different interests, hobbies, ideas, and backgrounds. There is space in the room to widen and include more paths as students are most engaged when they work on projects meaningful to them. From the willingness to participate in a healthy struggle to 12 iterations later designing resources within the criteria of the room metaphor leads students to make grand connections.

• Projects – People learn best when they are actively working on meaningful projects – generating new ideas, designing prototypes, refining iteratively. [6]
• Peers – Learning flourishes as a social activity, with people sharing ideas, collaborating on projects, and building on one another’s work. [6]
• Passion – When people work on projects they care about, they work longer and harder, persist in the face of challenges, and learn more in the process. [6]
• Play – Learning involves playful experimentation – trying new things, tinkering with materials, testing boundaries, taking risks, iterating again and again. [6]

In Strawbees Classroom there are student resources designed to be flexible depending on your student’s learning needs. These resources are in the form of a thematic lesson, activity models with building instructions, and open-ended explorations following a creative design process. Lessons and activities are designed with a central theme with plenty of supporting material for students to explore a wider range of topics with research, engaging in more building ideas, coding cards, journals for writing (or doodling) reflections.

Episodes from the School of Ridiculous Inventions are open-ended, inspirational resources shared with students learning how to brainstorm, document, act on prototyping ideas, and playtest with friends following an iterative design process closely tied to the Creative Learning Spiral.

Listed below are professional learning articles to further your teaching.