My son was playing with blocks yesterday. I wasn’t directing him, just watching.
He leaned two triangular prisms together and ran a matchbox car down the slope. A ramp.
Then he set a flat block at the top, so the car could drive up the ramp and onto a platform. The ramp had quietly stopped being a ramp; now it was a driveway.
Then he built a gantry over the platform, declared the whole thing a race course, and started lining cars up at the top.
At no point did he sit down and decide, “I’m going to build a race course.” He built a ramp, and the ramp told him what it wanted to be next.
The Bricoleur
In 1962, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described two very different ways humans make things. The engineer starts with a plan – a blueprint, a specification, a clear picture of the finished thing – and then goes and gets exactly the materials the plan calls for. The bricoleur starts with whatever happens to be lying around and builds by rearranging, adapting, and responding to what shows up along the way.
Lévi-Strauss wasn’t ranking the two. His point was that they’re equally sophisticated ways of thinking. But spend any time in a school or an office and you learn quickly which one gets the respect.
Almost thirty years later, the MIT researchers Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert noticed the same split in how children learn to program. Some kids planned top-down: outline the structure, define the functions, fill in the details. Others – the bricoleurs – wrote a few instructions, ran them, watched what happened, adjusted, and ran them again. They were holding a conversation with the material.
The planners’ programs weren’t better. They were just easier for teachers to read, because the teachers had been trained to value planning. Turkle and Papert named the bias a failure of “epistemological pluralism,” which is an academic way of saying we tend to recognize only one style of thinking as real thinking.
My three-year-old has never heard of any of this. He just builds the way that feels natural to him, which happens to be the way Lévi-Strauss described, the way Turkle and Papert defended, and the way every maker space on earth is now trying to teach back to grown-ups.
What the Blocks Are Saying
The thing worth noticing about the race course is that each step only made sense because of the step before it.
The platform made sense because the ramp was there. The gantry made sense because the platform was there. If you’d stopped him at the start and asked what he was building, he’d have said “a ramp,” because that’s genuinely all it was. The race course didn’t exist yet, and it couldn’t have – it had to come out of the building.
This is what Papert meant when he described learning as a conversation between the builder and the thing being built. The blocks aren’t passive raw material; they’re participants. Every block my son placed changed the structure, and the changed structure handed him a fresh set of possibilities. The ramp turned into an entryway the instant the platform appeared beside it. The whole context shifted under his hands.
Mitchel Resnick – Papert’s student at MIT, and the creator of Scratch – later turned this into the Creative Learning Spiral: imagine, create, play, share, reflect, imagine again. It’s the engine that drives kindergarten, and in Lifelong Kindergarten he argues it’s how the best creative work gets done at any age. We just stop calling it learning somewhere around middle school and start calling it “iterative design” or “rapid prototyping.”
What We Train Out of Them
Every formal education system I’ve passed through – and I collected a fair few of them earning my Master’s – eventually teaches children to plan before they build. Outline before you write. Spec before you code. Know what you’re making before you start making it.
This is genuinely useful. I have nothing against blueprints. If you’re building a bridge, for the love of everyone downstream, have a blueprint.
The cost shows up when planning becomes the only permitted mode. When “what are you building?” always demands a confident answer before a child is allowed to touch the materials, something quietly goes missing. The willingness to start without knowing where you’ll end up. The patience to let the work answer back. The ramp that gets to become a race course.
Turkle and Papert watched this happen up close: children who naturally built like bricoleurs got marked down, redirected, told to “plan it out first.” Their programs ran perfectly well. It was the process that looked wrong to adults trained in the engineer’s style.
Papert spent his career pushing back. He never argued that planning is bad. His argument was that we badly undervalue building as a way of thinking. When a kid stacks blocks and stumbles onto something he never intended, he isn’t failing to plan – he’s thinking, in the oldest way humans have ever made things. The blueprint is the newcomer here, not the block.
The Feedback Loop
What is it that makes my son’s block play look like play, and a designer’s prototype sprint look like work? (Besides the paycheck.)
Build something small. Look at what you built. Respond to what you see. Build the next thing. That loop runs exactly the same whether you’re three years old with wooden blocks or thirty with a Figma file.
His race course came out of about forty-five seconds of it. Ramp → platform → gantry → “it’s a race course!” Each cycle maybe ten seconds long. No hesitating. No wondering whether it was good enough to show anyone. Just build, look, respond.
This is the loop I try hardest to protect. Not because I want a kid who never plans – he’ll pick that up, and it’s a good skill to have. It’s that the instinct to start building and let the thing tell you what it wants to become is rare, genuinely valuable, and desperately easy to train out of a person.
Try This
Next time your kid is building something – blocks, LEGO, a pillow fort, a drawing – fight the urge to ask “what are you making?” at the start.
Just watch.
Watch each piece answer the one before it. Watch the project change its mind halfway through. Watch a tower become a bridge become a house become a rocket ship. It looks like indecision, but it’s a builder and a material talking to each other in real time – the same feedback loop that sits underneath every creative thing anyone has ever made. Your kid simply hasn’t learned to be self-conscious about it yet.
Protect that.
This essay is part of the thinking behind 12 Weeks of Tech Projects to Build With Your Kid – a curriculum designed around exploration-first learning for ages 2-6.
References
- Lévi-Strauss, C. (1962). The Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press.
- Turkle, S. & Papert, S. (1990). “Epistemological Pluralism: Styles and Voices within the Computer Culture.” Signs, 16(1), 128-157.
- Papert, S. (1980). Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. Basic Books.
- Resnick, M. (2017). Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play. MIT Press.