Playful learning, trial and error, tinkering around just for the fun of it, is the motor of biological evolution. Without producing large numbers of variants of self-replicable nucleic acid molecules, bacteria would never have populated the planet.

Playful learning was therefore not invented by anyone. But it sure was formulated as a concept numerous people. For example, Charles Darwin and Maria Montessori wrote about it from different perspectives.

Tinkerland.org has been very much inspired by the work of Mitch Resnick and other members of the Lifelong Kindergarden Lab at the MIT. Let Mitch explain his ideas in his own words.

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Short Mitch Resnick interview at Google Science Fair.

And a much longer talk: