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What are your bike parts?

Yesterday I attended The Sandbox Summit, a day of conversation around “Building a 21st Century Sandbox.” Much of the conversation centered around concepts that some parents may already know – it’s not necessary to stress over buying the latest toy or video or game that claims to make your kid a genius, rather kids do so much of their learning through the discovery and exploration of unstructured play.

The tone of the summit was set by keynote speaker Andy Berndt, the Managing Director of Google Creative Lab. He told a story from his childhood about watching friends get shiny new bikes. He looked upon these bikes with envy because what he got was not shiny and new. Someone from his family in the insurance business with ties to the police department brought young Andy a box of bike parts, stripped from several different bikes. What a gift, huh? Well, he soon discovered that since bikes were made to certain standards they could share hardware and be combined in new and interesting ways. He soon discovered all of the different frankenstein bikes that could be made from this book of parts, and realized how cool this gift really was. This “toy” offered innovation, experimentation, and imaginative play. Bike parts.

So what makes something bike parts? Several things came up time and time again. As media and toy creators we can look at this list and think how to incorporate it into our product. As parents we can view our children’s toys and media through this filter. 

  1. Flexible – can one kid use it one way and another kid a totally different way? Someone had a nice rule: a good toy is one that can be used at least 3 different ways.
  2. Promotes Active Learning – is the toy driving the experience or is the kid driving the toy? Another good rule: the experience should be 90% kid and 10% toy. 
  3. Simulating – does it spark creative innovation and imaginative play?
  4. Non-linear – can the kid choose his own path through the user experience? 
  5. Social – does the toy or media offer an opportunity to use it socially, with the ability to learn from and interact with others? 
  6. Fun – it’s funny how often this came up, as though everyone had forgotten to make things for kids fun. 
What’s one of the best toys to meet all of these criteria? Blocks. But there are also plenty of ways that technology can embrace this “bike part” way of thinking, much of which has been featured in previous posts. All those instances of kids creating content really feeds into this way of thinking, like the Ben 10 Game Creator, Scratch, Phineas and Ferb, Kid-Tough Camera, and Boom Blox. 
Olive’s bike parts are her tub of magnet tiles. Use #1: build 3-D houses for her robots. Use #2: put them together to make 2-D shapes. Use #3: stack all the squares together and pretend it’s a book, reading a new story every time you flip open the “pages.” This is one of the stories she made up this week when reading her magnet tile book, and I was so proud of this imaginative play that I wrote it down:
Olive and Ethan were running around their mommies. Then they noticed that their mommies were tickling them. Then a ghost came and ate them all. Then a scary bat came and ate the ghost. They were all inside each other’s tummies. Then they all sang a tune. 

If your family has a great example of bike parts, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. I’ll also be sharing more of the good stuff from Sandbox Summit in upcoming posts. 

Photo found via Gootyam, speaking of the cool stuff you can do with bike parts…

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 7:40 pm and is filed under Kids Creating Content, Museums and Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

2 Responses to “What are your bike parts?”

  1. Paul Hilliard Says:
    September 27th, 2008 at 12:17 am

    “Bike Parts”
    When it comes to bike parts it sounds like Andy Berndt and I have something in common. As a sculptor and father of two kids, I am always “playing” with stuff, and I love any kind of toy that has open-endedness. One thing that I started doing when I was a child was taking things apart, and today I still do that with my kids. The old VCR is dead? OK then let’s rip it apart and see how it works before we recycle it. Soon it’s easy to see most anything as a raw material for play or sculpture.

  2. big cheese Says:
    September 27th, 2008 at 12:57 am

    That’s awesome, Paul. I wish I had some of that rip it apart and put it back together know-how.
    And BTW, your sculptures are great.