A Playground Worth a Thousand Programmes

What if coding were as intuitive as playing in a playground? In this talk, Linda Liukas explores the concept of embodied knowledge in computer science, showing how future technologies will blend the digital and physical worlds. With insights from a Helsinki case study, she illustrates how playgrounds can be models for all learning.

Transcription

(Music) (Applause) Thank you.

My name is Linda. I’m a children’s book author, illustrator and programmer from Helsinki, Finland, currently living in Paris. And this is me, two years ago on the Düsseldorf stage, and as mentioned, the warmth I felt from the audience was insane, the energy and the feeling, and I’m so happy to be back here today. And we had a dinner yesterday evening, and I had a chance to speak with a few of the speakers over, and I feel like there is this ongoing theme here, I don’t know if it’s intentional or if it’s just creeping up, of change. Change in the ways we work, change in the methods we work in, change even in the mediums we work in. And two years ago when I was on this stage, I was working on something new that was still at an early early stage, and it all started from this empty lot in the middle of COVID times in the fall of 2020, when I started to really think about the word scale in a completely new way. And I’m not talking about the word scale in the way technology companies often talk about it, as a verb, when you take something small and you try to build it up, up, up, up, up as quickly as you can, you try to add users, you try to add money, you try to extend it as big as you can. I’m talking about scale in the way it was originally intended to be talked about, not as a verb, but as a noun, something small compared to something big, and how do we keep that small and make it big while retaining the qualities that made it great in the beginning?

And in my line of work as an illustrator, I thought about my own tiny drawings and how do I actually make them into gigantic play sculptures, but to get into all of that we actually need to go back in time roughly 10 years.

To this other question I was pondering at the time, if code and programming truly are the new universal language,

in addition to grammar classes, we need more poetry lessons. And it’s this one sentence that has been going on rotation in my head for roughly 10 years, and it has resulted in a career as a children’s book author. I’ve been really, really lucky that 10 years ago when crowdfunding was still in its early days, I got a chance to do one of the first picture books on programming education for kids and sort of built this community of people who trusted in me. And it became a career, the Hello Ruby series has been published in over 40 languages, from Thai language to Farsi to German as well over here. My publisher is in Berlin and they are wonderful, they run a school and it’s a pleasure to work with them.

And I’ve been able to explore topics from code to networks to artificial intelligence to computer hardware,

and it’s been such a lovely profession because I get to work with both engineers to really understand what I’m talking about, and the five-year-olds who are the true philosopher kings of the world who ask the big bold questions like why and what if and how.

And in my line of work I get inspired by people like Loris Malagotsi, Maria Montessori, Jean Piaget, but equally I get inspired by these people, people like Alain de Wurring, John Van Neumann, Ada Lovelace. And often in the world there is this dichotomy, this like clear spread that these are the mathematical, logical folks who don’t have a sense of whimsy in them, and these are the people who understand childhood and joy and human side of the world, but that’s definitely not true in my work. I think both these groups of people retain this sense of curiosity about the world and this sense of whimsy. And for a long time I felt stories were the strongest thing I was doing because I wrote picture books. There’s a narrative about a little girl called Ruby, and I felt that if we hear stories that help us understand ourselves, help us understand each other, and help us understand the world that we are living in, that’s got to count for something, that technology as a discipline is so murky and so un-understandable that we need more stories, we need more narratives and we need more voices. And I still believe that, but actually I’ve started to think that the more important part of my work is actually the fact that it’s physical, it’s intensely physical.

The series is a physical book, and at the end of the book there are these unplugged activities that ask the children to draw, to cut, to knit, to run, and to move their bodies. And it took me almost ten years to start to nail down the philosophy behind this. And it took to hearing this story about Maurice Sendak, the creator of Where the Wild Things Are, one of the most beloved children’s books in the world.

And Sendak got a lot of messages from his little fans around the world, and he got a message from this little boy who says, “I love your book so much.” And Sendak receives the letter and he draws a little picture back to him and sends it over and says, “Thank you, thank you,” and so forth, and doesn’t think about it again. Until a few years later he receives another letter from the boy’s mom this time, and she says, “Oh, my son, he loved your picture so much, he ate it.”

And this is what we are as kids, we love something so much we ate it, we experienced the world with our fingertips, with the tip of our tongue, on our hands and knees.

And we tend to think that programming and software are intensely abstract, they only happen in our heads. But really, like my tendonitis, my back pain, my poor eyesight, they all prove that even creating software is intensely physical. And as humans, that’s the thing that connects us to the world, our physical being in the world, and that touch, and actually this fingertip knowledge. Germans have a wonderful word for it, of course.

I don’t even want to go there.

I mean that touch is such an overlooked sense, and it’s the sense of touch that was actually the more important part in my work. So how do you take these ideas like databases, big O, binary trees, memory allocation, and turn them into something that we can actually touch to understand? And this work has taken me into all kinds of places. For instance, into looking into algorithms. So some of you look at this piece of code and it’s immediately clear for you. Oh, it’s a pancake sorting algorithm, of course. It’s a type of sorting algorithm. But for many of us, being included, code at the first get-go is incomprehensible. It’s really, really hard to focus enough to start to wrap my head around, and I need aids. And for this specific algorithm, I was lucky because the name already gives a little cue. I actually made a stack of pancakes.

And to practice this algorithm, to get that beautiful German word, the Fingerspitzengefuhl, to be able to sort these pancakes into order. And I tell you, it was very greasy. It took a lot of time. It was really like required concentration and focus. But by the end of it, I understood the algorithm. I understood it at a level where I will never forget the basic mechanism of how it works. And I wish this kind of understanding for all of us around the technologies we use. And especially the people who create these technologies to be able to pass that knowledge onto non-technical people. I hate the word, but like people who are not yet technical people, to get a sense of how these algorithms work. So here’s how pancake sorting algorithms work. You find first the biggest pancake, you put your spatula under it, and you flip it over. And then you flip the whole thing over once more. And then you find the second biggest unsorted pancake, and you flip over and over and over again. And I do this activity actually at workshops with grown-ups and kids alike with play-doh a lot of the times. And if you have play-doh at home, you can this evening try this activity out. I promise you, it gives you a sense of how a pancake sorting algorithm works in a way that only reading the code will never give you. And you will never forget it. The algorithm will be yours, it’s a recipe, you understand it and you own it.

All of this has to do also with the way we understand something that is hard to describe. One of my favorite activities has been also drawing, and asking kids to imagine what is inside a computer for instance, and sort of grouping and categorizing these different narratives around how we understand how the machines that power our world work. Sometimes it takes the port of drama, so we for instance play acted how the computer works, there was the busy CPU that ran between the RAM and the hard drive, and there was the ROM that went on and woke up all the other pieces. We built a gigantic input-output machine to teach these young kids, six or seven years old, the von Neumann architecture. So the kids are the input data, they crawl into the machine, they see a little piece of code say crawl out backside first and they become the output data, and round and round and round they go, this gigantic machine until it usually breaks down. Or we explore the ideas of algorithms for building a cardboard YouTube.

I had this little girl who had just moved from Japan to Finland, and she made first this video for the YouTube, she made her very first origami heart shaping video, and her English was still getting there and she was not the kid who was always the center of attention in the classroom.

But once she stood behind that screen and she started narrating her YouTube video, I could see in her eyes how brave she felt, how intensely proud she was about creating this story. And after that, I asked the other kids to say first, “We get thumbs up because that’s what you do on YouTube.” And then let’s hear some comments. And the kids would yell out, “Epic! Would subscribe! More of this!” And I could see how that little girl’s perception about herself, her self-agency, her feeling of what is possible for her in the world changed in that moment. And only after this, we started talking about algorithms. How algorithms are pieces of code that take into account your viewing history, the kinds of videos you’ve liked, your geographic location, and so on and so on, to try to make suggestions on what kind of videos you might like. And I think it’s this idea that you sort of have this memory, this experience, almost a physical experience, and you combine that with the knowledge that makes this knowledge something you retain for a long, long time to come.

A lot of the principles behind the kind of work I do boil down to this. Activities I do should be playful. They should allow for repetition. They should be self-teaching, simple and beautiful. And if this list looks familiar, it’s actually a one-on-one copy of Maria Montessori’s Principles for Montessori, Methods and Materials that she came up with in the early 19th century. And I think it’s a good list for anyone designing new experiences and products, thinking about how we can do things that are self-teaching, playful, simple and beautiful, because beauty is something that we also need to see in the world.

And there’s this children’s sort of psychologist or pedagogist called Jean Piaget. And already in the 1950s, he said in relation to math education that you can’t offer an entirely organized intellectual discipline with preorganized vocabulary and concepts, rather that true learning is grounded in action. And it’s this action that often feels is lacking in computer science education. So this was a long segue to get us back to this park and sort of imagining what would it look like if one could make oneself really, really small and crawl inside of a computer and learn how computers work from the inside out. And this had, as mentioned, been an idea that had been with me for almost 10 years. I wrote the second Hello Ruby book in 2016, and it was this Alice in Wonderland story where Ruby actually falls inside of a computer and meets the bits and the logic gates and the hardware. And I had always thought that, oh, like, well, maybe one day I’ll make a museum exhibition out of it or something. But then this opportunity to look at playgrounds evolved.

Maybe here’s the kind of bigger lesson for us all. I think I’m not going to say that. Well, whatever. I’m going to say it. I think playgrounds are the way we should do software in the future. It’s naive and it’s a little bit cliche, but playgrounds offer such a beautiful metaphor for us to think about how we create spaces where many different kinds of people can participate. And throughout the presentation, there are a few points where I hope you make the connection to your own line of work and see how maybe these principles can also help in whatever you’re doing in your own profession.

So there’s an idea. Then what? In my case, I had never done landscape architecture before. I had never done playgrounds before. I had no idea how to build something intensely physical. I only had this sort of nagging idea that wouldn’t leave me behind. And I must say here, unlike children’s book writing, which is pretty much a solo activity and illustrating, I have an editor, of course, but it’s still a lot of work I do in my head on my own. Building something like this requires a lot of people. So I was really fortunate to work with the city of Helsinki, the parks and recreation department, but also the education department with landscape architects, with play structure makers to make this thing happen. And here’s the park in its original state. It’s called Ruaholah, the playground. It’s in Helsinki. If you ever visit, you should go see it. And it’s this part of town that is gentrifying. So it’s socioeconomically quite diverse. There’s a lot of tech companies headquartered in the area, and it’s also very accessible throughout the city. And these are all things that I learned from the city officials, like how do they make decisions about where to build something like this?

And one of the best parts, obviously, was to do research around playgrounds. And I learned that playgrounds are interesting because they are somehow very public, but also quite private. Because if you don’t have the kids the right age, you don’t even pay attention to the playgrounds around you necessarily. And at the same time, playgrounds and parks are places where people from all kinds of backgrounds come in. They are truly the places where we actually do meet our neighbors and our communities in a way that is quite beautiful and inspiring. So I looked a lot into playgrounds that have that wow factor. I looked into adventure playgrounds, these places where kids are allowed to take a lot of risks. I looked into Berlin playgrounds. I really love the rough aesthetic you have over here. It’s really, really inspiring.

And that’s also lovely that playgrounds can reflect locality, that they are not this one uniform structure everywhere. But I saw quite a lot of castles. I saw quite a lot of pirate ships. And it always felt to me that computers are this thing that are present in kids’ lives every single day. Why aren’t there not more and more maybe ambitious playgrounds? Why there is no synthetic biology playground? Why there is not a playground around artificial intelligence? And yeah, it felt like a good idea to sort of shake things up.

I also looked a lot into the research and writing done around playground design. And again, I feel like software engineers and architects have this affinity towards each other. There’s Christopher Alexander and his pattern language, which was kind of the genesis for object-oriented programming. But I think landscape architects and programmers ought to have more discussions together because landscape architects, they build infrastructure in a way that software programmers are starting to do more and more nowadays. And there’s this longevity and this kind of like how we are building spaces that benefit everyone that I think landscape architects and playground designers have a very nuanced vocabulary to talk about.

I also looked into artists who have built playgrounds in the past. There’s the Nigerian-British Yinka Illori, there’s the Dutch Florentin Hofmann, and there’s Karsten Höller, who does these phenomenal slides out there to just get a sense of what I as an outsider could bring into the park.

And then on the computation front, there was a few projects that really inspired me. There’s CPU dumplings, Thay Yansho is a beautiful experiment where he actually built like a dump-link store, a physical like dumpling making kitchen. And he asked his friends over and he like re-enacted how ALUs work and how a CPU works on a very, very technical work with this dumplings.

There’s John Maeda’s early in the 1990s, this kind of performance art piece called “What’s a human powered computer?” It’s very weird and obscure. There’s Japanese people running everywhere. It’s a lovely piece of work. And then there’s Dynamic Land as a space and operating system, maybe not that much what I was thinking for my playground, but their bookshelf, the bookshelf with its physicality and agency chapters were lovely and I got a lot of inspiration from them.

I also had to write a lot of curriculum goals because we had the city education department with us so that those goals could be translated to the teachers and help them see how they could use the playground in their teaching. A lot of paper, a lot of sort of very tactile knowledge, but also happily a lot of sketching and sort of ideas of how to start to translate these into practice.

And one of the areas where I feel then software developers can actually teach landscape architects was user testing and speaking to your users because city processes, many of you might be familiar with the city of Berlin and how they run things. I bet there’s something similar over here. The cities have these official roots of hearing the citizens ideas, but they are often quite obscure. They happen in the city hall. Only the people who are really, really adamant about like being a part of the hearing will know about it. And often the people who are actual stakeholders of the project don’t get heard. And I think software companies in many ways have perfected this idea that we need to listen to our users and come up with methods of actually listening to them.

So we run like focus groups with playground workers. We had a very low key poster where we asked for feedback from the stakeholders, the neighbors of the park, asking their opinion on what should be saved, what should be like absolutely not touched, what’s something new that they wish to see.

And here I think something I’ve learned from the software industry is like it really matters what kind of questions you pose. So, for instance, if I ask children, what kind of playground would you love to have? It’s like a dinosaur world with like a water slide and like, oh yeah, that’s great, but like, oh, not within the budget. But if you ask, for instance, the grownups, what design principles do you feel are the most important, like learning something new, collaboration, risk taking and adventure play, you can kind of narrow down the values and ideas of the community. So in our case, I never asked the kids to draw what their future playground might look like. But what I did instead is I asked them to sort of rate what is most important for them.

And all of the kids said risk taking, adventure. And I said, yeah, let’s do something big and scary, whatever your parents say out there.

And then the exciting part was also when I started to see these sketches come to life. And I really professionally wish this experience for everyone, not necessarily in the field of a playground, but in the field of doing something new in the new industry. Because for a long time, and I’m speaking about years here, because these processes are slow for two, three years, these ideas were sketches on my paper. And then came the actual playground makers and they took these sketches and they turned them into schematics, they turned them into like building structures. And it was so amazing to see. It just felt like this moment of like, wow, it’s actually going to happen. And then it actually started to happen. So all of the pieces were built in a suburb near Copenhagen. They are all made of wood, so it’s easy to maintain and upkeep.

And they were like moved in these gigantic cars to the playground and construction started over there. There’s a few sneak peeks of what it looks like.

So a few lessons I’ve learned from this kind of like design phase of the playground making. I think playgrounds in many ways are what we wish schools would be. And actually, honestly, like workplaces would look like in the real world. Kids there are self-directed, they come up with their own projects, they do conflict resolution well within themselves. We grown ups are there, but we are not there. We are on the sidelines. We are there if something goes wrong. We are there for support, but we are not there micromanaging the kids or their experience. We are not there dumping information on them. Rather, the children’s curiosity drives them.

Physical spaces allow people to come together in a way that online spaces unfortunately don’t allow anymore. We failed. The internet failed at its original idea that we bring people together. But luckily, we still have the physical world where we need to meet the neighbors. We need to interact with people who come from different kinds of backgrounds.

And when we create playgrounds, they should be really about play, not proving grounds, not to say, not to like readily played things that are already boring at the like get go. They should be really about those principles of play we looked at.

So the second part of the presentation looks a little bit deeper into kind of these values and ideas behind these play structures. And I’ve had for a long time this idea of playground equipment as the hardware of what makes a playground work. But there is this more elusive, more sort of interesting part of playgrounds that I want to call the software of playgrounds. And we’ll get to that in a second. But before that, the hardware. So here’s a picture of what the playground looks like today. It opened a month ago in Helsinki, as mentioned, and it’s been a huge hit with the kids. There’s families. It’s a free playground. Anyone can come in and play there. There’s always queues there, unfortunately, but hopefully it will get easier. We had a few international reporters who came in and said, so will the playground close in the wintertime? And everyone looks at each other like, no.

What the Finnish children do is like they dress up warmly and they go in there and they come up with new ways of playing. The snow just adds a layer of fun to the playground. And we also paid a lot of attention to the lightning. That’s something I feel like, at least in Scandinavian countries, we have so much dark that making, for instance, lights inside of the computer structure so that it’s like a beacon that beams light throughout November, December, January, February.

It’s such a small but smart thing to do. So we did get that risk sense. The playground, the gigantic input-outboard machine that started as a drawing and became a cardboard and now it’s like a six-metre-tall tower.

It is quite risky. It’s exhilarating to see the kids as they climb up. And once there was a little girl who came out sliding from the playground and she said, I felt very brave.

And if that’s a sense a kid can have at six when she’s sliding a computer, I think she will be like a computer scientist when she grows up. She will not be afraid of code when she’s felt very brave with computers at that age. There’s also some notes to my own internet youth. I made a neon cat and I always love observing the nerdy moms and dads who come by and sneakily take a picture of themselves with the internet cat.

There’s very typical, normal play equipment. So for instance, these pixel chairs or play structures or whatever you call them. I think the beautiful thing about playgrounds is that grown-ups might have one or two or maybe five ways of playing in our head. But the kids will come up with 150 ways of doing something with any structure we provide them.

There’s a mouse. This is kind of a version of the YouTube box we did. The nice addition there is that the backside of the YouTube or the browser or whatever is made of chalk paint. So you can draw on it and maybe make your own web shop or whatever. And then one of the things we learned while talking with some of the community members in the vicinity was that for many immigrant parents, for instance, they don’t know that playgrounds in Finland are free. You can come in. You often have personnel there. So we made this little sign that in the six or seven most spoken languages in the neighborhood we say, “Welcome!” and we explain what a playground is. And you also notice the JavaScript there as a little wing to our playground.

Here’s the ballpark from the other side. One of the things that was really beloved is the trampoline. Again, a very simple structure. But you can practice if-else frequencies. You can practice loops. You can do all sorts of crazy activities with it. And one of my favorite things, as mentioned, is the idea of software. So we’ve devised this computing curriculum for all primary school teachers and early childhood educators in the Helsinki, Finland or like global region.

The materials are also in English. And the idea is that educators can take a group of students here. They can do an activity. They can fill that memory and they can go them back to the classroom and revise what is an algorithm or what is hardware or so forth. So it’s a bodily experience of understanding how computers work.

And why this works is actually, again, one of the systemic ideas and innovations. So in Finland, all, not all playgrounds, but I’d say like in Helsinki, like 10, 15 of the biggest playgrounds, they have actual paid staff. Year-round staff that organizes meetups. They organize programs. They organize stuff for moms who stay at home with their babies in the mornings and then in the afternoons for school kids. So they are kind of the software of the park, the human element that makes sure that we can organize all kinds of events and endeavors in the park. But then there’s also other examples like museums, Yorkshire, a sculpture park comes to mind. They have a really, really lovely material. There’s Little Island in New York that does a lot of this. They have, for instance, an artist in residence for the park, which I love as a concept. And the whole idea is like how can we take public spaces and turn them into learning environments and feelings. And one way of doing them is through QR codes. So there’s this binary, abacus and binary calculus activities and all of these like special play equipments have these QR codes that give you prompts of what you can do. But then they take you also to the website where you can learn more about what’s happening. One of my very favorite devices is this mobile phone that rotates and you can perform your victory dance, your TikTok thing, your whatever over there. But what I see in practice is that this has become a play structure where kids play together and kids of very different ages play together. So my son who was two might like sit there in the middle and then 10 year old boys might be running around and like moving the mobile phone around and around and around. And I think again, like these are design principles I didn’t inherently think about in advance. But now I notice that, ah, this is what good playgrounds look like, where you offer these places where you can play together at different whatever your ability or whatever your background.

And they are computer keyboard where you can find the letters of your name or you can practice control C or control V. No VIM codes so far, but we’ll see if there’s like, oh, what is that? It’s more like a keyboard, but maybe in an update for the park one day. And not everything needs to be super expensive. If you have a nearby playground you go to, you can use chalk and paint to like do a lot of these ideas. So one of the activities that worked really beautifully is this flow chart I designed. And I see often like groups of little girls go there and they go like, this is the way you work. These are the rules. This is how the logic goes. And they invent their own programs without like even understanding that that’s what they are doing. And I think that’s beautiful.

So I’m going to jump a little bit ahead and end up by saying that a lot of the work I’ve been doing is understanding sort of playgrounds as models for 21st century learning.

And as mentioned, it feels so like self-evident that this is what like work should look like. It doesn’t mean that playgrounds are places where crises never happen. If you’ve ever been on a playground with a two-year-old, there’s like a crisis every three minutes. But they are places where it’s safe to explore and experiment.

And maybe in a bigger picture, I also feel very grateful that I got a chance to experiment with a medium that I had no experience in. But I feel like the project brought out a lot of good things in me and also a lot of good things in the city officials, a lot of good things in the playground designers.

And if you ever get an opportunity to jump into a project that feels a little bit over your head, I would encourage it because it offers also a lens to reflect on your other lines of work.

And why physical space is so interesting, I think, for all of us is because as an industry, we’ve moved from this time when computers filled entire rooms to a time when computers would sit on the table to a time when computers were carried in backpacks.

To a time when computers fit in our pockets. But slowly we are moving into a world where computers are a part of our environment, a part of our built environment. And I’m only speaking for myself, but I’m hoping that the only experience available isn’t one where we put like lenses on our faces, but we build something more imaginative, more like ambitious, more fun.

And that requires that the technology industry speaks to other people and builds ecosystems instead of products. And that’s why I think it’s so interesting that we ought to have more discussions with landscape architects because they’ve been thinking about these ideas for a long.

And I know at this point it’s quite controversial to be quoting Linus Durvals anymore, but he’s a fellow of him and I appreciate his work dearly. And he had this quote about how to build Linux, which is a 20 or no, like over 30 year project at this point. And he says that I am not a visionary, I’m an engineer. I’m happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars, but I’m looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in. And it’s this sense of maintenance, this sense of infrastructure and caring about the work we do, as opposed to only looking into the stars, but I also learned from the landscape architects I worked with. They plan for projects that last for 20 years. I’m quite certain that all of the code I’ve ever written in my life so far, some of it’s really terrible, but it will be gone by the time this playground still will be standing. Because a playground is built for 20 years and a code rots in five, six, seven, sometimes never, but my code at least.

And that’s why it’s so, so important that we plan for longevity and we think about the things we do.

And I’m going to end up with a slightly different note. So when, as I mentioned, like drawing has been a really important way for me to allow the kids to explore these ideas around technology that feel quite obscure for them. I think drawing is good because grownups tend to think that they need to draw the right thing or the correct thing or they say, I’m not good at drawing. But what drawing allows you to do is experiment different perspectives. It allows you time to think, to sort of evolve your ideas and you don’t need to be really good at it. It’s more interesting to just see different ideas. So I’ve asked kids from around the world to draw the internet and place themselves in that internet. And I have a lot of like networks. I have a lot of Googles and TikToks and apps. But I also get very poetic examples like there’s a little like taped together flower field over there.

And one of the lovely things that happened recently in the States was I was working with a big group of kids and we were in a library and they had very pointy pencils with them and they were doing this activity of drawing what the internet looks like. And all of a sudden one little boy, he pushes accidentally the pencil through the paper and there’s a hole. And he first feels really terrible. He says, oh, I ruined it. Can I have another paper? But then I lift up the paper and I sort of look through it and I say, you know, it’s like the light is passing through here. And that’s what internet is. It’s like fiber optic cables where light flashes through and it goes like it stopped and it goes again and stopped and it goes again. And the boy was really like, I came up with the fiber optic cables and he started punching his like paper and then the little girl next to him is like this and she started punching her paper. And all of a sudden I see this idea spread all through the classroom. And I love moments when something like this happens where first of all, we modeled how viral the internet can be, how ideas can spread in a network quite rapidly.

And also like I didn’t anticipate that experiment. I didn’t think in advance that this is a teachable moment. It arose and I as an educator, I was there to kind of make the connection for him, but he was the one who kind of came up with it.

And there is this obscure again, sorry, Northern Italian art pedagogy, I think has a lot to do with how we plan these kinds of experiences, whether it’s in our professional life or in the life of schools. And it comes from Loris Malagotsi, the founder of Reggio Emilia. And Reggio Emilia is this philosophy that was born after the Second World War when the Italians basically said, we’ve screwed up a whole generation of kids. We need a whole new municipal way of educating kids. So this is not a private school. It’s a municipal early childhood education for art education. And Loris Malagotsi, he has this poetic beautiful way of explaining what I just explained to you with the punch card story where he says that we can’t as adults offer the answers that the search is undertaken together and the observations and paying attention are the part that are truly valuable in learning.

And instead of writing this strategy paper for everyone on like how to build municipal early childhood centers, Malagotsi in the 1940s, he wrote a poem. And the poem is called “A Hundred Languages” and in the Reggio network, it’s still widely used today. They talk about the hundred languages all the time. And in essence, what they say is that the child has a hundred languages to express themselves. They have the language of speaking and writing, of singing and crawling, of dancing and sculpting. But very often we in the world will limit languages into only two, those of speaking and writing. But luckily the children know better and luckily many of us are opening our eyes to see like the hundred languages the children have. And if Malagotsi lived today, I’m a hundred persons sure that he would consider code, large language models, generative AI as one of the hundred languages of the children, as one language that the child can express themselves with.

And I think this idea that we should look into the history eagerly and curiously into the future when we are designing learning experiences, when we are designing public infrastructure and when we are designing software is something I wish to carry with myself from this project.

Deb Chakra, who’s a professor of material sciences, I think, she talks a lot about infrastructure as care, at scale. And honestly, after doing this project, I’ve started to really rethink the word scale, not as a verb, as something that is opposed to small and too big. And to understand that even as a children’s book author, even as a playground designer, my work can have impact in ways that I don’t foresee because books have a long longevity, they can spread for many, many years to come. Playgrounds have a life cycle of 20 years and it’s this care in unlikely places like a playground that I want to put into the world.

I think all of us have these childhood dreams of becoming a coder, of becoming an astronaut, of becoming a playground maker. And as we get older, we often start to lose them. We focus on narrowly the thing that we argued at. And my encouragement for the next two days is to listen to the talks with that sense of a five-year-old, that sense of wonder, that sense of excitement, that sense of possibility. And if you are offered a chance to jump on board something completely new, do take it, do crawl it, do climb it and do roll down the opportunity. Thank you very much.