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Health & Fitness

Playing and Making

Playing and Making

by Mare Parker-O'Toole
Adult Services Librarian

At the Library Gala - Greening Medfield, I watched adults and children experience the art of felting by rubbing wet wool around a rock and learn about bees and beekeeping by tasting honey directly from a honeycomb. The smell of wet wool and the sweetness of honey are things that can only be experienced in the moment, not virtually. While any number of computer programs, books and videos can teach us how to do things conceptually, but there is no substitute for getting our hands wet and sticky. Children know this and take every opportunity to experience the world with their bodies, with their senses. For the most part the rest of us live in the world of longing for those olden days of direct experience.

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We don't just learn from seeing and hearing, despite what the trends in our schools might suggest. One activity that is happening in reaction or acknowledgment of this is something called makerspace. Defined by Wikipedia as a community-operated physical space where people with common interests, often in computers, technology, science, digital and/or electronic art can meet, socialize and collaborate. Makerspaces are being developed in libraries as extensions of our mission to provide services, equipment and experiences not easily available or affordable for the average person. This can include things like access to 3D printers, sewing machines, professional graphics workstations, robotics, cooking facilities, tools and other things not invented yet. Makerspace is the place some of these inventions happen.

We learn from each other. Everyone brings different truths and experiences to group endeavors. Makerspaces capitalize on this, focusing on peer-to-peer learning rather than relying on the teacher/expert lecturing. The experts may be in the makerspace, operating as peers or they may emerge from the experiences and discoveries they create in the makerspace.

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In its essence the makerspace offers the opportunity to play. Cultural theorist Johan Huizinga wrote a book called Homo Ludens or "Playing Man" about the importance of play in the formation of culture and society. He suggests that play is primary to, and a necessary condition of the generation of culture. Play is a hands-on experience of something that generates no commercial product. It exists purely for pleasure, for the satisfaction of curiosity, learning, mastery, invention and for fun. For children play is their primary job, for adults it is an activity for the soul.

Mare Parker-O'Toole


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