The relationship between child’s play and scientific exploration
Laura Schulz, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, has always been interested in learning and education. At the age of 6, she tried teaching her 3-year-old sister to read, an effort that met with limited success.“She did eventually learn to read, wrote a book, and is now even a book reviewer, but I think I had very little to do with it,” Schulz recalls. “It went swimmingly at the letter A, and by the time we got to the letter B she wanted to go play in the sandbox, so that was the end of that.”Schulz has devoted her academic career to investigating how learning takes place during early childhood. Starting in infancy, children are quickly able to learn a great deal about how the world works, based on a very limited amount of evidence. Schulz’s research, much of which she does at a “Play Lab”...