Family Creative Learning Workshops and Facilitator’s Guide

Family Creative Learning is a workshop series that engages children and their parents to learn together — as designers and inventors — through the use of creative technologies. We designed the workshops to strengthen the social support and expertise of families with limited access to resources and experiences around computing.”

Ricarose Roque is a PhD student with the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab who designed these workshops and guide. She’s interested in the design of technologies and experiences to enable people, especially youth, to design and build their own creations that contribute to their lives and enrich their communities. This Family Creative Learning workshop series involves collaborating with community centers and outreach programs to design creative learning experiences for families in communities that have limited access to resources and social support around computing.

Bringing parents into a learning experience with their children is a way to show parents what creative, constructive learning can look and feel like. Parents can’t support changing education until they’ve seen it with their own eyes and experienced it themselves. Parents may fear that anything that is different is not going to be as good, or that more open educational experiences may just be a sneaky way to dumb down what their kids are doing.

Even if a rigid, instruction-heavy environment was not a good way for them to learn, parents will often insist that their children be taught this way because it’s the only way they know. This is true for all parents!

Check out opportunities for Invent To Learn Parent and Family Workshops in your area.