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When Will Wright took the time to explain the significance of his childhood experiences attending a Montessori school, I gave him my full attention. Wright and his colleagues have developed Spore, an evolution video game that enables the player to interact with an entire world and experience the universe. The player can control planetary atmospheric temperature and pressure and can see the results of her actions sped up over time. Wright explains that he created the game so that children (and their adult friends!) can “compress long term dynamics into short term experiences”. Spore has been described as “Pacman, Sim City, Risk, and Star Trek rolled into one mass multi-player game, with intricately modeled biological, ecological, and social phenomenons.”
Will Wright has created a style of computer gaming unlike any that came before, emphasizing learning more than losing, invention more than sport. With his hit game SimCity, he spurred players to make predictions, take risks, and sometimes fail miserably, as they built their own virtual urban worlds. With his follow-up hit, The Sims, he encouraged the same creativity toward building a household, all the while preserving the addictive fun of ordinary video games. His next game, Spore, which he previewed at TED 2007, evolves an entire universe from a single-celled creature.
Recently I happened upon three websites dedicated to toys for children made out of paper. What a windfall! One is a website dedicated to providing templates for paper toys of various shapes and sizes. The second site is dedicated to flatpack toys for printing and construction. …and finally one cannot forget about origami. Here is a website that provides unexpected topics for origami folding.
Wherever I am in the world, I am a keen pursuer of traditional toys. These websites provide the type of accessible and charming resources that warm my heart!
Subject: Traditional Games 
There is so much to say about traditional games. Of course there are games that you play in the street, and games that you play indoors. I was fortunate enough to experience street games in the 1970s in Ireland and Quebec, and learned many indoor board and action games. As a Montessori educator, I have collected resources and photography books about traditional street games. I have also been fortunate enough to travel and collect simple games, and viewed exhibitions about traditional childhood games in Barbados and Japan.
The Streetplay.com website is a wonderful resource for information about this topic. I was also pleased to see that a Canadian sportswoman has been supporting the Right to Play initiative, along with many of her Canadian colleagues, and has recently launched a book about child’s play.
I’m not completely negative about contemporary toys such as video games. For girls in particular, they are a useful tool to develop certain neurological-muscular functions. However, I wasn’t interested in the idea of looking at a TV screen and playing a game when younger, and still find it unappealing. In my classroom, while teaching overseas, I placed traditional games in the window sill that could be used after lunch. The children loved them and would often say that their parents hadn’t told them about these games.
Olympian Silken Laumann says the solution to childhood obesity is simple: play. (Bringing back fun , April, 2006, National Post)
“The schoolyard games have been lost. Kids don’t know how to play four-square, a lot of people don’t know how to play hopscotch,” says Silken Laumann, who over the next couple of weeks will be conducting sessions across the country instructing parents on the rules of the games most of them played as children.”
