Intrinsically, human beings should not solely be regarded to as tool users. They are creators. Computers should allow humans to intuitively make creations and adaptations instead of merely following paths that developers have already designed. Such educational meaning would be most beneficial for children.

Imagine you were five years old and you picked up a wood board stacked in your backyard and bridged it across the rivulet. Another day, you could not find a place to hang a hanger, and then simply put it on a door knob. When doing your assignment, you grabbed a ruler by the side of you to crop a piece of folded paper as a knife. You may have forgotten these instances because they were thoughtless, tiny things in your childhood, too obvious to be visible. However, rethink these subtle but significant occasions. They are the ways that children react, adapt, and exploit their environment, which is not always tailored to their needs in a particular context.

How can children make these creations in a thoughtless way while playing in their backyard or basement? Could the same outcomes emerge from playing with digital technology?

My theory is that four main factors make these intuitive creations happen: 1, the ambiguity of raw materials and tools, in terms of function. 2, the affordance that enhances the understandings to the properties of raw materials. 3, the altering contexts. 4, the nature of children as tool makers. More specifically, those artifacts, e.g. the wood board, door knob, and ruler, have multiple properties to exploit. They are open-ended, and could be utilized with different functions in different contexts. After perceiving the affordance of those raw materials naturally, children can adapt in their immediate surroundings for playing based on their own theories and hypotheses freely.

However, in regard to computing, most components have fixed functions in current operation systems or applications. For example, in the Drawing Pad application, “pencil” is a well-defined tool with a single and clear function. However, in contexts other than Drawing Pad, it could also be seen as a stick, a tag, or even a bolt for your email box since we could see different properties of a “pencil” as a tool. In addition, in current system, it is also hard to process these digital tools and adapt them to something new by users themselves.

Admittedly, targeting one context and fixating on the function of the tool is easy to use by users and efficient to implement by developers. However, on the other hand, it fails in triggering creativity, ending up with forcing users to directly choose from the existing “ready-to-use” tools passively.

The concept that I have drawn from these insights is as follows: Basically, the system for children includes three parts: the “box” of basic tools, the “Tool-making-studio” to adapt the basic tools, and the “playground” with different contexts, activities and tasks. Since the contexts and activities keep being altering, and the basic tools are not able to fit every activities, children can not always find the right tool in the tool “box”, so they may need the “Tool-making-studio” to adapt those tools and exploit their properties in new context to fit their needs, and those new tools or new functions could be for self-using, exchanging or sharing in public.

For instance, Tom wants to know how long time it will take to walk from his home (A) to MIT (B), and he ponders, “What could I use in my tiny tool box? The Ruler? But could I measure the curve with it? Or I should make it happen now! Additionally, only knowing the distance seems also not enough if I want to know the time...I need to borrow that property from a Timer.”

 Tom meets a problem in a particular context

 What Tom has are a tool box of raw materials and tools and some adaptors

 Tom begins to exploit the basic limited resources to make new tools

 Tom could use the specific new tool he creates and saves it to his tool box 

In order to implement this concept, it is necessary to build a pool of basic tool properties according to the physical world in advance, and the properties could be of the shapes, colors, functions and others. Then we need to develop an algorithm that obtains the inputs on which properties of the tools users utilize and how the users process several independent properties to build new tools for a particular context. Finally, it is also important to publish the self-created tools so that others could not only use them, but also break them into parts and reuse the property units to build their own tools.