I see a lot of parallels between the work kids do in Math in Your Feet and the Maker Movement. Not only is the human body our original “technology” and the tool with which we learn about the world and develop our cognition from birth, but the “maker” philosophy aligns with my own approach to bringing math and dance together in elementary classrooms.

Mitch Resnick is the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research and head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab. Resnick recently sat down for a conversation with EdSurge. You can read the whole conversation but, below, I’ve focused on his thoughts about the process of making.

When one comes upon a whole classroom of moving bodies dancing in little blue tape squares it’s easy to to miss the forest for the trees, in the sense that it looks a lot like dance and not a whole lot like math. The reality is that math making and dance making have a lot in common. Both share a process by which the learner experiments, asks questions, revises, reflects and…often….has something tangible (an answer or some choreography) to show for it.  Resnick’s comments below resonate with the premise of the new book.

One of the things that appeals to me about the maker movement is that it’s not just about making. That’s an important part of what the maker movement is about. If you give a child a set of step-by-step instructions and build something, in one way, they’ve made something—but that’s not the spirit of the maker movement.