Welcome to our Roblox world.
One of the enduring pastimes at Fairhaven School is one representation of what Sudbury Valley founder Daniel Greenberg called “Worlds in Creation,” the complex example of imaginative play in which young people collaborate to make entire worlds together. While the Theatre Corp works overtime on two plays, and while the JC keeps busy on complicated cases, still other students continue creating worlds.
Sometimes, this happens only in their minds, as they talk back and forth somewhere on campus, pushing their narrative forward. As we’ve written before, the cadence of this verbal play is unique, featuring lots of phrases like “and then you (do something)”, followed by “and then I (do something.)” Other times, they may begin each remark with “pretend I,” and back and forth they go, sometimes for days on end. With each phrase, one can almost hear the neural pathways forming, bifurcating, growing.
Eating lunch the other day, a younger student asked me if I’d like to join him and his friend playing Escape Room, another iteration, in this case where one player is dictating to the others the contours and items in an escape room he’s creating in real time, all in his mind. When the two primary players left for another location, still playing while they walked away, another young person who had been observing did not skip a beat. He asked me, “Do you want to play Escape Room?” We did, and soon I was trying to navigate my way out of chambers featuring giant mouths, treasure chests, a ladder, and a pickax, to name a few. This exemplifies the wildfire nature of play at Fairhaven School, a place where games evolve and spread daily.
Many of us experience an instinctive recognition of the value of play in young people. Doesn’t seeing children at play simply feel right? However, there’s more to this than a gut feeling. Indeed, a host of research identifies the many benefits of play for young people, including the development of social skills, cognitive abilities, and emotional intelligence. Here is one summary.
See the attached video for a student tour of yet another recent example, wherein two students began with the online platform game Roblox and then crafted their own version, Robloxia, in the Art Room using various materials, and, of course, their remarkable imaginations. Endearing and fun, this three-dimensional demonstration captures the often evanescent, very serious work of what we call “play,” an exquisite version of free minds in action.
