We should be teaching kids to be creators, not consumers.

If “Sissy’s Mag­i­cal Pony­corn Adven­ture” sounds like a game that was cre­ated by a five year old girl, that’s because it is. Well, her Dad helped too. Ryan Hen­son Creighton and his daugh­ter Cassie devel­oped a charm­ing lit­tle Flash-based game you can play right here for free that’s also avail­able on iOS  for $2.99. Cassie came up with the con­cept and drew all of the game’s art­work with crayons. You may have heard about it; it’s got­ten a lot of press.

I don’t expect you to rush off to play a game about “pony­corns” (unless you really want to, in which case I com­pletely under­stand), but my point in shar­ing this infor­ma­tion is so that you’ll under­stand why this same five year old girl and her dad just gave a very inspir­ing TED talk:

In it, Creighton argues that “we should be teach­ing kids to be cre­ators, not con­sumers.” Basi­cally, the more sim­pli­fied tech­nol­ogy becomes, the more it sim­pli­fies  us . And there are other issues too: Why aren’t we teach­ing kids pro­gram­ming in our schools? Why are our school system’s com­put­ers and soft­ware so anti­quated? Creighton’s vision of the future is one in which using com­put­ers for devel­op­ing games and other cre­ative out­lets is more acces­si­ble and eas­ier for every­one to learn, espe­cially chil­dren, and that these types of activ­i­ties are more encouraged.

This quote says it all:

When we see kids using tablet com­put­ers, we say “Oh my gosh, it’s so amaz­ing how well they’ve taken to tech­nol­ogy!” and we clap our hands together and we call them “dig­i­tal natives.” Folks, these devices have a touch-controlled inter­face and one but­ton. If we’re amazed our kids can use these devices, we’re not expect­ing enough of our kids.

Watch the video; it’s only about seven min­utes long. Be inspired.

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