Art has always held a special place in a learner's relationship with the world. By creating and engaging in art, one can do many things. Among others, it allows you to take an idea through to fruition, to understand relationships between different materials and ideas, it can help you make sense of emotions or the world around you, it can foster creative problem solving, and it can help you to learn and develop skills through iteration.
I agree with Resnick that encouraging creative thinking and play in kindergarteners is crucial, and can develop into strong problem solving skills and resourcefulness as they get older. I also agree with Resnick in that this type of practice should not be limited to kindergarten, but encouraged throughout one's entire school years and professional life. While kindergarteners begin with glitter and glue, the transition to creating with digital technologies can begin shortly thereafter. Scratch, Tynker, and countless other programs out there allow young and old students to create stories through open-ended play while also engaging with graphics and digital art. Scratch even lets you design your own characters and environments with their paint tool, furthering the student's engagement with art. ExplainEverything, an online program that allows users to tell stories and even create lesson plans and videos, is effective because users can incorporate original art, provided graphics, text, music, and more. If an eight grader wants to create a class project about the water cycle, or if a teacher wants to create an expressive video about the Civil Rights Movement, both can be done in ways never accessible before. Therefore, the influence of digital technologies doesn't stop at art education, but now art through digital technologies can influence subjects of all kinds. I believe we are still in the relative infancy of how digital tools will revolutionize students' ability to create, but what's already available is still enough to disrupt (in a good way) and make waves in the education community.
Creative digital technology allows constructivist learning principles to truly take shape and reach its full potential. Students can use these programs to create, make mistakes, learn, create more, play, share, and learn again in their own way. It's exciting to witness the forefront of this movement, and I can't wait to see where it leads up next.
