The Importance of Limitations for Creativity and Learning
The other day, my kids started messing around (at home) with an online document writing platform their school uses. They’d discovered a fun little easter egg. I watched them laugh and play with the feature - pushing its limits and ultimately crashing the browser.
These same kids have messed about in Scratch (wikipedia.org) through the school as well, but they rarely stick with it for very long.
I think Scratch is brilliantly done and I don’t wish to speak ill of it.
But it struck me how the limitations of the easter egg made it more compelling to play with. The feature was a little buggy and did not handle multiple instances very well. This led to interesting behavior as they added more and more instances to the page.
This "toy" had way less features than Scratch, but it was pretty free-form in use and it was easy to invoke. It also had severe limitations and was easy to break.
I think Scratch is so featureful that it is intimidating to newcomers. The paradox of having so many toys is that it’s hard to know which one to play with.
In both learning and creativity, I think there’s a lot to be said for a very simple toolbox that invites play but doesn’t present too many options at first.
I think a lot of people can relate to this in the visual arts: Give me a nice set of paints and brushes and a big blank canvas and watch me agonize about what to paint. But put a ragged piece of scrap paper and a pencil in front of me and watch me start to doodle!
Are these the same principles at work? It feels like they might be.
See also: free-verse-programming