This book gathers a selection of international day care centers and schools designed by renowned architects, combining functional, technological and construction features creating imaginative and evocative atmospheres.

Dreaming of a day when there will be a real playground in her own neighborhood, a little girl is ecstatic when she learns that a local playground has been planned, in a story inspired by the construction of the first playground built by the KaBOOM! national nonprofit.

Teaching Off Trail describes the transformation of Peter Dargatz, a national board-certified teacher, and public school coordinator, from an anxious assessor to a fair and fun facilitator of learning. It shares his personal professional journey detailing his evolution as an educator while simultaneously offering strategies for readers to implement Peter's unique teaching philosophy to increase opportunities for play, creative expression, and personalization in both the indoor and outdoor classroom. In his own classroom, Peter brought learning outside by creating a nature kindergarten program that emphasizes community partnerships, service learning, and meaningful and memorable experiences in the outdoors. Teaching Off Trail aims to inspire educators, administrators, and parents across all levels to turn their outrage for today’s educational system into outreach that promotes passionate and purposeful problem-solving. He incorporates techniques often seen in private educational settings like Reggio and Montessori—student-centered, self-directed experiential approaches to learning) and shows how they work within a public school system.

This open access book examines the educational conditions that support cultures of exploration in kindergartens. It conceptualises cultures of exploration, whether those cultures are created through children’s own engagement or are demanded of them through undertaking specific tasks within different institutional settings. It shows how the conditions for children’s exploration form a web of activities in different settings with social relationships, local landscapes and artefacts. The book builds on the understanding of cultural traditions as deeply implicated in the developmental processes, meaning that local considerations must be reflected in education for sustainable futures. Therefore the book examines and conceptualises exploration and cultural formation through locally situated cases and navigates toward global educational concepts. The book provides different windows into how children may explore in everyday practice settings in kindergarten, and contributes to a loci-based, ecological, integral knowledge relevant for early childhood education.

How lessons from kindergarten can help everyone develop the creative thinking skills needed to thrive in today's society. In kindergartens these days, children spend more time with math worksheets and phonics flashcards than building blocks and finger paint. Kindergarten is becoming more like the rest of school. In Lifelong Kindergarten, learning expert Mitchel Resnick argues for exactly the opposite: the rest of school (even the rest of life) should be more like kindergarten. To thrive in today's fast-changing world, people of all ages must learn to think and act creatively—and the best way to do that is by focusing more on imagining, creating, playing, sharing, and reflecting, just as children do in traditional kindergartens. Drawing on experiences from more than thirty years at MIT's Media Lab, Resnick discusses new technologies and strategies for engaging young people in creative learning experiences. He tells stories of how children are programming their own games, stories, and inventions (for example, a diary security system, created by a twelve-year-old girl), and collaborating through remixing, crowdsourcing, and large-scale group projects (such as a Halloween-themed game called Night at Dreary Castle, produced by more than twenty kids scattered around the world). By providing young people with opportunities to work on projects, based on their passions, in collaboration with peers, in a playful spirit, we can help them prepare for a world where creative thinking is more important than ever before.

As a new generation of educational environments are designed and built, this design manual helps architects to grasp the underlying educational theories and how they can be realized in built form, so that the building fulfills its role as a 3-dimensional curriculum plan. It presents over 80 international case studies.