Make: Technology on Your Time Volume 41

WELCOME

Why the Banana Piano Makes Sense

Jay Silver

BY DALE DOUGHERTY, founder and CEO of Maker Media.

BLINDFOLDED, THE CHILD SAT AT A TABLE BEFORE A SET OF TOY BRICKS AND ANOTHER SET OF CUBES. The child was asked to pick them up and sort them, putting bricks on one side and cubes on the other. It’s a simple but useful task for a 3-year-old, one of many object-based exercises that Maria Montessori, the 20^th-century Italian physician and educator, used to develop an “education of the senses” that would help children integrate their own experience of the world. Montessori noted that children “are very proud of seeing without their eyes, holding ...