On October 23rd, Nintendo announced a formal partnership with Institute of Play, a New York-based nonprofit that researches new ways to make learning fun and engaging for kids. The bedrock for this partnership is Nintendo’s free-form creative peripheral for the Switch, the Labo. If you didn’t know, the Labo is a series of cardboard constructs with accompanying open-source software. With a bit of creativity, a variety of toys and gadgets can be created from a Switch console.
The Institute of Play has begun crafting a guide for a Labo-centric curriculum for teachers in order to integrate it into their lessons. Nintendo will be providing the Labo units, with initial plans to supply them to 100 schools and the hopes of reaching over 2,000 students within the 2018-2019 school year. The initial test phase in New York has already begun, and results are positive so far.
In a comment to The Verge, Arana Shapiro, co-executive director of the Institute of Play, said “immediately kids are excited and engaged and ready to go. And the thing that I think is very special about Labo is the willingness to try things. You see kids fostering a kind of grit, where they keep going and going until they get it. The kids are all-in at the beginning, but the adults have a healthy amount of skepticism, and by the end they’re really excited about what they can do when we’re not there anymore.”
