A couple of months ago I saw a video on social of a new toy called a noodle pod,
which essentially replaces all those pesky plastic toys with one beautifully
designed, creative, open ended toy.
So I thought if my kids were still young, I'd I would be ordering that thing.
And i've been seeing more and more videos on social about this brand new
amazing innovation and I thought I need to find out more about this thing
and so I did a bit of googling and found out more about the designer and
founder of this amazing innovation.
And so today on Blooming Curious, we have Marcus Veerman.
Marcus is a playground designer founder and ceo of a charity called
Playground Ideas Playground Ideas was born when Marcus started designing
playgrounds with totally, sorry, with locally available materials, tools,
and people back in Thailand in 2007.
The company's playgrounds have positively impacted the lives of millions of
children around the world who have enjoyed the benefits and sheer joy of play.
So today Marcus is here to talk about his playgrounds and
his new baby, the noodle cart.
So welcome to Blooming Curious Marcus Veerman.
Thanks for having me on the show.
It's really exciting to have you here, Marcus.
I know you've been on social and you're doing the rounds, but can you
tell listeners about yourself and how you came to be designing those
playgrounds in Thailand those years ago?
Firstly, it started in 2006, I married a very strong woman and one of the,
one of the, she wasn't particularly keen on getting married and set
down some very strict requirements.
And one of them was that, um, uh, that she wanted to make sure that we were
going to go and live overseas and do some development work, um, at some stage.
And I had to be okay with that.
And so we got married in 2006 and by 2007, um, , she got a job with something called
Australian Volunteers International, which is a volunteer program which
places Australian professionals into organizations to, help them to develop
their organizations and programs overseas.
So that started in the, um, Far north of Thailand in a tiny little
village called, um, Changdao.
We lived in a little, um, thatch kind of Beautiful house with a little, with
a rice paddy just out the window and a stunning Chengdao mountain, um, that we'd
see the sun rising over every morning.
Uh, and then we shifted after about six months to the Thai
Myanmar border, so way over
to the, west side of the country.
And I went over there having absolutely no idea what I was going to do.
I had worked as an, uh, a mountain guide and outdoor education
teacher, both in Australia, and I'd been lucky enough to travel to
some amazing places with children.
I, I got to go to some very remote locations in Madagascar,
Cambodia, and Thailand
and other places and,
I, I had happened to just by chance, build a couple of playgrounds on those trips.
Um, and from the, I'm in Vietnam.
So I'd built two playgrounds, one in one in Cambodia and one in Vietnam, basically.
And so when I was arrived in Thailand and my wife's organization said, Hey,
could you help us build a playground?
I was like, Sure.
So we built a small playground and before I'd even finished, um, a
local school principal who lived way up in the mountains was passing by
the property where we were staying.
Um, where I was building the playground and said, I work in this very remote
region with the, pandang people who were uh, Nepalese group that had
traveled into Thailand thousands of years ago and and had this small little
group that lived up in the mountains supported by the Thai government, but
they didn't have a lot of resources.
You know, she said, could you come up and help us to build a playground?
I said, okay.
So I did that.
And, basically one thing led to another that we, as soon as I
moved to the Thai Myanmar border
I started talking to some of the NGOs that my partner was connected to, and
I had another playground build request.
In fact, a guy who was running a big charity, World Education
Consortium, said, You know what?
My, my mother just gave me 500 to donate to a project.
We've got this great school.
I'd like to give it to you.
Could you just build a little playground and let's see what happens?
His name was Greg, amazing guy.
And we built a playground with almost nothing out of recycled materials
and car tires and bits and pieces.
And from that, that birthed a whole bunch of little partnerships with organizations
where over the next two years, we built 40 playgrounds for about 25, 000
children,, you know, they weren't schools, they were operating out of shopfronts
and, um, you know, underneath in the basement of houses and places like that.
And because we weren't really an organization, we were just a bunch of
ragtag volunteers, we could just go in and build playgrounds for these places
for very low cost,, and so get the job done and, and create really great spaces
for those, for those children, because I've always had, as being a creative
person, I've always just had a very strong sense that children will learn
what they need to learn, um, or at least the majority of children will learn
what they need to learn through that self motivated intrinsic play drive.
We've diminished the importance of play, by calling it play,
which is to do now to do with toys and all sorts of other things.
But the play drive is essentially the child's drive to learn how the world
works and to practice and apply that in their lives so they become competent,
um, and become increasingly competent throughout their lifespan, right?
I
love that.
The drive to learn how the world works.
That's play.
I
mean, what else is Why else would children spend every waking hour doing this crazy
activity, spending all of their energy?
You know, you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, scarcity has
been a problem for humans throughout time.
Probably for the majority of time in terms of having enough calories to eat, and yet
children are born and all they do is move.
They burn everything.
It's a death sentence really, evolutionary speaking, but because
we have big heads and our main tool is our brain, not our claws or our,
you know, um, teeth, our fangs.
No, really, that's our tool, right?
I'm just thinking, you're thinking, what a shame that not enough
people are using that tool.
Well, I, but I think even, I mean, the thing is that humans are generally, I'm
talking about adults, not children, I know, I know exactly what you're saying.
Humans.
are generalists.
We have the ability to use tools to, you know, to do everything that we've done
in the world that we see, which is what makes us absolutely incredible and able
to adapt to any environment anywhere and to solve problems that be creative
and go, okay, I'm struggling with this.
How would I solve that problem?
Well, can I make a tool?
Can I talk to someone?
Can I go to a therapist?
Can I, you know, like, You think about the incredible ways that humans have
solved everything to essentially be the dominant species across the entire planet
is absolutely, you know, we eclipsed everything that's ever come before
us in terms of any kind of species.
It's quite amazing.
And I think that that's all developmentally rooted in play.
And no surprise, the closest species to us that plays are orangutans.
And they, they have a childhood that lasts about, um, eight to 11 years or
something like that before maturity and ours is almost double that length, you
know, and, and as society increases in complexity with technologies and other
things, have you noticed how childhood.
Is increasing in length, you know, kids stay at home for longer.
We, do you mean?
It's, it's quite interesting how you see that.
Oh, I mean.
I've got
24 year old.
Yeah.
So I don't think that's a surprise.
I, I, I'm probably also not looking forward to that, but having kids at home.
It's
amazing.
I love it.
We love having our kids here.
They're, studying and, , it's amazing to share in a different way in their lives.
It's and I and sometimes we think how lucky are we to still Um, be able
to share in our children's lives.
We see it as a blessing.
We honestly do.
Of course it's not going to last forever.
You know.
Yeah.
And that's a good reality check.
You know.
And humans have probably lived in small family groups like that, you know,
until they partner up with someone else.
They would live in that group.
And we've sort of, I guess we had to move away from that, you know, um, sort
of maybe in the seventies or eighties, which is because of house prices and
other things, I think, people are staying together for longer and things
like that as humans fill the earth.
But anyway, so to cut a long story short, you asked me how I got to here.
Yeah.
So from Thailand and building those 40 playgrounds, we spent the next
few years, I got some funding and we spent the next few years essentially
documenting everything we learned from that process into simple step
by step kind of IKEA style, um, step by step pictorial, directions.
We created a five step playground.
Sort of community consultation playground building manual based on our process and
a bunch of and sort of how to assess your playground to the international safety
standards, the sort of the basics if you don't have safety standards in your
country and so on and so on and so on.
Essentially, anyone, anywhere can come to our website.
They can even set up a crowdfunding page with a PayPal button to raise money.
They can get our manuals and educate themselves on how to build a playground.
And then they can, um, use our online or offline printable drag
and drop playground designer.
And then , download those designs and then off they go.
And so, that supports now.
So, uh, we did 20 playgrounds a year in Thailand.
And that now supports, give or take, around 700 to 1, 000
playgrounds around the world every year in about 143 countries.
So it's a truly scaled up, and it costs us about 30 cents.
For that model.
And, you know, I just want if anyone's listening out there that runs a charity,
I would highly encourage you to give away your IP and allow other people
to use what, you know, for the good of their communities, you know, so many
charities take their IP and bundle it up and say, this is our special thing.
Our real strength, I think, has been sharing that with the world and
allowing, you know, an individual literally anywhere can just stand up
and decide they want to make a change.
And we empower them to do that.
That's how our model works.
Marcus, that is honestly, that is incredible.
So you did say, and it was a thought going through my mind when you were talking
there, that it's actually worldwide.
So anyone, anywhere, cause obviously it's online, it's on the web.
So everybody has access to it.
And so are you finding that,, most people.
or schools or organizations that are going to your website and downloading
these playground plans, are they mostly from disadvantaged communities, third
world countries, or is it, is it a mixed bag or what are you finding?
I
think that there's a lot of people who are going on a playground
journey for their, you know, their primary school secondary school.
Perth, for example, you know, and they just get some interesting information,
but I would say that most of the people who follow through and actually build
are from, low income nations, uh, the global south, things like that, because,
you know, we're very constrained here in Australia with, safety standards,
material use and community expectations.
People, people say, well, I know what a playground looks like.
Unfortunately, it looks like a bunch of steel poles.
With a bunch of plastic or steel platforms and roofs and a little, you know, um,
simple shop underneath the cubby house.
It's not hand painted, you know, it has a very refined finish.
Sort of aesthetic and that, that model was set up in the sixties
that sort of modular playground.
It's a great business model, but I think that, playgrounds can
be a lot more, and we don't have to do that cookie cutter model.
You know, one thing, one thing we love to do in our playgrounds is just heap
up earth and grow grass on top of it and put a few little paths up and down it.
You know, you don't have to build a slide
to give children that falling, slipping, you know, experience, they can just
run down a hill, they can roll down a hill, you know, and, you know, I
mean, we get, we get stuck into these sort of swing slide, a playground needs
to have a swing slide and a seesaw, but it doesn't, you know, children
want diversity of experience and they want a stimulating environment.
But we don't have to do these same kind of repeated kind of activities
all the way through where, uh, you know, you know what I'm talking
about, it's just silly that we've got this such a fixed standard model.
And interestingly, I've met the father of, that playground design, that poles
and platform playground design is sort of credited to one particular person.
He's a super creative guy.
He didn't, he didn't design those things to be used universally for
every playground in the world.
He just created a really smart system of connecting poles and platforms together
and did all sorts of creative things.
I'm hoping that we have a big revolution in this area and
seeing much more creative designs.
And there are, there are companies.
Um, that are definitely doing more creative things, but
they're still in the minority.
Because I think what we are seeing, and I, I've, you know, I've spoken
about this with another guest who's also really into play and outdoor play.
I think we're seeing a shift.
I see a shift anyway in my local area and in our playgrounds
more towards natural materials.
You know, you see more sort of wooden things.
nets and these kinds of things.
But to me, those are really aesthetically very pleasing, but they're so
safe and I think we still lack an element of risk in so many of the
playgrounds that are being designed.
And when I looked at some of your videos from the playgrounds that you did,
must have been in Thailand or Cambodia or somewhere.
Kids were having so much fun and they were taking risks.
But they weren't risks that were going to kill them.
They were just risks that could push their bodies to a little bit of a limit.
Because I think we're so wrapping kids up in so much bubble wrap
now that they don't actually know how to even take risks anymore.
They're so scared just to put one foot in front of the other,
and
I think COVID really, um, put a huge hole in that.
Yeah, I think that this sort of, you know, I've been talking about this a bit more
lately, this sort of indoor generation.
There's a whole bunch of different factors that are going on in the world right
now and they're all pushing parents and teachers into a really difficult position.
But let's come back to that in a sec. I want to touch on that
word risk that you brought up.
If there's one message that your listeners could take away
from what I'm saying today.
about risk is that there's actually two words.
There's risk and there's hazards.
So a hazard is something that deserves a big you know, uh, fluorescent orange
sign next to it that says if you do this, you're likely to get hurt.
So no playground should have a loose screw or nail where a child can stand
up and bang their head on onto it.
You know, something like that or something where they can get
splinters or, you know, something that's going to cause them an injury.
All of those things should be removed from playgrounds for sure.
They're called hazards and that's important to note.
Risks, on the other hand, , and so the other thing about, um, hazards, something
that makes something a hazard is a really clear defining thing that we sort of
worked out in the early days is something that a child is unlikely to be able to
see before they engage in the activity.
That make sense?
So, for instance, here's an example of something risky.
We often make standing seesaws, right?
So a big plank.
It's lower to the ground than a normal seesaw, very long, but it's clear that
if you walk up that seesaw, when you get to the fulcrum, you know that it's
going to drop down the other side.
That's not a hazard.
It's a clearly visible and the longer the seesaw and the more heavy it is,
the slower that that that tilt happens.
So your body gets a bit of warning and obviously you don't have any
hazards either side so you can just jump off if you get a fright.
Right?
So we're learning about physics as well.
Yes, so that's, that's what I would call a risky, a risky activity.
It, it has a, it gives you a sense in your body, a sensation in your
body that you need to respond to.
Um, and if you're a very young child, That could be a very challenging physical
element and then as you get older the great thing about that same element is
instead of tiptoeing up you can run up and see how far you can get off before
you jump off the end because you expect that that fulcrum shift and then you can
you know and you can increase the level of challenge so but I think it's very
important to note the difference in my mind I don't talk about there's there's
not risks that are dangerous and risks that are positive I would just say There
are certain things that are hazards.
We need to get rid of those.
But taking risks is absolutely, foundational to growth and that's true,
you know, with, with the launch of noodle, if we hadn't, if we didn't take risks and,
um, you know, and make enough products, we get to a point very quickly where
we run out of product and we run out of money and the whole charity goes downhill.
And do you know what I mean?
Like you have, you have to take risks in life and the removal of risks, It's
a critical error that many, many, many parents, uh, making that error on a
daily basis where they stop their child.
I can't, this is something that drives me crazy.
You go to the playground or you go to, you know, even just a birthday
party or something and you see parents removing the, The responsibility from
the child to take a risk, whether it's a social risk, you know, you sort
of, you know, micromanaging a child's
emotional response.
Yeah, to, yeah.
I mean, I think we've got to be careful with those terms because it
makes parents sometimes feel guilty.
I think it's more just kind of going, let's talk about the positives of allowing
your child to take that risk with that child who's just snatched their toy.
They've come back to you and they're really upset.
Yeah, sure.
You can comfort them.
But then, You don't have to go and manage that situation.
Give them some advice.
Give them some scaffolding and then send them out into the
battlefield of life, right?
That's their job to work that out.
They've got to, they've got to, they've got to practice these skills
over and over and over and over again and work out what works for them.
You know, if they snatch that toy back, you can coach them again.
What happened there?
Instead of saying, don't do that.
You can't do that.
It's never going to work.
You can, you can say, what happened there?
Was that effective?
Did you get what you wanted?
Did the world get what it needed from that situation?
Or maybe there's, you know, are there other options?
You know, and I know that can be exhausting.
But, no, actually, I think parents are doing exhausting things all the time.
In fact, probably taking too much of the responsibility.
And they need to sort of, I think oftentimes, there are a lot of parents
who need to really, really step back.
I think it's hard because often you've got, you know, when you've got two
parents, often you find that you also find that conflict between the parents
where one is standing back probably a little too much and not engaging.
I don't know if you've seen that movie, The Incredibles where, you know, the
father is, you know, he's, he's really distracted and his wife screams at him,
would you engage, just engage and, and, you know, he's off with the fairies.
And, and I think that you often get that combination of one parent who's just off
with the fairies and the other parent is feeling like they're grinding through and
carrying all this stuff and trying to find a way to sort of find a nice place between
them where you can allow children to take risks and to do those things, you know.
Going back to what you've just said, I think sometimes as parents And even
as teachers, we jump in too soon.
Sometimes I think it's helpful to just stand back, just watch, just listen,
and let the kids sort things out.
Let them try first before you jump in to scaffold and help.
Because I think they're very good at sorting themselves out.
You know, I think we sometimes interfere too quickly.
And that's the other thing is that play or really deep independent play.
Kids just want to be left alone to get on with what they're doing.
And I think play is really important for that because you learn so much from play.
You're actually learning so much from, you know, if I'm going to snatch
this toy away from this child.
Every time I do that, there's a consequence that happens, you know,
and I think that they learn that.
But of course, as adults, when we're standing back a little bit and observing,
we can come in and scaffold, and as you've said so wisely, You know say to
them has that been helpful, you know hasn't helped your cause So I think what
you've said there is really wise and I hope a lot of people take note of that
Marcus you mentioned the Nudel cart.
So that's your latest venture And i've also seen you've also
have some other Nudel products.
So can you explain what the Nudel cart is and how you see the Nudel cart and your
other Nudel things being used by children?
Yeah, sure, just one thing you got me.
Can I go back just to one point that I thought, because it's such a, this is
such a fascinating topic that we've been talking about for, I mean, over a decade.
I just wanted to cover that point about, how did we get to this place where there's
less risk and, and those kinds of things?
Like what, what is actually, you know, a lot of people ask, ask
me, and we've been talking about, like, why, how did we get here?
Right?
With this sort of, Helicopter parenting and, and the lack of
risk and other things in it.
I, I think there's lots and lots of reasons but I think there's
some unusual macro factors that we don't often think about that I
just wanted to quickly touch on.
And one of them is family size.
A lot of people don't think about this, right?
The pressure on parents to do all of this coaching work and to be close and
talking with their child I think is to do is there's a major factor that no one's
really talking about which is essentially the number of children per family when
you have as you did mid last century 4.
5 children per household.
Versus now when you've got about 1.
6 and in Japan, I mean, it's, it's a chronic problem, right?
You've got two parents and one child on average.
If you take, so here's just one example of how that affects everything.
If you take a standard suburban, like urban block, what we used to have was
marauding groups of 20 to 30 kids after school, and lower numbers of cars in
suburbs, smaller streets, more dirt roads, and things like that where, people
would drive, and cars that were more cumbersome with worse brakes, so they
would drive slowly, and cars also had an expectation that they would run into
giant groups of children playing cricket, football, or whatever, on the street.
So people treated the street as a shared space.
When you reduce the numbers from, you know, if you think about a standard
block might have 20 houses and four and a half children in each house, that's,
that can be 30, 40 children who might be in multiple groups around those
streets doing things on the street.
They are learning intensely all of these social skills that you're talking about.
Without parents, in the rough and tumble of that world, older children
are going, we can't play cricket unless we put our arm behind our
back because the little kids won't play with us because we keep winning.
Right?
That compassion and empathy is being learned through those kinds of skills.
And the younger children get to stand further away from the goals or they get
to have three kids against one bigger kid.
You know, we, we don't see that as much, this multi age challenging
play where the older children have to disadvantage themselves
to play with the younger children.
Peter Gray is an amazing guy who talks a lot about this kind of stuff
that I find absolutely fascinating.
But the other thing that's happened is when you've got less siblings.
The parent becomes the friend or the sibling, right?
There's a change in that relationship because the child has to play.
They are hardwired not to play on their own, but to play with
another person or other people.
And so the formalizing of culture, the lowering number of children
means that now we've got playdates instead of just kids walking into
their next door neighbor's house.
And stranger danger is, absolutely terrifying parents.
So, you know, allowing your child to roam and just go to another person's
house and things like that is incredibly stressful and difficult for parents.
And I'm not saying they just should let them go, but it's all of these factors.
are kind of compounding to create a situation where, and this leads into
Nudel cart and, the work that I'm doing with the pod, where parents
need an environment in the home.
Cause we can't solve a lot of these problems.
You can't just go, Oh, well, I'll just let the kids roam around the streets.
Now they're full of cars.
Now that there's less kids on the street, these are hard problems.
So the pod is trying to create an environment to solve some of these
problem solving, creativity challenges, and make a great environment for lower
numbers of children and their parents to connect together and do these enjoyable
activities together instead of the parents sitting there with these toys
that beep and make all these annoying noises and, and don't, and they, and
they're so boring for the parent.
We're trying to create an environment that works with parents and children
in this modern environment to give them that risky, open ended, creative space
that's enjoyable for both parent and child because we just, we appreciate
that there's parents doing that work now.
I have to say I have never considered family size as an impact on play.
So this is, Incredibly enlightening.
Yeah, and it makes total sense actually.
I have to say.
My kids formative years when they were little were spent in the middle east And
I guess as an expat we lived in these little small gated communities And my
own kids now say how lucky they were to spend that time there Because these kids
would roam around that little community.
They would be in these bands on the streets you know setting up ramps and
skateboarding over them and running a muck outside So luckily for my children,
they actually did have that experience, but we were only lucky because we were
in the small gated community where cars knew the minute they entered, there'd be
kids on the streets, as you've just said.
And so there was a slowing down because they expected to
see children running around.
And those community expectations are so important because they change our behavior
you know, what we expect to occur.
Is more likely to occur, whereas now, I mean, you're listeners,
if you think about a little child who walks to the front gate, they
walk to the front gate, they look left, they look right, there's no one there.
If mom and dad are busy, or a sibling is busy, then they go and
play on their Nintendo Switch.
You know what I mean?
The opportunity is not taken up.
They go, Oh, I'd like to do blah, blah, blah.
The only thing, so just to add to your story, the thing that's
working for my children, my family at the moment, and again, I feel
incredibly blessed to have this.
I live in an apartment where I'm sitting right now, where on this
side of the apartment at the front door, there's a small street, very
quiet, it's a dead end street.
But just out there, I don't know if you can see.
It's a park.
There's a park on the south side, and out that way is a park, and we specifically
chose this place because of that, is a park on the um, west side, but what's
amazing about the west side is we have a door out there, and, crucially, No street.
And so when my very flighty, fast moving, energetic children run
out the back door, I don't have an anxiety attack because they run out.
They hear the kids playing in the park and they can just go.
And I don't have to stop them, right?
I've got a child who would run out on a road straight in front of a car.
You know, even probably now at 10 years old, and it's, you know, it causes, um,
us no end of stress, but living in an environment with it, where that just that
one thing, the street has changed, and that the whole apartment block, um, you
know, we're quite squeezed in here, but we don't want to move because there's
15 apartments all opening out to the park, and many of them have children,
and so it just means that large group interaction is where all of those social
skills and other things of practice is happening really well, it's beautiful.
You know, you see the sun sets on the west side and you see these kids in
groups of five or eight, you know, and they're squabbling about this and they're
laughing about that and they're playing this game and now it's this and, you
know, collecting huge piles of grass to build, you know, some giant snowman or
whatever, you know, all of that stuff happens on a daily basis here and I never
take it for granted because most people nowadays, I think they're saying that, you
know, by 2050, 70 percent of the entire human population will live in cities.
So this low birth rate, moving to cities is a fundamental change
that we're not going to get rid of.
And we need our toys and our school resources and other
things to do more in less space.
And in this new world that we're living in.
So Marcus, and before we talk about the, the cart, I think you've also touched
on something else there, town planning.
And so really people who are planning, you know, towns and
these new high rises and buildings, they've got to be smarter, right?
Like I'm getting seriously annoyed when I drive just around here in Perth
and I'm seeing nursery schools pop up and they're wall to wall with, no
outdoor space for these kids to play.
My gosh, that's like sending a kid to prison every day while you're at work.
Then there's no grass.
There are no trees.
There's no outdoor.
These kids are confined to concrete and it makes me incredibly angry and
incredibly sad, and I think town planning.
Have to take the blame for that because why would you allow a preschool to
be in that location or to be built in that manner where there's now no access
to nature for children I think that's crucial and and we need to be influencing
I don't know how but we've got to do something about getting town planners to
take The next generation, because as you say, there's going to be more people.
We're going to be in high rises and in apartments.
They have to get smarter about how do we make it safe and healthy for children.
And things that are, things that are planned well, have a higher value, right?
So in, in Melbourne, where I live, you know, there are some really great
examples in a suburb called Doncaster, which is just an outer suburban town.
They have these houses that are built on these very curvy roads and, and coming
off the curvy roads are these very short, you can't drive through them, you just
go into these little pockets off the main street and all the houses are off these
pockets and as a result, you've got low traffic counts and kids can play cricket
and stuff in the end of the cul de sac.
So that's one, we are seeing those things and I've seen where they created
smaller streets, and, at the back door of the houses was a long kind
of linear winding path that connected all of the houses at their back gate.
So slightly smaller backyard, but then when you go through the back gate,
there's this long connected , park.
I didn't love that so much because it was sort of behind the tall back fence.
So line of sight was difficult.
I think line of sight for parents is something that we always took
into account for playground design.
, , where do parents sit and, and what can they see?
Because as soon as they feel like they can't sort of see particularly young
children, they're going to stop the play.
They're going to bring them back.
So there's these little things you really need to think about with adults.
The other thing that I saw in Germany, um, years and years ago, which was absolutely
incredible, was basically all of the streets in this, particular housing
estate were kind of like laneways, single direction, um, laneways with garages
on each side, nothing to look at, just these garages and you would drive your
car in these kind of almost like service lanes and then they took the linear
park idea and they put it in the front.
So, small front yards, almost like a patio and a little tiny garden space,
and then they shared the rest of that space, and then every five or ten houses,
there was a little gap, and there was different play spaces in every gap.
So, in one of them was just a massive boulder.
Just a huge rock that you could climb on, that you could hide around
the back of, and things like that.
In another one, there was a more of standard playground.
Another one just had a giant long seesaw, very low cost interventions,
and then just grassy space.
So you could have a picnic or whatever, but it reduced that private space.
But, gave access to the community to many, many big public or, you know,
large ish public spaces where you were shaving off a little bit of private
space for everyone and then giving access to a much larger public space.
And there are tons of examples of great town planning, , and human beings as
soon as they see that they love it.
You know, it always staggers me like new housing developments, almost
always on the poster, they don't put a picture of the house alone, they put a
picture of the playground and the park.
That's what people want.
You know, that's the big sales ticket.
Does this place have a have a longer line of sight to a green space where I can
share and have good times with the people, around me and connect me to my community.
That's, you know, they never have a picture of a supermarket on the poster.
Nobody cares, you know, sure, you've got to go to the supermarket, but that's
not the, what people really value.
It's that connection and community within a space for them and their children.
That's so true and let's hope that town planning, you know, more of
that into consideration as they allow new buildings to pop up everywhere.
And Marcus you touched on the Nudel cart and you mentioned that one of the
things was that it was an innovative toy, let's call it that, where in a small
family, parents could get more involved and interactive with their children.
So was that your original idea for it?
Or,, with you working with all these children and schools, did
that have some kind of influence on you when you were constructing
your prototype for the Nudel cart?
What was it that that got this whole idea
A few things came together all at once.
First of all, we worked with a government entity I won't say who it was Playground
Ideas was going really well and we won a contract to build 300 playgrounds
across one of the newest nations called Timor Leste, which is up, , it had
separated from Indonesia and there was a lot of develop, big development
work going on there, multi million dollar project and we tried to use the
Playground Ideas model you know, local and recycled materials to build those
playgrounds for early childhood centers.
Very, very low cost.
We had a very small budget, and, East Timor is mountainous, um, lots of valleys,
beaches, agricultural areas, cities, very diverse spaces we're building in, and
we're building in communities where one valley and one community would barely
talk to people in the other valley.
They didn't share materials.
They, you know, they were quite disconnected and the playground ideas
model just didn't really work very well.
We, you know, there weren't even enough recycled car tires in the
entire country that we could find to build those 300 playgrounds.
And so the challenge of that project to make that work, really spurred us on to
kind of go, how could we create not just.
You know, play spaces that were as good as the fixed playgrounds
that we had planned to build in Timor Leste but actually better.
I sort of went on to this sort of fanatical kind of, classic me, sort of
exploration of what could that look like.
And at the same time as that, an absolutely incredible woman, one of
the most creative and amazing designers I've ever met called Emma Ribbons.
Um, just sent me a message through Playground Ideas and said, I've been
doing these loose parts activations in Greek refugee camps for Syrian refugees.
You remember when Syrian refugees were crossing the Mediterranean and, you
know, there was that famous picture of that child that had died on the beach
that went around the world, that awful, you know, with just thousands of people
in peril coming across into Greece.
She was literally taking a, a backpack made out of kind of cardboard
boxes almost with straps on it.
This big bulky box full of loose parts and taken into refugee
camps because they couldn't build physical structures in the space.
They weren't allowed to.
The refugee camp was like, look, this is not going to be here forever.
You can't build a playground.
She took in loose parts.
We immediately clicked and, we started exploring this idea of what if you created
a no compromises, mobile, on wheels space that you could just open up and would
completely transform any space into a really highly stimulating space that
taught all of these incredible skills that we saw children learning with loose parts.
It just so happened that I put a loose, a giant loose part box in
one of the Timorees playground designs when Emma contacted me.
So it was something I was really interested in.
We also have a Loose Parts manual that's freely downloadable from the
Playground Ideas website if anyone's interested in Loose Parts and sort of
the theory behind it and the materials.
That experience with Emma, became the initial trials that we did with Syrian
refugees in Lebanon, where I sent Emma and a few of my staff over to build the
very first cart, and to trial it in, I mean, the very first trial we did in a
refugee community, extremely impoverished area in Lebanon, where it was just all
ramshackle old apartment blocks that these people were living in, very low rent, very
low services, they had no playgrounds, they had nothing, and we actually
trialed the first one on tarpaulins in a lane that smelled like urine.
We worked with a fantastic organization called Right to Play who found us
the only open spaces community spaces we could find were laneways and
other things we blocked them off.
And we put the loose parts out and it was absolutely incredible.
That, just purely by chance, um, a guy called Roger Ungers, who I'd sent over
there to just document the process, take some photos and video and help us.
He turned that into a film.
It's called The Wheels of Wonder.
And it's available from the Nudel Cart website.
You can just buy a ticket from there.
And I strongly suggest you do it.
It's an amazing exploration of that, of that initial experience we had.
, That was a very costly experience to build the first one and
we're running out of money.
Um, and so I decided then the next big shift was I decided then to say, well,
we can't go to refugee camps anymore.
I wonder whether we could be cheeky enough to send out an email and see if there
were teachers in Australia who would be willing to bring this crazy thing.
into Australian schools.
So by that time we had done some safety testing on it, and we
knew that it was, you know, safe and could be used with kids.
So, we, we got 12 schools to immediately sign up within 24
hours saying, yeah, bring it on.
We'd love to see it.
And eight of those schools completely unexpected by me said,
we'd love to buy one of these.
And I was like, well, they're not for sale.
You know, this is our non profit charitable, you know, playground thing.
And the teacher said, but look at the skills they're learning.
They're learning, so in the Australian curriculum for US listeners, we've since
found out to a Bond University study they are learning all of the sub points of the
critical and creative thinking capability in the Australian curriculum and all of
the, 28 sub points , in the curriculum.
All of them were, demonstrated also in the personal and social skills capabilities.
Now we have not tested the cart for numeracy, literacy, and the other
curriculum areas, but in those two areas alone, with no, this is really
important with no teacher direction.
So you can have your worst teacher, you know, your tired, depressed, burnt out
teacher sitting in the corner on a banana lounge with a pina colada doing nothing.
And they will learn and demonstrate and practice all of the 28 sub points
of those curriculum areas with you doing nothing, no setting challenges,
nothing just in open ended play.
So that was another light bulb moment where I went.
Again, this play drive, which we've really diminished in terms of just
something frivolous that children do, is now Bond University has shown
that all of those points were covered with teachers doing nothing, right?
Let alone the other curriculum areas.
And that's where we kind of went, well, maybe we could turn this into a
social enterprise that actually raised funds and supported the charity, right?
So, we should probably go back a step the Nudel Cart just so people can
imagine if they're listening to this in audio is, about 3 ft long and 2 ft
wide for your American listeners or 1.
2 m long and about 65 cm wide and it sits at about hip height.
So it just goes to a, it just fits through a standard doorway
and it's about a long arm long.
What's interesting about it is it has this, we have this no waste kind of
theory where every part of the storage device, so the cart on wheels, it looks
like kind of a Danish piece of furniture.
When you pull all the parts and you deconstruct that
cart, there's nothing left.
There is no storage device anymore.
The storage device is all of the playable parts.
So when we make a new car, just as an aside, there's nothing left but
sawdust and a little tiny plywood frame.
One noodle cart is made out of exactly four sheets of plywood.
And so those 350 parts are usable by an entire, classroom of children
to engage in completely open ended, high quality, high stimulation kind
of flow state exploration where they can build literally anything.
If they want to build a rocket ship the other day, I saw seven children build
a rocket ship that they got inside.
They're all huddled inside this little this this rocket ship.
You know, if you want to teach the time instead of going, Oh, I'll get my clock
resource you know, my plastic kind of clock resource and then here's one for
each, you know, groups of two or whatever.
Forget that.
Just look at the clock on the wall and teach the kids how it works and then
say, here's a bunch of random parts.
You build me a clock.
I don't care what it looks like as long as it works.
And then you say, can you make that clock show three o'clock?
Can you make it say quarter past two?
Blah, blah, blah.
And then this is where the Nudel, has this, what we call multi layered learning.
So instead of Instead of doing numeracy and doing literacy or doing these
separate boxes, which, you know, large organizations love to put things in boxes.
The Kart has this multi layered effect where the kids might be working in a group
and learning all these social skills like negotiation and design and, you know,
iteration and collaboration to build their clock, at the same time as learning how a
clock works, at the same time as, working out, well, how are we going to make these
hands spin, you know, one on top of the other so they're banging to each other.
I don't know, whatever those questions are, they're doing all of these sort
of, I see it like all these transparent layers that build into a block of
learning, which are much, much more complex than, just learning about
how to tell the time as a clock.
And I think that's where, Loose parts in an educational setting are so powerful
because the children have to do the work.
One thing we talk about with the pod all the time is the more work the toy does.
And an iPad is the ultimate example of this.
It does all the work, right?
The less that the child is doing.
And as parents and as educators, what we're trying to do is get the
children to do the work, right?
To get, if we want to build those complex neural synapse connections in their
brains between one thing, social skills, for example, and another thing, telling
the time or whatever, we want as many connections across and in the brain
to happen before those pairing events happen where the brain
goes, Oh, I didn't need that.
I didn't use it, but just get rid of it.
Right?
Cause the brain builds itself and then pairs itself down to what it needs.
And then it builds itself again, teenage years and pairs it down.
And if you're not using it, the brain just goes, cut it off.
What is it?
If you don't use it, you lose it.
Exactly.
It's like a muscle.
And so, in an extreme example of that, we know that that's, it
sounds crazy, but we know it's true.
Those Romanian orphans, they did MRIs of those children's brains and
you can see it with the naked eye.
You can see the density and complexity, the rutting and the size of the brain
in the brain case was physically smaller because of a lack of stimulation.
Now we're not going to see that in Australia, you know, there's
plenty of stimulation around.
It's much harder to see with the naked eye, but we, but I'm just using that
as an example to say, if you want to maximize children's development,
which is obviously the goal.
We want children to have the best opportunity to thrive throughout life.
And these complex open ended environments, I think, are the
closest thing to give us that.
That benefit.
And so the Nudel Cart and the smaller Nudel Rover, which is for
8 to 10 children, I think offers the most open ended, we sort of
just went, what if we turn this up to 11, what would that look like?
And what came out the other side was the Nudel cart and the Nudel
Rover for, education, allied health, and those kinds of things.
Well, you know, it seems to me, as an educator myself who works in a
school, there's two big words, budget and resources, but it seems to me we
should be getting rid of a lot of those superfluous resources and plasticky
things and goodness knows what and just spend our money and get a Nudel cart
which can do everything that all those or most of those other resources can do
because now it's open ended and I think and I'm a very big proponent of
loose parts play And I'm always saying to people it doesn't matter, just get
whatever you can, you know, just get it and because you can do so much with
it when people say oh, we don't have the budget I'm saying well look in your
bin and just get some recycled stuff.
Take all the plastic tops off bottles, Go to Bunnings get some pebbles, get
some stones, go for a walk, get sticks, get seed pots, get gum nuts, whatever.
Those are all loose parts, freely available, right?
But on the other side of the coin, and I think this comes to what I want to ask
you about, the materials that we use,
because very often we're saying, for loose parts, use whatever you've got.
And I think using whatever you've got is better than not using anything.
But if you can use something as beautiful and well designed as your
products, why wouldn't you do that?
So could you explain the use of materials and your thinking specifically behind
the materials that you've chosen, the plywood, for example, and the
construction of the components of the cart, what was your thinking behind that?
Okay, so there's a bunch of things that I want to talk about.
One is.
Those pods, those loose parts, pods, you know, shipping containers full of stuff.
I'd love to talk a little bit about that.
And then I'd love to also, yeah, let's talk about the part.
So just for that first point, we almost before the cart, the Nudel cart, Rover
pod existed, we almost took over a, uh, shipping container, uh, loose parts.
organization that was running in Melbourne.
They were struggling.
And it's actually, it's working, I think in the UK quite successfully
when it's scaled up, but it's a really hard business to run.
They had to run a huge truck that would go around to all these
factories and pick up all the parts.
One, one problem I always, and I'm , very conscious to say this because I
don't want to have any negativity, but you know, one thing I was always
concerned about was when you're using industrial materials, which they use
a lot of, which have, yeah, just, you don't know where they've come from.
So you need to make sure that they're not, they don't have lead or formaldehyde or
other, VOCs and other chemicals that have been used either in the manufacturer or in
the, the chemicals used to make sure that the mold doesn't stick into the whatever.
So that was always something that was a little bit of a liability
concern that I wasn't sure about.
And then there were things like, I love cardboard tubes, you know,
there's giant cardboard tubes and things from fabrics and whatever.
Um, but they need to be carefully managed because as soon as it
rains, they get wrecked and moldy.
And then you've got black mold.
And you know, there's, there were a bunch of real challenges there.
Now the places that I've seen that working really well is when a teacher,
so Coolaroo South Primary School, incredible principal a few years ago,
they've left now, had a couple of, shipping containers full of stuff.
It was managed by another incredible playworker called Catherine
Sewell, who was there every week.
maintaining, gathering parts, sorting them, making sure that everything worked.
And they had an absolutely unbelievable program.
They didn't spend money on playgrounds.
They spent money , on creating a great learning environment
within the playground.
So if it's done right, I think it's great.
If you end up with just parents bringing whatever, to be honest, from home and
putting it in a thing, It's a disaster.
And I've had endless parents tell me how they thought it was a great idea
they went all in and then six months, 12 months later, it was a poorly managed.
I saw that was a big problem.
You know, Coolaroo South, even with their fantastic program had a lot
of community complaints saying this place looks like a rubbish dump.
What's going on?
There's car tires.
There's, you know, what about mosquitoes forming?
You know, all sorts of things like that.
So, you know, car tires, fantastic.
Just drill holes in them.
There's all sorts of solutions for those kinds of things,
but it's not a simple solution.
There's more to it than people think and that's why we didn't take it over,
but managed properly, incredible.
And the UK has hundreds of examples and Australia
I'm sure has lots of great examples as well.
I just don't know quite as many.
I think
that's what you've just touched on there, managed properly.
Yes.
I think loose parts are wonderful, but if you have them on a playground, yes,
it absolutely can look like a disaster.
And that's why somebody has to take responsibility for them and
be, in charge of, or whatever it might be, of looking after
loose parts play and make sure that things are organized.
As you said before, that there are no hazards and it cannot just be,
well, I'm just going to throw all my stuff out there and see what happens.
That isn't how it's meant to be.
And student rosters, get the students to help as well.
If you want to do things properly, In life, whatever it might be, if
you want to do it well, you actually have to do some work because nothing
works beautifully just by leaving it out there and hoping for the best.
You actually have to get involved.
Yeah.
And it's similar to it.
I saw a carpenter on YouTube, a video of a carpenter the other day who did
an experiment and said, I've seen all these woodworkers making tables out
of pallets, , like wooden recycled pallets and he said, I'm going to do
an experiment where I build a table out of pallets and then I'd build a table
out of poplar, which is the lowest cost hardwood you could use for a table.
And he did a calculation of the cost.
And what was fascinating was the pallet would actually cost significantly more,
not even though the materials were free, the amount of time to prepare everything
and maintain everything was significantly higher than the poplar table.
Now, if you want the recycled table and if that's what you want for your
kids, it's totally possible, but you just, I'm just saying you need to go
in with your eyes open, that there is no free lunch for any of this stuff.
So materials.
So first of all, uh, Corpus Christi in Kingsville in Melbourne, use our carts
as almost like a play pod response.
They've created an accordoned off area with AstroTurf on the ground.
Really fantastic principal, , lovely person, just really trying to
encourage, great, great spaces for kids.
Cordoned off area, AstroTurf, and the grade sixes manage a roster where
they push the card out, deconstruct it, and a different class gets to
use it each lunchtime over, say, two weeks, and then the roster repeats.
And the grade sixes manage that, there's a bell that goes,
and they start to pack it up.
and they bring it inside.
I don't know if they're still doing that, but they were definitely doing
that last time I checked with them.
Fantastic, simple program, and then the cart is stored inside, no mess, no fuss.
No maintenance., The cart comes with a maintenance pack, just extra screws and
other things to keep it going because we see it more like a car that, you
know, you look after over time will last you over a decade, but with, very,
very little work to do that to remove a lot of these issues that we we saw
in other different types of programs.
We really worked hard on that.
Materials, unlike a lot of loose parts.
, construction sets and systems and other things.
The pod doesn't use hardly any plastic, at all.
But more importantly, it's not just, , one material.
So, you know, for instance, I was talking to the lovely guys at Play
Silky, so you make these silk scarves.
It's just, it's, it's fantastic.
It's one material and then it gets blended with other loose parts.
The cart has inside it hard plastic.
wooden pieces that are both large and heavy, which by the way, if you don't
have large heavy parts, you don't get social skills and collaboration.
That was clear.
That was, found very clearly from the Sydney playground project.
Anita Bundy, uh, fantastic researcher with, Oh, Shirley Wyver, W Y V
E R did some incredible studies in loose parts over a decade.
Anita's now in the States, Shirley's still in Australia.
two American researchers.
Absolutely incredible.
They found that heavy, heavy parts in encourage collaboration.
It's a bit like the, you don't think about the, the lowering number of
siblings affecting play heavy parts.
Some people avoid them in, um, loose path spaces because they're
worried that someone's going to drop them on their toe or whatever.
But if you don't have them, kids don't have to work together.
If you have a lower number of large heavy parts, that was one thing
that they found as a, as a real key.
And one of this sort of six or seven findings of the, of what makes loose
path playgrounds work really well.
Along with those, and then we have small timber parts, we have wooden
dowels that fit perfectly through all of the holes in the plywood, but those
wooden dowels also fit through the loops , in the tensile webbing straps.
Tensile is an incredible, it looks like polyester, that strong sort of rock
climbing webbing or, backpack strap webbing, but it's made of wood fiber.
And then there are silicon pieces, which also stretch over the sticks
and stretch onto the wooden pieces.
And then the straps fit over the silicon pieces.
And so what we've essentially done is instead of having a linear kind
of this fits this, and then this fits this, it's almost like a circle where
all the materials are in a circle, and the connections are zigzagged
like a star between everything.
So, the functionality of each different material does totally different things.
So some of them, the straps work really well under tension, but they
obviously are floppy under compression.
The silicon pieces are stretchy , and have kind of inbuilt
kind of springiness to them.
So you can flick things and move things.
The wooden pieces are obviously hard both ways , the, the dowels are round
so things will spin around them.
So all of these different physics principles are embedded in it.
So if you want to build a right angle, you can use a right angle plywood piece.
If you want something to rotate around a hinge, you can use a
stick with a something over a hole.
You know, for instance, like the middle of a clock, if you want to
rotate an arm around something, it's messy and it's organic.
But if you want to do that thing that's in your mind, whatever it is,
you can just, use a kind of a hacker mentality, which I absolutely love.
People who do well and are innovative and creative, they hack things together.
They go, you know what, this will do.
And I want to encourage that mindset in children to go, I don't, I don't
have the perfect product, so I don't have the perfect thing to do this
thing, but if I want to generally get that direction, I'm going to just
iterate and find these pieces and put them together in interesting ways.
Until I find a sufficient solution to demonstrate the thing that I'm
thinking about, whether it's a rocket ship or a rainbow or a horse or in one
little story that we had in, in terms of the cart and schools, a Canberra
school ran, , noodle cart sessions for kids over an entire term every week.
And at the start they did the usual thing where they build cars and
trucks and helicopters and whatever.
By the 10th session at the end of the term, I saw this incredible write
up of, a kind of in the play world you might call a play frame or in
our, Nudel cart world, just a sort of a vignette and narrative story.
One child garnered a bunch of kids to come together and build an, MRI machine.
It was just basically a flat board with a bunch of these
silicon hoops going over the top.
The child got inside that, got scanned.
They were very sick.
, they died and then the MRI machine, which was this whiteboard, became a
coffin, which was then picked up by the children and carried to a funeral.
And they held an entire funeral for that child.
And this entire thing happened within sort of this 10 week program
that went from one to another.
And some people might go, Oh, that's a bit weird and morbid and macabre, whatever.
That child is going through, I guarantee you that child is going through
their own self initiated therapeutic process to understand what on earth
has just happened in my life, right?
And they've garnered five or six other children to have that experience, and
to, they, essentially, using their kind, empathic friends to play through that
narrative, you know, and, and over the other side of the room, you know, there
were other kids probably having a fashion show or building an airplane, you know,
nothing to do with, but for that child, that moment, this was an opportunity
to explore and process something in their lives that was very important.
And again, that comes back to that multi layered learning with loose parts
where you're doing, hardcore curriculum learning mixed with these psychological
and therapeutic layers and the social layers Brings together a really complete
package of learning and processing and all that stuff for children.
So, that's just a little vignette in this school sort of therapeutic context.
You know, as you've been talking, as a teacher, the one thing that I am a big
proponent of is integrating Different subject areas into one because people
are always talking about, how busy and overcrowded the curriculum is so
I'm a really big one Well, let's see how we can actually kill a couple of
birds with one stone and I actually think while you've been talking that
this Nudel cart is really the ultimate experience because as you've said
before there's math, there's social and emotional well being, there's language,
there's cooperation, and storytelling.
So I think it actually encompasses the entire curriculum, as an educator,
you can actually empty most of your storeroom of all that rubbish that's
in there and rather spend your money and get one of these things, which
can do so much and you can integrate it into different areas as well.
And meet curriculum outcomes with one thing.
So why wouldn't we do that?
It just makes perfect sense to me So and
one one thing you just said just to touch on that that study.
So with that, um, funeral that when we were doing that study that was actually
a mathematics study and it wasn't we didn't get the results we got were
non conclusive because the study wasn't written very well, but anecdotally when
this when it was finishing up this math study, the principal came to me and
said, look, I don't know about maths, and the math skills that have been
garnered from this process, we had some troubles with a couple of people running
the study got COVID in the middle and we had a whole bunch of complexities,
but the principal said, whatever happened in that study, what I saw was
an unbelievable increase in vocabulary.
The kids, the amount of words per minute that the children were speaking
and listening and all those, all those language skills is through the
roof compared to a normal classroom because the kids for the whole
time are running on this sort of high engagement, um, negotiation
and collaboration in that space.
And so definitely that was just a weird, just a very strange thing that we saw that
was unexpected was their language skills.
So really,
it's the opposite of an iPad.
Well, yeah, but again, because it's not, like, when you look at, when you look
at loose parts, they don't do anything.
When you look at loose parts, they're just a bunch of highly connectable,
very beautifully designed pieces that connect in billions of ways.
But if you do no work, They have zero value.
They don't look like something, they don't function in any way, they
don't beep or flash or say anything.
Actually, I haven't talked about this for ages.
One thing I think that that does in the brain, you know those, ink blot tests
that, um, psychologists use, right?
Yeah.
So, you know, it's just a bunch of random paint.
Yeah.
That's a little bit like, I think, what loose parts do in the brain.
They, they give you an itch to scratch because they are so unhelpful.
They don't say anything.
And so that, so similar to an ink blot test, you go, when your brain goes,
Because humans are pattern makers and meaning finders, tool makers, you know,
we, we make connections between things.
That's the, our brain is literally just a connection machine.
Children see the pieces and they can't, it's like they can't help,
but put them, make sense out of them.
And that sense that they make is through an individual drive in their brain
to understand how the world works.
That makes sense.
There's a weird psychological thing that I think is happening in a child's brain
where they run towards it and they go, You need to make a pattern or make sense.
And at the moment it does nothing.
And I've got to make that meaning for it to make sense.
Marcus, this is a fascinating talk and one that I think we can talk about for
days, but how can teachers, parents, school administrators, principals, how
do they get hold of one of these things?
And I think in the beginning of our talk, you mentioned something about
going on there or whether it was that just for the playground, setting up
a PayPal or whatever it was, how do we go about, how can people.
Teachers listening.
Principals, hopefully, listening.
How can they get hold of a Nudel cart for their school?
So there's three things.
The Noodle Cart is for 30 children, for teachers.
The Noodle Rover is for 8 to 10 children.
Fantastic meltdown mitigation tool outside the vice principal or assistant
principal's office is one of the most common things, and schools often
buy one of each for those purposes.
And we didn't even talk about the pod.
So we've just launched the pod Um, over 800.
Which is what I
saw actually.
Yeah.
My first introduction was the Nudel pod.
No, I love talking about the, the background philosophy of all this stuff
so much we didn't even talk about, but the pod is basically a home based
family, version of the cart and rover.
It just very briefly, it only, it does two main things.
Number one, it reduces the clutter by becoming all of
those large and some small scale
toys that are completely filling up the square space of your child's bedroom.
You know, people are moving into apartments.
They have less space than ever before.
Their houses are full of stuff that removes the square meterage in the house
to do those open ended adventurous things.
The cart just becomes all of those toys so you can put all that stuff on
marketplace or not buy it in the future.
I
was just writing an email actually, to pod users about this mentality
of experience is not stuff.
If it doesn't create great experiences, get rid of it.
And then for birthdays, when often this single use plastic toy rubbish comes
into the house, just tell people, I want you to buy me experiences, not stuff.
I want a present which encourages my child, a dance class, an art
class, you know, some bushwalking boots so we can get outside more,
you know, a jumpsuit for the rain so that they can go outside, whatever.
Whatever, things that encourage experiences and memories.
not more stuff, so, so the pod gets rid of the clutter.
And then the second thing it does is it creates an open ended
environment where the child becomes the toy maker, not the toy user.
They don't become a consumer of toys.
They become a maker and a tinkerer and create their own unique
customized toys that work for their unique quirkiness, right?
Their individuality.
And the pod, other than the making of the toys does all of that same great
stuff that the cart and Rover do, but, you know, really small package.
Um, and it's really enjoyable to use between parents and children
to fill that gap of, you know, we were talking about how parents are
much more their child's friend.
I don't really like that term.
Even when I said it, I was like, that's not what I mean.
I mean, when giving an enjoyable experience to the parent to engage
with the child in that connected space where parents and children
share time together instead of sitting there with some beeping, flashing,
annoying, plastic whatever instead.
but to answer your last question nudel dot shop n u d e l.
I'll put all these links onto the show notes so that it's very easy and clear
for anybody who's listening to Click on it and go to your shop and really
start Nudel fying their play experiences.
It's been fascinating Marcus and I hope that our listeners Really
get to listen and experience all these things that we're so clearly
so passionate about And i'd really love to see that change in the world.
And I think I've been watching your videos and including that little I
think it's just a short version right the wheels of wonder documentary It's
really an eye opener and I would really recommend and i'll put links to all these
things in the show notes for listeners to just go and have a look because I
think we need to get a little bit more curious and see what else is out there.
And I just think that this contraption is the answer to everything really.
It's, it's to get kids playing, and I really, really appreciate you
coming on to Blooming Curious and sharing this with our listeners.
And I wish you guys and your company and your charity , every success.
I hope this is something that just will blossom because it's ultimately
for the benefit of our children.
And that's what it really is all about.
It's not for us, it's for our children and their growth and the development
and it does the best for them.
And that's amazing.
And we can't ask for more than that.
So thank you so much for sharing.
It's very kind.
Thank you very much.
It's great to be here.