In 1837 in Germany, Friedrich Froebel created the world’s first kindergarten. Because of his theories on play and learning, teaching was revolutionized, and his influence is still evident today.

Froebel’s school was a major change in educational institutions, not only because of the age of students, but in the approach to the way students were educated as well. Froebel was deeply influenced by Swiss educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi who argued that children need to learn through their senses and through physical activity. At the core of Froebel’s kindergarten he put physical objects and physical activity at the core. He used “gifts” such as balls, blocks, and sticks (actually 20 total as well as occupations, the original 5 were published during Froebel’s lifetime) for children to use in the kindergarten. This enabled children to learn and recognize common patters and forms found in nature. Frank Lloyd Wright credited his childhood experiences with Froebel’s gifts as the foundation of his architecture. The Bauhaus school of design can be traced to Froebel as well. Both of which were fascinated with the possibilities of geometry.

Born April 21, 1782, in Oberweissbach, Froebel was largely self-educated, but was able to study for a few years at the Universities of Jena, Göttingen, and Berlin. Froebel tried a number of vocations, including forestry, surveying, and architecture, before discovering his true vocation, teaching. He was deeply mystical in his relationship to "nature", believed in a "universal harmony", and he thought that children carried within them a seed for development which had to be nurtured by adults. He became an instructor at the Frankfurt Model School in Frankfurt am Main, and from 1806 to 1810 he worked and studied with the noted Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi at Yverdon, Switzerland.

Froebel's teaching career was interrupted from 1813 to 1815 by service in the Prussian army and by work as an assistant in the Mineralogical Museum of the University of Berlin.

Froebel stressed physical activity as a break to the basic curriculum, and individual activities to supplement group work. The recess activity, the use of specific-shaped objectives, the concrete rather than the abstract, spiritual training, self-directed activity, things before words, and pleasant surroundings are all part of his educational philosophy. His most famous book is "On the Education of Man."

Mitchell Resnick (with Kwin Kramer and Robbie Berg) is using the idea of balls as learning tools in his development of digital manipulatives. He created the Bitball which can “know” something about its motion and display some information. Children can write a program for the bitball on a computer, then download it to the Bitball via infrared communication.

Books and Publications

1826 - On the Education of Man