JOZI HERO: The Imagination Machine: Meet the teacher building an education revolution with 6 tiny bricks

When children are given six plain Lego bricks, something remarkable happens. Educator Brent Hutcheson tells Oliver Roberts why imagination may be more important than knowledge.

If you go into a classroom of young children and see it running down their noses, a lot of the time it has nothing to do with illness or cold weather.

“The vestibular system is incredible,” Hutcheson says. “It’s a built-in spirit level behind both our ears. One of the things it detects is inactivity in the brain. And if there’s inactivity in the brain, what does it need? It needs the hands to move. So if your nose is dripping, what do you do? You wipe your nose.”

Hutcheson has seen it countless times. He visits a crèche where children sit glassy-eyed and sniffling. He introduces Lego bricks, trains the teachers in how to use them, and returns a week later.

It is exactly the kind of observation that has made Hutcheson both a respected educator and an irritant to conventional thinking. For more than three decades he has argued that many of the problems in education stem from a surprisingly simple mistake: we ask children to sit still when they are designed to learn through their hands.

It’s the early 1990s. Hutcheson, a young teacher at Rivonia Primary, brings his own computer to school. At the time, computers were still the preserve of specialists and nerdy enthusiasts. Few teachers knew how to use them. Fewer still knew how to teach them.

When the school’s headmaster discovers that Hutcheson owns one, he gives him a new responsibility: helping to establish a computer centre. With that, Hutcheson becomes the first full-time computer teacher in South Africa.

The computer centre was such a success that it was soon commercialised. One of Hutcheson’s contracts was with EA Sports, which sent games for the children to test. For the pupils of Rivonia Primary, it was about as close to paradise as a computer lab could get.

Hutcheson, however, was already looking beyond the screen. He wanted to teach the children robotics. To do that, he assumed he would need to teach them logic. What he discovered instead would shape the rest of his career.

“I quickly realised it wasn’t logic that was the problem,” he says. “The children’s logic was fine. The problem was mechanical. What children didn’t have then, and still don’t today, is exposure to and understanding of the six simple machines.”

Hutcheson is referring to the building blocks of engineering: the lever, wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, and screw. Master them, he argues, and you can build almost any machine in the worl