This booklet, connected to the Invention at Play online exhibition from the Lemelson Center, highlights inventors who started out as great players and who recall a strong link between their play and inventing. It encourages adults to create an enriching play/inventing environment at home with hands-on, minds-on suggestions, and offers open-ended play and inventing activities for adults and children to do together.

Did you know that play is an essential ingredient in a child's intellectual and creative development? Scholars have discovered surprising parallels between the ways children play and the creative processes practiced by inventors. When children pretend, build with blocks and boxes, solve puzzles, take things apart, or rig a new way to do something, they are practicing flexible habits of mind and making important new connections.