Creating Good People - with Nyla Khan

The concept of a ‘good person’ is an odd one.

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That's Child's Play!

This blog post was published to accompany an episode of Kide Science’s podcast, “That’s Child’s Play!” To hear more about creating compassionate human beings through play based learning and get the full conversation with Nyla Khan, listen to the podcast directly on this page or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Play-based Learning and Good People

The concept of a ‘good person’ is an odd one.

Who determines what a good person is? Are you a good person because you give up your seat to a stranger, or because you donate to charity? Are you a good person because you picked up a piece of litter while nobody was looking, or because you put your shopping cart back so a store clerk wouldn’t have to?

There’s likely as many definitions or thoughts of what a good person is as there are people on the planet. 

According to Nyla Khan, a person on this planet and Co-founder of Willow Tree Nurseries and Partner at Mirai Partners, “a good person is a person who is able to show compassion.” Khan uses the word compassion deliberately and not the word empathy, and for good reason. Let’s get into semantics here by getting explicit definitions. 

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the emotions of another.

Compassion is sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.

The difference in these two definitions is subtle and nuanced, but makes a world of difference. By simply understanding and sharing in the emotions of another, people don’t necessarily go the extra step of having a legitimate concern or sympathetic pity for another. In other words, “a good person is just someone who is able to show compassion to someone who needs it in the moment.”

Nyla also believes that in order to create compassionate human beings, a good place to start is in the classroom (and we agree!). “In Montessori, everything is play, and the way in which we incorporate compassion at a young age is asking the child to respect the environment. So if you’ve made a mess, it’s really important that you clean it up… when you respect the environment, you respect other people,” she says. 

These little things make a big difference in a child’s development, and can add up to make a compassionate human being. 

This blog post was published to accompany an episode of Kide Science’s podcast, “That’s Child’s Play!” To hear more about creating compassionate human beings through play based learning and get the full conversation with Nyla Khan, listen to the podcast directly on this page or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

A transcript of the episode (generated by AI, so there are mistakes!):

Nyla Khan Interview 

Antonio Santiago: 

We all want to be good people, but what makes a person good? And how can we influence a child to be a good person through play? Welcome to this episode of that's Childs Play brought to you by Kide Science. And this podcast, we discuss all things early childhood steam education. I'm your host, Antonio Santiago Today, we're going to talk about what makes a good person and how we can create them through play-based learning. spoiler alert. It's complicated without further ado, let's get into it every week. We are going to have special guests who are thought leaders in the play steam and education fields.

This week we're joined by Nyla Khan her resume is long. She's the founder of Willow tree kids and kids. World's nurseries affordable nurseries with research backed pedagogies and an advisor and co-founder of Mirai partners bringing solutions to various firms. She also was recognized as a Forbes, 30 under 30 young innovator.

Nyla thank you so much for coming onto the show. I'm very excited to talk to you. Let's start off with how you began your journey

 Nyla Khan: I was a young girl and I knew what I wanted to do, which was work with young girls and children and women as well on addressing some of the, inequality, growing up, I got into gender policy.

 With the lens and with the aim that education is in my view, the only way to create the change that we want to see if we use it the right way along of course with healthcare and other aspects. But for me, education is the focus. It's my life's purpose. And today I work across the value chain of education I have to be main avenues by which I work. One is through traditional brick and mortar nurseries.

 One of the biggest issues with private nursery education in the region that I come from is that it's inaccessible. It's so expensive. And especially something like a Montessori education, which can cost you up to $15,000 a year in the U S or in the UK. So how do you make that?

 How do you deliver, That level of quality of Montessori education in an affordable way, in a way that's based on community partnerships and just kind of other things. So that's kind of where the nurseries are. Then I have the application that we're building, which is about informing parents.

Cause that's one of the biggest issues that you see is that when it comes to Early Years the parent has the most control over the child's life. Very few other actors come into contact with the child during these years, if so their nursery teacher, but , even then for a very short period of time.

And so how do we empower parents to become actors and active participants in their child's education? And then later on thinking about more scalable ways of, you know, reaching parents that don't know English and parents that have never understood what early years is and making sure it's accessible there as well.

And then the third one, which is the one I'm most active with is , , is Mariah partners. The other two are Willow tree kids and kids, world nurseries. And with Mirai partners, we are. Kind of consultants and also educators, I think first and foremost. So my co-founder and I, we started Mirai with the lens of creating solutions that help the greatest many within education.

Antonio Santiago: I love that you came from the nonprofit background and it's kind of a common thing for people to get a bit disillusioned from that field. So as a socially aware person, how did you make the pivot from non-profit to for-profit or private?

Nyla Khan: That's a really great question. And it's a question that, you know, I was very adamant about. So until I got my first job out of college, every single work experience that had prior to that was completely non-profit.

I never, for once thought I would go into private sector, it was not in the plans. I didn't grow up to be a, it wasn't a dream at all, but I got really disillusioned along the way. I think was my last semester at college when I was, you know, looking for jobs, I got really disillusioned with the idea that I'd worked in so many non-profits and they just seem to not be efficient.

 There was this higher, it was this ivory tower. That's the right word is that everyone sat in an ivory tower because it made them feel good that they work in the nonprofit space, but really there was no accountability. There was no efficiency.

There was so much that was lacking. And so I really wanted to see what it was like to kind of work in a profit for good, you know, a for-profit for good kind of structure. And so I think starting there when I did. I really loved and thrived in that because you don't take things for granted. And there is, you know you're forced to deal with things like quality and you're forced to, you know, prove your capabilities and things like that, which is so important because we shouldn't take for granted.

I think that also. What happens is that when you work in a complete not for profit, you can sometimes run the risk of taking the people that you work for for granted, and almost as if you're doing them a favor. And I saw that in a lot of the professionals that worked in that space, that the bare minimum was enough because it was a non-for-profit whereas in a for-profit for good, the bare minimum is never enough.

You have to still be competing. You still have to maintain quality. You still have to give people the respect that they deserve, because at the end of the day, it could be a social good project, but you have to adhere to your business standards so that's kind of the difference.

And that's how I landed up in that space,

 Antonio Santiago: Why is early childhood education so important to you?

Nyla Khan: So I was really young. I was below four when I experienced something that I shouldn't have, and that really , in very developmental terms, altered my development.

And as a young child, when you go through such a traumatic experience you don't know how to communicate it, you know, you don't have the language to communicate it to your parents or any of the adults around you or anyone who you think , can help you. And you don't have information from the outside world to make sense of what had happened, because people don't talk about certain things.

Right. And so unnecessarily had to go on through a life, like many millions of other children around the world where life just didn't make sense, but you knew something was wrong. And to me I think that that entire experience and how it affected me as an adult has made me internally very, very passionate and very determined that we cannot stop bad things from happening to children.

And that's a really. Unfortunate and sad reality. We have to come to terms with, we cannot stop things from happening, but what we can do is we can try our best to create systems that when things do happen, we're able to heal or help with the traumas with the negative impacts of the traumas that impact our children.

And so the reason I'm so passionate about it is partly personally, But also, because I know today from the work that I've done in early years, how much you can change a little child's life by doing a few simple things at a point at which they're so vulnerable, their brain is developing at the fastest rate.

, it's the best opportunity for you to not just, it's not jus t just about helping a child, it's about also giving them the tools to really blossom and, and grow and be resilient adults. Once you find that secret out, or it's not so much of a secret, but once you find that out that you can really, , impact someone's life for the better at that age then it's kind of a no-brainer as to why.

Now my whole life is dedicated towards that. That's my purpose, is working with the early years and working with children under six. I also just get along with them. I feel like we're on the same wavelength.

Antonio Santiago: Let's go into what differentiates things like Kide Science, Willow tree nurseries, and kids' worlds nurseries from other early childhood programs.

Nyla Khan: It comes from a place of so much love and personal passion and research. And I think that, that sounds very idealistic and it's not a, great response always to say that your business comes from love, but oh my God, every single lesson, every single part of the nurseries, every wall, every teacher, every child And that's the most important thing in life as human beings is that our ability to show compassion and love to other people as common as it is to talk about it. It's really rare to actually see genuine compassion and love being shown to people and the respect that they deserve. And so I think one of the differentiating factors is definitely you feel the compassion and love and family in when you interact with either Willow tree or kids, world, you feel it in the brand and you feel it in our, in our activities and resources.

And that's one big aspect. The second is the focus on Education is meant to be an interactive experience. teachers are not there to tell a child what to do. We are not, adults are not meant to tell the child what to do. We are supposed to allow children to create their own meaning because they can, and they will grow and learn from their mistakes.

But we are. Stifling. And we are doing them a disservice by not allowing them to experience the world through their own eyes And by enforcing on them, our often traumatized biased views of the world, where we're forcing children to see it through that. And that's not fair to them.

Antonio Santiago: One of the things I've noticed about my talks with all of these play-based educators is they're focused on a child's autonomy. 

All of them share the thought that if we gently guide kids, then their adventure and wonder will fill in the blanks.

Nyla Khan: And so one of the big things that we focus on. Creating spaces for children, which are interactive, which they can explore, which are made for them, not for us. And most importantly, I think, is the focus on what does it mean to actually be what responsibility do we have as early educators to children for their future?

And for me to answer that question would be what differentiates us is that the main focus is how do we build compassionate, caring, inclusive children that can choose whatever they want to be if they want to be. You know I dunno like if they want to be a scientist or if they want to be a doctor, if they want to be an artist or.

Uhm, a gardener, or a, you know, whatever it is that they want to be, that they do so with - with the knowledge that this is a decision they made because they were given the chance to be responsible and an independent decision makers that they think of life as inclusive. Without as many stereotypes as we can remove, we can't remove all because we're all biased individuals, but as many as we can remove a worldview , that uses language and, and a perspective on life that is inclusive of, of sexuality, of of color and race and ethnicity and religion.

 And I think the last part about compassion would be letting them make mistakes. So just creating an environment where they can make mistakes and they feel safe enough to get back up and learn from those mistakes.

So I think those are some of the areas I can think of off the bat that I think differentiates us. 

Antonio Santiago: Can you tell me in your opinion, why it's so important to help kids develop critical thinking skills?

Nyla Khan: So two years ago, I really started reading about Buddhism , a lot, and I was reading the specific monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and I was new growing up. We're always told nature's important nature is important.

Respect, nature. One of the things that I really started to be more and more aware of are the intelligence systems of nature that exist and how we think of words like critical thinking and problem solving as things that only the advanced human brain can actually do. But when we actually look at history and when we actually look at the things that have happened in terms of human inventions, all of them have been inspired or copied not from not just come up from our own brains, but really from the intelligence systems of nature that we see around us, whether it be flying, whether it be gravity whether it be astronomy, I mean, there's, there's so much everything around us.

All of our human inventions are born out of the intelligence systems. So, what does that have to do with critical thinking? I think critical thinking is one of the most important skills because it allows a child to decipher for themselves what should be considered reality or not reality.

 It allows them to create free choice. It allows them to question things that human beings have put in place and said are fact versus. Maybe just being a theory. And I think that critical thinking enables children to experience two things. So, like I said, the freedom of thought and the freedom of choice and free will to question the things that man has made or human beings have, are the truth.

And then second is to be able to understand the intelligent parts of nature. The intelligent systems of nature to be able to experience them and to think what is it that we have come so far as human beings to believe to be true? How is it not true? And how does nature say it better? And how does nature teach me?

Right. That's where I think critical thinking and problem solving really. That's kind of the deeper philosophical meaning of why it's so important to me when I think about children,

Antonio Santiago: There's a talk with Nyla at Kide Science, where she discusses, how the goal isn't to make the next Albert Einstein or Elon Musk. But the goal is to make a world full of good people. Nyla. What is a good person to you 

Nyla Khan: I knew that question was coming. It's a very, very important question to ask because I think who am I to really say what's a good person, what isn't, because then I kind of really I'm flirting with the grounds of , values and morals and ethics. Okay. when I say a good person, what I mean is a person who has the ability to show compassion.

So empathy is a funny one. We use empathy a lot, but empathy can be used for very, very, very wrong reasons, too. So I'm going to stick with compassion. And for me, a good person is just someone who is able to show compassion to someone who needs it in the moment where they're so comfortable with expressing their own feelings.

Antonio Santiago: Bumping in here to say that of all of the profound things Nyla has said, this one hit particularly hard because we often make empathy benign, but people can also do some, you know, not so great things with empathy.

That someone else's doesn't scare them because oftentimes our inability to show compassion to someone else is our inability to show compassion towards ourselves. And so when, I mean good people, I mean, people that care about things outside of themselves where we're teaching children, that life is not individualistic, not about you.

Everything is important around you that in order for us to live. We. Need the trees to live and we need the animals to live and we need our planet to live. So for me, a good person as someone who's compassionate enough to share love with other people and to receive love from other people a person that, we've given the tools of resilience too.

So that later on. Their own insecurities or their own traumas. They may experience doesn't turn into treating someone else with revenge or with the same treatment that they got themselves, and I don't think it's wrong for someone to have an uncompassionate moment or for someone to kind of treat someone badly.

We've all done. It. We've all been, part of that. But I think it's more important to have that as a goal. At least for where humanity can head. And the only way to really take that seriously as goal is to incorporate it into mainstream curriculum, because otherwise it's all talk. If you don't have it in mainstream education today for children, then when you say you want to build a better future with better people, it's not true.

It's not true. Not unless you are telling me that your policy or your curriculum mainstream curriculum. Compassionate inquiry or trauma informed care or any of the beautiful systems that people have created for education? Not until that, that exists. Do I believe someone when they say that? 

then? Is compassion something that is learned or even easily teachable? 

Nyla Khan: I think it's natural. We beat it out of children. The world beats it out of children. I think it's nature and nurture, but I think in the world that we live in, it's a lot more nurture than we allow it for it to be nature.

Antonio Santiago: How do you think that the style of play-based learning we see in Montessori schools and new nurseries promotes good people.

Nyla Khan: So if I think about Montessori first because play-based is associated with Montessori in the very kind of

philosophy and fragments Montessori, everything is play. And so when I think about it from that perspective, one thing about building what we consider to be a compassionate person is respect respect for yourself, but also respect for others. And the way in which we incorporate that at a young age is.

Asking the child to respect the environment. So if you've made a mess, it's really important that you clean up, not someone else. So you're respecting the environment. You're respecting other people's time. If a teacher's engaged in discussion with another child, you know, that there's a polite way to ask.

And if the teacher's engaged, then she'll get back to you or he will get back to you when they're done. So basic classroom rules is what we would use in early years it's really centered around building this idea that a child is responsible for their actions, because it's really easy as adults.

Oftentimes we don't mean it in a bad way. We just, we want to do things for the child. Cause were like, oh, maybe they don't know how to do this. Or they don't know how to do that. We're scared of them to , hurt themselves but actually by allowing a child.

to make these decisions and by providing them with certain rules and it was actually John Dewey, who is one of the biggest American theorists around play-based education is that it's actually just a set of rules and children play within it. And they actually enjoy those set of rules because if those set of rules are based around respect for environment, respect for people 

things like if there's only one of what you would like, and there's 10 other people that wanted, how can we take turns? These are really essential life lessons that later on turn into a more responsible adult, a more conscious adult if we teach them the right language and expose them to the right kind of diversity, the way to do that is through play.

If you force something down a child's throat, no one, no one. I mean, no adult, no child, no one likes to be forced to do anything.

Antonio Santiago: We have this problem today in education where there's this assumption that the way to solve issues in underserved communities is through discipline. There's this idea that a general lack of discipline is what causes these schools to underperform, which leads to more discipline, more standardized testing, et cetera.

And this kind of thinking extends to the parents and administrators in these communities. Where the idea of play-based learning is like almost preposterous to them. How can we speak these communities languages in order to like sell play-based research, backed pedagogy.

Nyla Khan: So that's a great question. And it's one of the most important questions that I'm trying to address. Because again, I think, as I mentioned, for me, it's not about bringing this to private education or to areas where people already have access to, Montessori and play-based education in general.

So first I think that there are a lot of assumptions we have about certain communities that we really need to get rid of and I think this, this is something that you probably also know well off , with your political science degree and as researchers we can never get rid of our biases completely, but there are quite a few biases , that you can at least be aware of that you.

And one of the things I really learned was when I went into the refugee camp, for instance, when I was working in in Greece or when I went into Brownsville in east New York or when I was in Brazil in the favelas and in India, I think, especially and there's actually many research papers written about

the sums in India, and actually here, even in Zanzibar, I've created such a huge kind of lead up to what I'm about to say. I realize you see children in every one of these places and what they're doing because they have a lot of free time because they don't have access to afterschool classes.

They don't have parents that are. Behind their back because their parents are working full-time sometimes multiple shifts. There's no afterschool activities cause there's no access to afterschool activities or beat. There's no resources to afford the afterschool activities. And a lot of times kids, unfortunately in these communities are either, , skipping school and not attending school or working.

So what you find is a lot of children making their own. Or their own toys. It's incredible. So, for example, I'll give you an actual example from Zanzibar. Most recently, I was sitting on the beach and I was playing with some of the kids that were staying around , and one of the kids had a Slingshot in his pocket.

I just asked him, can I see that Slingshot? And basically he made a Slingshot out of a branch a spare rubber tire and a rubber band that he had found. And when I saw it, I was like, oh wow. He could probably sell this. And because the other children that were slightly older started asking him, you know, how did you make this?

Can we buy it? And. obviously they didn't all speak the same language. It was very interesting to see negotiating happening but when you actually realize is that just making a Slingshot, taught that child so much about life. It taught the child engineering, it taught , how to commercialize a product, how to negotiate, so many skills that were learned from that. I actually think that there are two things. One is that I think specific communities don't actually have an issue it's us who don't think that they would need it. So oftentimes we go into these communities thinking of the bias of like, why would they care about this like privileged education?

Because oftentimes maybe we even ourselves don't believe that play-based education is a valid form of education. So there's that. And then the second is we think that play-based education doesn't meet the existing needs of students. So why should we bring them to communities where they need basic education?

Again, play-based education does fit those basic needs, but we maybe don't believe them. And then third, if it's reverse one of the major things. With parents is that especially vulnerable populations is they're very, very vulnerable to being taken advantage of. And so oftentimes they have their guards up, they want to know what you're offering.

will give them, give their children a livelihood. And I think in those situations, it's up to us to take the extra mile and to go the extra mile. To show the parent the research in a way that's easily accessible to them. Oftentimes we bring in solutions into these communities and expect people to just understand and then that's not meeting them where they are.

And that's where we really, really go wrong is that we're not able to speak to parents in the language that they're used to speaking. So if I go into rural Kenya, for example, rural America for that matter, I need to be speaking and showing parents evidence in the language that they speak.

And when I say language, I don't just mean the actual dialect. I mean, in the body language, in the respect for the culture that they come from, putting things into their perspective, not into yours and forcing them to adapt because you're not going to get anyone to follow you by doing that.

Antonio Santiago: Earlier, Nyla mentioned trauma informed care for children, and it quite neatly falls in line with the idea that children from underserved communities not only can benefit from play-based education, but likely benefit even more than somebody from a more affluent community 

Nyla Khan: I think that people will use research and stats to say, see, this is what I told you. The systems at work that are constantly allowing for us to believe certain assumptions and for them to keep coming true in the way we believe them. And I think that's where trauma informed care really , comes into play in the importance of trauma informed care is that it comes from this underlying belief that, as an educator health care practitioner, You were taught that a child is not operating.

If something happens, it's not because that they have issues with discipline it's because there's something going on. And by simply just changing that mindset really, really changes the way you start to see children, especially children that we oftentimes label as badly behaved . There's actually quite a bit of body of research , and I'm sure you've heard of it already is that we're so quick to label children as ADHD, but is it that they are just evolving to adapt to the environment they're in?

we don't know which one is true. but what we do know is that we don't have to overmedicate children because they don't fit into our. Definition of what we think is normal, and that's where I think things like then play based education and things like that, they're naturally more inclusive because they allow for multiple outcomes and they allow, they give space for children to express themselves freely.

Antonio Santiago: You kind of hinted at this by saying that children are adapting to their environment. So what's your opinion on kids and technology like phones and iPads and such?

 

Nyla Khan: I love this question because I do actually have an opinion on it and I don't think it's wrong.

 To me, it's a pretty simple question to answer. And maybe cause I'm millennial, I'm a little more comfortable with technology my co-founder she has about 30 years of experience in education.

And so she's, , gone through different iterations of what technology means right today. It means smartphones 20, 30 years ago, it meant something else. that idea, that technology is constantly, changing is true throughout history. We constantly have new ways of delivering information. And one of the things she brought up was that when trains had first come out, parents would tell their children not to look outside the trains because the view outside was moving so quick that would reduce their ability to concentrate.

And she used that as an example of how, she deals with technology with our kids. And I think that essentially that's really. The truth of the matter is that human beings, we will always be unsure about the impacts that something may have, especially when it's new or especially when we don't completely know.

Now the responsibility we have in that situation. We, first of all, we have to feel a lot more a lot more responsible for things we say yes and no to, to our children, because we say it with absolute terms and we make absolute decisions. And that's why early years is so important because children are the most vulnerable to the decisions adults make in their life.

And it does have a massive impact on how they will. At which point there's no adults making decisions for them. Right? So when we say things like technology is bad for children, have we questioned it ourselves? Have we gone and done the research? Have we taken the responsibility that by banning technology from our children, that we are in some way impacting their future progress or prosperity or exposure?

So I think life is not absolute. I don't think you can have absolute decisions made for children. And I don't think you should, it's not fair to their own agency. I think it's really important for us to believe that technology can be good and bad, just like anything else. And there does need to be some form of a balance allowing your child to, to use technology.

You know, for a limited period of time is a great way to find balance. You're not denying your child of technology technology has the power to significantly improve a child's life b y exposing them to things that, they could never have dreamt of being exposed to at the same time, having too much of it could cause all sorts of issues.

So I think for me technology as an educator, first of all, I think technology more than students it's imperative that teachers have access to technology. But when- when it comes to students, I think it's really about striking that balance of. Here's access to technology, but I don't want you to get too hooked on it.

And then children develop a sense of responsibility that way as well, because you're not denying them of it. You're enabling them to experience it. But at the same time, there are. Kind of limits. Like you can have chocolate, but not too much because otherwise it'll have this impact on you.

So it's kind of like the same thing is that you, you shouldn't deny a child of an experience. You should allow them to experience or create an opportunity and then, then you do the same thing with, with, you know, playing outdoors. You wouldn't want your child to play outdoors 24 hours a day because then they wouldn't be sleeping.

And then they would just be providing them with one way of experiencing education or one way of experiencing the world. So I think it's really important to have that kind of, you know multiplicity of experiences.

Antonio Santiago: I think I can take a wild guess, but what do you think is the biggest problem facing society today?

Nyla Khan: I would say it's the lack of compassion that we have for, for other people, for our environment, for animals. I think really where we're, we're running low on that that, that emotional intelligence specifically related to, to our ability to, to, you know, feel others pain and to care for others.

I think it's, it's evident in really many ways. And, and I don't want to say that that means that there's a lot of people that aren't compassionate because I do think our generation and I, I think our generation does care.

And I do think that people care. It's not that they don't. I just think that we maybe haven't been taught the tools of life that are the most important, which is, you know, essentially how do you be there for other people and how can you be there for yourself?

Antonio Santiago: . And I've been asking everybody this. So what is a question or something that a child has said to you or done that really made you think, and how did you respond to that? 

Nyla Khan: there are so many awkward, funny, weird moments I've had with children where they've just asked me things that it blows my mind, but I would say one, I'll never forget. I was in India. I was in Delhi and we were visiting this school and this child comes up to me and says, you know, I'm gonna ask you a question, but you're not going to guess the answer.

And I was like, wow, this child is so confident. I love it. And I actually, I can't answer most of my children's questions because that's, Again, I think teachers feel insecure about the fact that when they can answer a child's question, when actually I think it's just a great learning opportunity.

Where you get to learn something new. And so this boy, this young boy, he asks me , what is the whole world made of? And I was like, oh, , he's watched national geographic or something. So I'm gonna say atoms, and so I said atoms and he was like, no, I was like, okay.

Hmm. What's the whole world made out of, and then I just went on to kind of say different things. And he was like, no, I told you you're not going to get it. And then I was like, okay, I give up. And he was like shapes. And you know what? Probably someone told him that he may have picked it up from somewhere.

It doesn't matter because , he really, really, really believed. He believed it and he saw it and he really operated now from seeing the world as full of shapes. And I thought that was such a beautiful moment for me because I realized, , childrens think of the world in such philosophical and abstract ways we're the ones who try and reduce it to answer them.

But what if we were to meet children where they were, which was a lot more abstract and philosophical. And if you see that with artists, musicians, some of the greatest ones that have existed, there's always a childlike quality to them. And so yeah, I think that was one of the most memorable moments.

Antonio Santiago: We can meet children where they are to view the world in abstract and philosophical ways. That's a great note to end it on. . I want to thank Nyla Khan for joining this podcast episode.

If you liked what you heard, consider giving us a follow on Spotify or a review on apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. We also have a blog and newsletter listed in the show notes with our social media and website. The blog will have a transcript for those deaf or hard of hearing to be able to get the podcasts as well,

 and if you're interested in learning more about Kide Science and play-based steam learning that blog is a good place to go to. Well, 

thanks so much for listening to that's child's play. See you next time.

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