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It was October 9th, 1984, and Steve Jobs was going to a nine-year-old’s birthday party. He’d been invited just a few hours earlier by journalist David Scheff, who was wrapping up a profile of the Apple Computer wunderkind for  Playboy . Jobs was far from the highest-profile guest, however. Walter Cronkite,  Andy Warhol ,  Keith Haring ,  Louise Nevelson ,  John Cage , and singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson were also in attendance. And  Yoko Ono , of course—it was her son’s birthday, after all. Despite the last-minute invitation, Jobs had managed to bring along a gift for the young Sean Lennon. A few hours into the party—once cake had been served and the adults began to talk amongst themselves—Jobs asked Lennon if he was ready to open his present. It was, naturally, a Macintosh computer. Released in January of that year, the machine was the newest of Apple’s personal computing products on the market. Jobs set up the Macintosh on the floor of Lennon’s bed...

Kindergarten isn’t often referred to as an invention—let alone an important one. But when Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Mitchel Resnick was invited to participate in a 1999 conference that reviewed the past millennium’s most significant innovations, he suggested just that. “Some people argued that the printing press was the most important invention; others argued for the steam engine, the light bulb, or the computer,” he writes in a new book,   Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play   (2017). “My nomination for the greatest invention of the previous thousand years? Kindergarten.” Resnick has spent the better part of his career optimizing how people, and especially children, learn. In particular, his focus as MIT Media Lab’s LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research has been developing tools that help us think creatively. In   Lifelong Kindergarten,   published by MIT Press this summer...