Playful Thinking Series — Post 2
This is the second post in the Playful Thinking series, exploring Harvard Project Zero’s Visual Thinking Routines and how they can make learning more purposeful, more playful, and more powerful for every learner.
That One Time My learners Thought a Catapult Was a Ladle
We were in the middle of a science unit on simple machines. My learners knew they would build model catapults as part of the unit (I had teased that fact earlier to build interest), and I wanted to spark some thinking before practical application of the concepts we were learning. I found a photograph of an ancient wooden catapult — beautifully detailed, full of texture and history — and I dropped it into my slides.
But they didn’t see the whole image. Not yet.
What appeared on the screen was just one small piece of it: the bucket of the catapult, the curved wooden cup designed to hold and launch a load. Cropped in close, stripped of context, it kind of looked like a wooden bowl.
What do you see? I asked.
“A bowl.” “A dish.” “Something to soup in.”
Then I revealed a little more.
Now they could see the curve of the wood, a flash of metal hardware, the suggestion of something larger beyond the frame. Now what do you think?
“A wooden spoon?” someone offered. Then, with great confidence: “A ladle.”
The class laughed and several learners agreed. Yeah – a ladle!” What made you change your mind? “Now there’s a kind of handle, so… ladle.”
More of the image appeared. Now there were ropes. Wheels. The suggestion of something mechanical and old. Someone in the back leaned forward, whispering: “I think I know what this is…” I gave him the international quiet sign with a wink and a smile.
Then — the full image. A towering medieval catapult, aged and enormous, its bucket now clearly just one small piece of a magnificent machine.
The room erupted.
The student who had figured it out before the full reveal looked quietly triumphant. The ladle theorist laughed the loudest. And before I could ask another question, the wonders were already coming:
How old is it? What did it throw? Does it still work? Where is it?
They knew, of course, exactly why I had chosen this image. We were going to build catapults. This zoom in added to the fun; it also had them thinking about the various parts of a catapult and how those parts fit together.
What Is Zoom In?
Zoom In is a Visual Thinking Routine that uses the slow, deliberate reveal of an image to build close observation, interpretive thinking, and genuine curiosity.
Rather than showing an image all at once, you reveal it in stages — crop by crop, piece by piece — pausing after each reveal to give learners time to think then asking learners what they notice, what they think, and how their thinking is changing.
The routine comes from Making Thinking Visible (Ritchhart, Morrison & Church, 2011), a landmark book that grew directly out of decades of research by Harvard’s Project Zero and their Visible Thinking framework. Project Zero describes thinking routines as sets of questions or brief sequences of steps designed to scaffold and support student thinking — deliberately simple, so they don’t get in the way of the thinking itself.
Zoom In remains one of the most practically powerful routines in the original collection. In my classroom, it never gets old.
How Zoom In Works
The structure is beautifully simple — and the preparation is what makes it work so well.
Choose your image carefully. The best Zoom In images have layers: details that are ambiguous close-up, elements that shift in meaning as more is revealed, and a full picture that rewards patience. Historical photographs, scientific images, works of art, political cartoons — all work beautifully.
Divide the image into stages. You don’t need exactly four reveals, but four tends to work well. Think about what each reveal gives away and what it withholds. Be strategic: the first crop should be genuinely ambiguous. Each successive reveal should add information — but not necessarily resolve the question.
In PowerPoint or Google Slides, the simplest method is to place your full image on a slide, then layer blank text boxes or shapes over the sections you want to hide. Remove them one by one as you reveal. You can also duplicate the slide and crop more of the image each time, so each slide shows a little more.
At each stage, ask:
- What do you see?
- What do you think this is?
- What made you change your mind?
- What do you still wonder?
The question — what made you change your mind? — is the heart of the routine. It makes the thinking move visible. Learners aren’t just looking; they are ‘watching themselves look’ in a sense, noticing how new evidence shifts their interpretation. That is a genuinely sophisticated cognitive skill, practised in a context that feels like a game.
Why It Works — The Thinking Behind the Reveal
What makes Zoom In different from See Think Wonder — even though they may seem similar in set up — is that it does several thinking jobs simultaneously.
It teaches patience and slow looking. We live in a world that rewards fast answers. Zoom In deliberately slows everything down. Learners learn that first impressions are important — and that looking more carefully is always worth while.
It makes revision visible and valued. When a student moves from “wooden bowl” to “ladle” to “catapult bucket,” they are not failing. They are thinking. They are revising and thinking again. The routine celebrates changed minds, more than just correct answers. This is quietly radical in a school setting that often feels like making mistakes is a sign of weakness. This thinking routine values a growth mindset!
It builds suspense and genuine curiosity. The reveal structure creates a low-stakes dramatic arc. Learners are invested. They want to know. That wanting — that lean-forward feeling — is exactly the emotional state in which learning happens best.
A note on language and comprehension: For teachers working with language learners, Zoom In offers something particularly valuable. The ambiguity of each reveal invites participation at every level. A student with limited language can still point, gesture, or offer a single word. The image does the heavy lifting. Sentence frames — I think this is… because I can see… I changed my mind when… — give learners the scaffolding to express genuinely complex thinking in language they are still acquiring. The thinking is real; the language grows to meet it.
The Playful Twist
Zoom In is already playful by nature — the slow reveal creates suspense, the wrong guesses are celebrated, and the “aha” moment is genuinely satisfying. But here are some ways to turn the dial up.
Choose an image that gets wilder as it zooms out. Start with something that looks completely ordinary — a patch of grey, a bit of texture — and pull back to reveal something absurd or unexpected. The further you zoom, the funnier it gets. Learners who think they’re being very sensible will find themselves completely wrong in the best possible way.
Go deep with a rich, layered image. The protest photograph of a young woman placing a flower in the barrel of a soldier’s gun. A street scene from a century ago. A scientific image of something seen under a microscope. Images like these don’t just reveal — they unfold. The wonders they generate can carry a class for a whole lesson and beyond.
Make it a game. Treat the reveal as a guessing challenge. learners earn points (or tokens, or bragging rights) for observations that turn out to be significant later — details they noticed early that the full image confirms. This rewards careful looking, not just lucky guessing as well as makes the point that ‘this will be important later and should be noted for future reference’ to the rest of the class.
Play with extreme close-ups. Find macro photographs of everyday objects — the surface of a strawberry, the eye of an insect, the fibres of a piece of cloth — and use the routine as a guessing game. This works across every subject and every age group. It is also, genuinely, a lot of fun.
Let learners run it. Once your class knows the routine, ask learners to find their own Zoom In images, divide them into reveals, and run the routine for the class. They become the teacher. They have to think about what to show first, what to withhold, what will mislead in interesting ways. That act of designing the reveal is itself a profound thinking exercise — and they love the power it gives them.
Try It Yourself
Find an image connected to something your class is currently exploring. Something with layers — a historical photograph, a scientific diagram, an artwork, a place. Divide it into four pieces in PowerPoint or Google Slides. Decide on your reveal order.
Then show only the first crop. Ask: What do you see?
Listen to what comes out. Notice how learners commit to interpretations — and how they revise them when new information arrives. Watch for the student who figures it out early and sits with quiet satisfaction while classmates catch up. Watch for the ‘ladle theorist’, laughing loudest when the full picture appears.
The thinking you see in those moments is real. It is happening. And it will happen again the next time you use this routine — because each image is a new mystery, and the slow reveal never gets old.
If something unexpected, funny, or playful happens — I would love to hear about it in the comments. If you are an audio learner, you can listen to my youtube video of this blog post:
Thanks for being here. I hope your day is full of play.
Maureen | Playful Pedagogy playfulpedagogy.com | YouTube
Next in the series: Compass Points — navigating opinions, perspectives, and the beautiful complexity of what learners actually think.