With limited understanding of English, William had to rely mostly on pictures and diagrams to construct his windmill. From recognizing alphabets, he could match the words from a paragraph to the correct diagram to understand what needed to be done, or to search them up in another book. Another challenge he faced was not having the proper materials to build the windmill. William had to rely on scrap materials from a nearby tobacco estate as well as everyday items from his friends and family for the right materials. In his dad’s bicycle, William saw a sturdy frame and in the PVC pipes from his friend’s bathhouse, he saw the windmill blades. William had the extraordinary ability to perceive the hidden affordances of what most people would refer to as garbage. For his peers who could not see the uses of these scrap materials, they poked fun at William and called him crazy as he searched through the scraps.

William’s creativity and problem-solving skills might have been largely a result of nature play. With little access to electricity and the Internet, William had limited exposure to electronic gadgets. It might have very well been a blessing in disguise as he was forced to spend his time playing outdoors. One of his childhood games which he named ‘USA versus Vietnam’ involved playing with his friends in the maize field using makeshift guns made out of the mpoloni’s (African bush) stem and maize pith.

“We did many of the same things children do all over the world, only with slightly different materials”

Another toy that William and his friends made were toy trucks put together from cartons and bottle caps as wheels. They even customized the wheels with their father’s razor blades so that each truck could have their own unique track marks. This contrasts with the factory-made toys that most children are exposed to today, which comes with a specified look and way to play. It is therefore not surprising that building a windmill out of scrap materials was like second nature to William. He even modified his windmill to have four blades instead of three as shown on the textbook after testing that it would generate more power. Unstructured play without rules and restrictions may have instilled this experimental mindset in him as well.