It's hard to understand how far you're suggesting going with this. Many people in child development would disagree with how far you seem to want to take this c

It's hard to understand how far you're suggesting going with this. Many people in child development would disagree with how far you seem to want to take this concept of abstracting away real-world objects. My kid's preschool had an idea of "loose parts" (for example: http://progressiveearlychildhoodeducation.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-children-use-outdoor-play-spaces.html http://progressiveearlychildhoodeducation.blogspot.com/2010/...) in which a selection of physical objects (buckets, balls, tables, blocks, boxes, ramps, branches) was placed in a large play yard for open-ended construction. The kids were allowed to do whatever they decided to do with the parts. They would build some things up across several days (without being directed). It's important to understand that, to make this work, you don't put out everything at once. For a week, you put out a few things that go together. Then they go in to storage, and you take out a different assortment. It has to rotate, or else it becomes part of the landscape and is not used. To do this, you need to have a considerable amount of storage space, and a staff that is energetic enough to wrangle the stuff. But the stuff itself is rather inexpensive and, by design, simple. The same kind of ideas hold, on a smaller scale, in households.