A tip of the hat to Pittsburgh’s Kids & Creativity group – a loosely linked collection of artists, media folk, museum directors, hackers, teachers, professors, businesses, philanthropists, all working to make the Pittsburgh region an amazing place to be a kid. And because Pittsburgh is a center for both technology and the arts, many of the projects work at this intersection. The group — now about a hundred strong — meets monthly for a vibrant exchange of information and ideas, and yesterday’s meeting at the Carnegie Science Center was a flood of conference and meeting reports, from the Game Developers to Interaction Design for Children to SIGGRAPH. I’m relatively new to Pittsburgh (5 years now) and through Kids and Creativity I get to hang out with the most amazing and committed and imaginative people. Kudos to Gregg Behr, executive director of the Grable Foundation, who seems to know everyone and has that special knack to bring very disparate worlds together.
All posts by mark gross
I’m helping organize the Creativity & Cognition conference. It’s an interesting mix of artists, computer scientists, and just plain creative people. Which leads to the question: How do kids learn to be creative? To create is to make; so learning to make things is an important part of learning creativity. Construction kits like Lego and Meccano offer a structured (“scaffolded”) way to make physical things; and programming languages like Seymour Papert’s Logo and Alan Kay’s Squeak have offered kids a way to make computational things. Now we’re amidst a revolution that brings together the physical and computational in massively parallel and distributed ways. So, we need construction kits to scaffold kids creativity in this new world. 