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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.
I’m at the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC for the annual Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation meeting.
Mark Yim gave the talk for our group, discussing progress on the Autonomously Reconfigurable Stochastic Factory. Robots building robots building robots. There are some amazing far-out projects here: attempts to reinvent the electrical grid, embed sensing in transportation systems, and map the brain. A lot of stem cell projects.
Francisco Valero-Cuevas showed some research that uses a computational system to animate cadavers! But I’m surprised to see that the majority of the talks are sort of poorly presented with text-only powerpoints. Maybe this is where they send the projects that have cool ideas but not quite enough charisma for
TED.
I’m flying to London tomorrow for
TEI 2009, an academic conference on Tangible and Embedded Interaction. It’s in Cambridge, and I’m super-excited. We demo’d roBlocks at last year’s TEI in Bonn, and the community was really young and energetic. Since it was a conference on tangibles, everybody seemed to have some sort of cool gadget with them. We’ll be showing off
Graphmaster, a prototype kit for playing with graph theory concepts.
We’re changing our name! roBlocks was a good name for our kit when it was just a research project, but it’s too similar to ROBLOX, a video game company. We haven’t settled on the new name yet, so please answer our poll and let us know if you think one is better than the others. Please email any suggestions to Eric (
eric@roblocks.org). If we pick your idea, we’ll send you a free 8-block kit as soon as they’re ready.
Update (March 21, 2009): Thank you for all of the suggestions and votes. We’ve picked a name! But I can’t tell you what it is yet so I don’t make the same mistake as last time. But stay tuned, I’ll post the news here as soon as I’m allowed.
[polldaddy poll=1361432]
Great news today. We’re happy to announce that roBlocks received a $100,000 “Phase I” Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Science Foundation. The award is to investigate programming languages appropriate for children to modify the behavior of individual blocks. We’ll be building a few different frameworks for end-user programming and testing with a bunch of smart kids. Fun!
