Teach42

I’m kicking off the BLC06 conference over at the MIT Media Lab. After an early start spent fighting traffic caused by collapsing tunnels, we finally made our way over to MIT. The moment you walk through the doors, you know where you are. This place simply reeks of creativity. I won’t bother to describe any more about the room itself, you’ll just have to browse through the photos to understand what I mean.

The lab focuses on “creative uses of new technologies”. It all revolves around innovation, particularly learning in education. Mitch is saying that they call their program Lifelong Kindergarten because for the most part, Kindergarten works pretty well. Kids spend a lot of their time building, creating, experimenting and collaborating. They believe that’s what should drive the bulk of educational experiences throughout school. In the process of designing things, kids learn about the rules of the world. Often the spirit of kindergarten dissipates as students move into the older grade levels.

Froebel, the person often credited for inventing kindergarten, created specific tools to be used in kindergarten to promote development. “If Froebel were alive today, what tools would he be using with kids?” By using technology, they hope to apply the principals of kindergarten to learners of all ages. ‘Frobel’s Gift’s for the 21st Century’.

One thing I find very interesting is that everything in this room looks like it was just recently hacked together. There are no fancy shelves (they use the same wire ones that I used to have in my kitchen growing up), half the computers don’t have outer cases on them, and very few of the computers or monitors seem to match. The lab is a marked difference from most computer labs were everything looks 100% the same and great care is taken to maintain identical standards.

The Media Lab helped to design Lego MindStorms. For years, people have been using it to create robots in a variety of settings and in competitions world wide. Mitch is showing off something called Cricket, which is similar but very different. For example, there’s a birthday cake with candles that have blinking lights on them. When somebody blows on the candles, it plays Happy Birthday. Not exactly a robot. Same sort of idea, but different in execution. I’m pretty sure that he showed this off last year at the conference, but it seems to be on the market right now, being sold by the Playful Invention Company. Typically, they’re for children eight years and older, but he showed us an example done by a six year old.

The software looks like a simplified programing visual programing language. Very module, almost like assembling something with Legos. Just build your program block by block.

The other program we’ll be playing with is Scratch. Looks a little bit like Logo. It’s similar, but this one isn’t quite as ‘cute’. For example, it throws a cat onto the screen. You can drag over a command, such as “Take 10 steps forward”. Then you can add other commands, like “Turn 90 degrees” and so on. However, this can get pretty darn sophisticated. It can apply simple Photoshop type filters based on things like the location of the mouse. Mitch used the ’swirl’ as an example. The closer the mouse gets to the center, the more the picture swirls. Most of the time I’ve found that computer and art teachers want to move right on past the filters in Photoshop so they can get to important things like using layers to make students appear in a rain forest or on the moon. This turns a flat 2D piece of art into a multimedia masterpiece. Essentially, you can create an engine that end users can use to create their own artwork of sorts.

Scratch is still in beta. Later this year, it should be available to the public. Cross platform as well, which is always a good thing. I wonder if it’ll work in Linux.

After a short presentation, we split up into two groups, one half playing with Scratch and the other half playing with Crickets. I do say play because that’s exactly what we were doing. However, we were also learning plenty.

I hunt out with the Crickets group. I have to admit, the software made it easy to get rolling. There were about six groups of people doing Crickets, and everybody went off in very different directions. I wound making a digital Menorah. When you touched two clamps together, a light started flickering. Touch it again and another light started flickering. Touch it a third time and it started playing “Dreidel Dreidel“. At the very end, the lights would gradually flicker off into darkness. The program to create that sequence was actually much more complicated than it sounds, but the software made it really easy to experiment. I kept taking out pieces and putting in others to see what would happen. There was one other project that really stood out to me. Two women made a ‘friend finder’. Basically it just beeped and blinked until two units got within a few feet of each other, and then they both started playing “Oh My Darling, Clementine”. It used IR to determine when another unit was close, so it had to be pretty exact. But they got it working really well and I have to admit it was pretty impressive.

After everybody had demonstrated their projects, we formed a circle and had a round table discussion exploring the applications for these programs in education. People are pointing out that since there’s so many points of entry, and the projects are so open ended, students of all levels can be successful. I think one thing that everybody took away from this was how important the process was versus the product that they created. Regardless of what the final result looked like, everybody learned something about programming, logical process, cause and effect, and sequencing. One person said, “I’m not a math person, but I was astounded by the math implications that were in this project. I was kinda of growing with it. I kept adding to my toolbox of knowledge of how this worked.” Everything was very simple, yet it could become extremely sophisticated based on your needs and efforts.

In New York, they have some groups of students using Crickets to try to explore ways that they could improve the subway system there. While they may not have created inventions that could directly be implemented, the ideas that they came up with had potential that could actually be developed. For example, one group came up with the idea of having air swirl around the tunnel when the train was approaching, in order to give some warning to people with disabilities. Someone who may not be able to see or hear the approaching train could still feel the increased air activity.

While the software itself (Scratch) is going to be free, I was a little disappointed to hear that it wouldn’t be open source. They said that they wanted to make sure it was free so that students in third world countries could still get equal access to it. However, I look at the software and I immediately think that it could very easily be ported to a totally on line version using something along the lines of AJAX. Of course, I say it could easily be done because I’m not a programmer and wouldn’t do it myself, but the front end looks like it could be web based. So why not give somebody who DOES know what they’re doing the opportunity to continue to develop it? Also, I would love to see more programming commands created for Crickets. For example, there is no way to have it loop back to a specific part of the program if a specific trigger is tripped. So why not allow somebody outside MIT to code that them self so it could be worked into a future release? It wouldn’t affect the business model, because people still need to buy the Crickets hardware, so that’s a non-issue. It’s a lesson that Lego learned as well with Mindstorms. By allowing the community to develop their own plugins or add ons, Mindstorms really took on a life of its own.

Interesting note: Mitch obviously loves his work and greatly enjoys sharing it. The only time I saw him lose his smile the entire morning was when somebody suggested that they align some of the demo projects to state standards. I know that doing so sort of takes some of the ‘open-endedness‘ out of it and sort of feels like it’s diminishing the creative aspects of it, but at some point you do have to face the reality that schools live and die by their standards right now. It may not be pretty, but that’s just the way things are. So how do you address specific standards within the curriculum while still maintaining the freedom to be innovative? It’s a tough one that isn’t too much fun to address.

On the whole, it was a perfect way to kick things off at the conference. A little bit of instruction, a little more play time, and a whole lot of learning. More than anything, it really got everybody thinking about a subject that often gets left out of the curriculum: innovation. And let’s be honest, where would this country be without innovators? It’s easy to teach someone how to scan objects in the checkout line, but teaching people to be innovative is an entirely different challenge.

technorati tags:blc, blc06, mit, medialab

Blogged with Flock

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Enable CommentLuv?
If you have supplied a blog in the URL above, it will include a link to your most recent blog post.