LEGO Bricks!
Some of you might have got confused by some comments running around, so I guess I'll save you the trouble of trying to find out what it's all about. I wrote something in a segment called "Voices of Scholars" on the A*STAR website, which you can find here. And then you also can see a picture of me. Just proof that I've actually graduated. Heh.
Did you play with LEGO in the past? It was one of my favourite, albeit most expensive, toys. I recall model sets of petrol stations, airports, train stations, hospitals, pirate ships and all that. It was such a joy fixing them. I don't quite like the new sets they bring in now which I saw in Raffles City last weekend. They had a really cool display of a football (I'm still rather British like that, but soccer for the rest of you) stadium, some of football players the size of about half a metre, and models of pirates. Moving ones too. You might want to go check it out, it's pretty fun. I nearly took photos, but I didn't think I would have captured the beauty of the displays to do enough justice to them.
Which reminds me of a talk I attended this morning. Rather, the talk this morning reminded me of the LEGO display. It was called Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society by Mitchel Resnick, who is the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research. He has been working on programmable LEGO bricks. Cool huh?
Prof Resnick is the head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group in MIT, which is part of the MIT Media Laboratory. You should check out the site, they do really cool stuff.
So Prof Resnick was talking about using computers and technology as painbrushes - interactive tools rather than the more passive mode of teaching like using computers as televisions. He's quite into getting kids on to hands-on, physical playing around, and also to find avenues to let children experiment in computing software.
He introduced Scratch, which is a software which allows children (or anyone really!) to make their own computer games or animation in a very easy to use way! And it's free! Although you can only download it later this year. I'm going to bookmark this... I think it's a great tool to help children to understand in a simplistic manner how programming works, and yet have lots of fun by creating their own animation. I can imagine myself getting stuck at this for a long time.
There's also this Computer Clubhouse project which he mentioned. I just got overawed by the number of things that are going on. I kinda wished (briefly!) that I was going to MIT instead of Stanford. Hmmz... Ha ha.
But to leave you off, I'll write down some of the things that the children made when given the freedom to create:
- an alarm clock which scratches one's head and plays music to wake one up
- a house for a pet gerbil which detects, via sensor, when he (the gerbil) enters his home
- shoes with ping pong balls attached to them so they light up with different colours when the shoes detect varied pressures on the soles when one walks
- a lock on a diary which detects when someone tries to pry it open. Even takes a photo of the perpetrator!
- a jukebox which reads what types of coins you put in and play different music
- a toilet paper dispenser which rolls out toilet roll when you clap your hands!
Phew, sounds fun? I think so too! Gotta find out more what these guys do...
Well, in the mean time, at least we've Fab Lab running (just about). More on Fab Lab next time, I know I still haven't talked about it!
Hopefully I'll start having pictures in here soon. Hopefully...
Did you play with LEGO in the past? It was one of my favourite, albeit most expensive, toys. I recall model sets of petrol stations, airports, train stations, hospitals, pirate ships and all that. It was such a joy fixing them. I don't quite like the new sets they bring in now which I saw in Raffles City last weekend. They had a really cool display of a football (I'm still rather British like that, but soccer for the rest of you) stadium, some of football players the size of about half a metre, and models of pirates. Moving ones too. You might want to go check it out, it's pretty fun. I nearly took photos, but I didn't think I would have captured the beauty of the displays to do enough justice to them.
Which reminds me of a talk I attended this morning. Rather, the talk this morning reminded me of the LEGO display. It was called Sowing the Seeds for a More Creative Society by Mitchel Resnick, who is the LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research. He has been working on programmable LEGO bricks. Cool huh?
Prof Resnick is the head of the Lifelong Kindergarten group in MIT, which is part of the MIT Media Laboratory. You should check out the site, they do really cool stuff.
So Prof Resnick was talking about using computers and technology as painbrushes - interactive tools rather than the more passive mode of teaching like using computers as televisions. He's quite into getting kids on to hands-on, physical playing around, and also to find avenues to let children experiment in computing software.
He introduced Scratch, which is a software which allows children (or anyone really!) to make their own computer games or animation in a very easy to use way! And it's free! Although you can only download it later this year. I'm going to bookmark this... I think it's a great tool to help children to understand in a simplistic manner how programming works, and yet have lots of fun by creating their own animation. I can imagine myself getting stuck at this for a long time.
There's also this Computer Clubhouse project which he mentioned. I just got overawed by the number of things that are going on. I kinda wished (briefly!) that I was going to MIT instead of Stanford. Hmmz... Ha ha.
But to leave you off, I'll write down some of the things that the children made when given the freedom to create:
- an alarm clock which scratches one's head and plays music to wake one up
- a house for a pet gerbil which detects, via sensor, when he (the gerbil) enters his home
- shoes with ping pong balls attached to them so they light up with different colours when the shoes detect varied pressures on the soles when one walks
- a lock on a diary which detects when someone tries to pry it open. Even takes a photo of the perpetrator!
- a jukebox which reads what types of coins you put in and play different music
- a toilet paper dispenser which rolls out toilet roll when you clap your hands!
Phew, sounds fun? I think so too! Gotta find out more what these guys do...
Well, in the mean time, at least we've Fab Lab running (just about). More on Fab Lab next time, I know I still haven't talked about it!
Hopefully I'll start having pictures in here soon. Hopefully...
posted by Female Fizzicist at 12:36 AM
6 Comments:
hi hi, why don't you start a lego club when you get to stanford?
there is a beautiful parallel in the lego thingy, the fab lab, and the web. each of these are giving large groups of people, who have had minimal training, the tools to create things of their own desire and to solve their own problems.
why does this matter? besides the inherent democratization of technology and innovation?
i will answer this with a quote:
“Revolutions are not made by fate but by men. Sometimes they are solitary men of genius. But the great revolutions in the eighteenth century [eg. Industrial Revolution] were made by many lesser men banded together. What drove them was the conviction that every man is master of his own salvation…
...marching men of the age expressed the impulse in invention. So they produced a bottomless horn of plenty of eccentric ideas…Every pointless invention…is matched by another superb one...
The men who made the Industrial Revolution are usually pictured as hardfaced businessmen with no other motive than self interest. That is certainly wrong. For one thing, many of them were inventors who had come into business that way…"
(Extract: Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, 1973)
It is a great time to be alive.
fabulous.. :D
Oh yeah. I'm currently in graduate school at Stanford. Maybe we can get together for a JC class gathering sometime in July. :-)
-Viv
Hmmz, lego club... I'll end up playing lego all my days in Stanford, and five years later wonder why I can't graduate!
Ha ha, but an idea to ponder upon...
you know... my Prof in Denmark has boxes of Lego stacked in his office. and he made us model the lego human for CAD... heehee. see, engineers know how to have fun! *grin*
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