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...