High-tech craft kit spurs children’s creativity
At first blush, the PicoCricket Kit resembles a plastic box of arts and crafts supplies, crammed with colored felt, pipe cleaners, cotton and Styrofoam balls.
But this is a craft kit for the digital age. It includes electronic sensors, motors, sound boxes, connecting cables and a palm-size, battery-powered, programmable computer.
By combining the traditional materials with high-tech ones, children as young as 9 can invent interactive jewelry, fanciful creatures that dance, musical sculptures and more, said Mitchel Resnick, an assistant professor of learning research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.
Resnick, whose work with children and learning at the Media Lab helped the Lego Group create its highly successful Mindstorms robotic construction kits in 1998, said he wanted to produce something in which the emphasis was not on the building of mechanical objects.
Instead, he said he was more interested in encouraging the creation of something artistic, and delivering a technology and programming language that would let young people take more control of how their creations would behave.
“The hope is to get people started with simple projects and let their imaginations run wild,” Resnick said. “I do think young people are very quick to dive in and experiment.” The PicoCricket Kits, he said, “are designed to encourage that sort of experimentation.”
One of the PicoCricket guides, for instance, instructs users on how to turn a birthday cake made mostly of felt, cardboard and drinking straws into an ingeniously interactive one, a cake that can be programmed to shut off the lights in its electrical candles when someone blows on them.
With a few adjustments in the cake’s programming, its artificial candles will even flicker before they go out. With more programming tweaks, the cake can play birthday tunes or be joined with another homemade contraption that will toss confetti into the air.
The $250 kit is the first effort of the Playful Invention Co., or PICO, a Montreal-based company of which Resnick is a co-founder; Lego is a financial backer. (The kit will be available next month from www.picocricket.com, where orders are now being accepted.) Besides all the parts, the kit includes building guides printed on double-sided place mats, but little more in terms of instructions.
Its central tool is PicoBlocks software, a point-and-click, drop-and- drag programming language.
“Putting kids in control is what’s so important to us,” Resnick said, noting that girls as well as boys are drawn to the kit’s creative engineering, according to MIT research.
Robotics no longer needs to be limited, he said, “to what comes in the box.”
source: www.rockymountainnews.com
