By embedding computer chips in construction toys, Professors Nicholas Negroponte, Seymour Papert and Mitchel Resnick have added computational capabilities to traditional playthings such as beads and LEGO bricks. The goal is to empower children as designers and inventors, enabling them to learn about the world through their own explorations and experiments. In pilot studies, children have used the new technologies to create their own robotic creatures and even their own scientific instruments. Young children have always learned about the world through direct manipulation and exploration. By programming their creations to have behaviors, children learn advanced concepts of feedback and control.
Traditional approaches aim for incremental change.
To create a learning revolution, both at home and in the classroom, we need to use technologies that support a new vision of learning. The MIT team began linking computers to children's toys in 1984, in cooperation with The LEGO Group, which funded the research. Early versions used wires to connect LEGO building materials to desktop computers. Each bead has a tiny light and can communicate with neighboring beads along a necklace. By stringing the beads together in different ways, children create different dynamic patterns of light, learning an important scientific lesson on how patterns can emerge from simple, local interactions.