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Smart Toys for little Kids
(by Jill Priluck - 10/25/99)

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts -- Lego will link up with the Media Lab once again, this time to create a center devoted to developing new technologies for kids.  

The Danish toy company said it will give US$5 million to fund the Lego Learning Lab which will merge the fields of technology, education, and child development. 

"There are many research institutions in this world which are excellent in technology and there are many institutions excellent in the fields of learning and education," said Torben Ballegaard Sorensen, a Lego senior vice president. "But there are very, very few centers which combine these two fields of research with the name of understanding and improving how children develop their mental capabilities." The announcement of the new lab came at the opening reception of Mindfest, a weekend gathering of playful inventors. 

"It's part of the scheme to make children and learning and development a major entity unto itself," said Media Lab co-founder and director Nicholas Negroponte. He added that Mitchel Resnick, a professor of learning research and the organizer of MindFest, will head the new facility. 

The lab is scheduled to open in 2003. That's when the Okawa Center, a neighboring Media Lab building, will be completed. Seymour Papert, an early pioneer in artificial intelligence at MIT, began the Media Lab's relationship with Lego when he envisioned placing a computer inside a Lego brick. 

Papert developed the "Logo" programming language almost 20 years ago. Since then, the world's best known plastic building-pieces manufacturer has hitched up with leading technology researchers to create some of the more innovative toys ever created. In 1996, for example, Media Lab researchers came up with a programmable brick which led to the product known as Lego Mindstorms.

The Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten group, which spawned the cricket, a cross between the programmable brick and wearable "thinking tags" with its motors and sensoring capabilities, is just one example of several projects under Resnick's direction at the Lego Learning Lab. All of them are rooted in constructionism, an approach to learning that emphasizes design, invention, and experimentation. 

"We've had a long collaboration with them. In some ways, it's a natural extension of that," said Resnick, who co-founded the Computer Clubhouse, an after-school space for under-served communities. "It's going to enable us to enhance and expand things we're doing now and to develop a new generation of technologies that are reaching a new generation of kids."  

"There's a need for rethinking the tools, toys, and materials in the hands of kids. We want to empower them to want these types of things on their own."

by Jill Priluck

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