[MUSIC] We call our group lifelong kindergarten because we've been inspired by the way children learn in kindergarten. That, you know, children in kindergarten are constantly designing and creating things in collaboration with one another whether it's building towers with wooden blocks or. I mean, pictures with finger paints and crayons. And we see the kids learn a lot in the process, you know they, they'll build towers with wooden blocks. They learn about stability and structure, you know, they make pictures with finger paint, they learn about how colors mix together. But maybe even more important, they learn about the creative process. They learn how to start with an idea. And follow through, and create something together with others. Something that you can share and be proud of. And then, too often, after kindergarten. Kids spend a lot of time filling out worksheets, or listening to lectures. And they sort of lose that approach. That playful creative approach to learning. So I think what we want to do in our group. Is to extend that kindergarten approach to learning to learners of all ages. And we think this is where new technologies, if we use them the right way, could really make a difference and help us extend the kindergarten approach. I always have to be careful to say that new technologies don't do this automatically. In fact. You know? I get frustrated by the way that most new technologies are used. That, often times, in learning and education settings. That new technologies just perpetuate old ways of doing things. And we want to see it differently. We want to take new technologies to used in the kindergarten spirit. Where as you know like wooden blocks or finger paint are great for learning, kindergarten concepts about number and shape and size and color. And we think if we have new technologies they can be like the wooden blocks of the 21st century. We can design new technologies to let people explore a wide range of different ideas and create a wide range of different things. For learners of all ages, not just five year olds, but ten year olds and 15 year olds and 25 year olds and 55 year old to keep on learning in a playful, creative way. One thing I'd add, since we're sitting here at the media lab. We try to run the media lab like a big kindergarten. That the students here, are playfully creating in that kindergarten style. Of course, they're using micro controllers and laser cutters, things kindergarten kids wouldn't use. But the spirit of their interactions is the same. So, I think we've tried to re-create that kindergarten approach here. And we think that's what makes the media lab such a creative, innovative place. And also a great place for learning. So people learn a lot here because they're constantly designing, creating, experimenting, expressing themselves in collaboration with others. It's like, what we want to do is to take that spirit of kindergarten and the spirit of what we do here at the media lab, and try to provide opportunities for everyone to get engaged in those types of activities. I'll give you some examples of the types of different, you know, tools and technologies that we've been developing to engage kids in creative explorations and creative design experiences. So a couple of the students in our group. Jay Silver and Ark Rosenbaum created the makey-makey kit. It allows people to create things in the physical world connected to the digital world on the screen and see how they mix together. So people have used this in all sorts of different ways to be able to make your own, you know, piano keyboard out of every day materials. The banana piano. Where as you touch different bananas each one plays a different not and it's done just by having people you know, explore different materials in their everyday life connected up to the makey-makey board to the computer. And then, you can then control the dynamic interactive world whether it's controlling music as in the case with. The Banana piano, but also controlling animations on the screen or, you know, any type of dynamic thing with music, light, and sound that you bring to life by just connecting together things in the physical world, and I think one thing that excites me about it is that it lets people start looking at the physical world in a new way. You know, when you connect things up with makey-makey, you have to find conductive materials. And different types of conductive materials will make your, you know, creations react in different ways. And I think we're accustomed to growing up, seeing things based on the color it is. Or how hard or soft it is. But materials have other properties. How conductive it is, or how resistive it is. So kids start to see the world around them through a new lens to see what is that will help, you know, drive this computer circuit. And they start thinking about the world around them in a new way and seeing the world around them through a new lens. When people think about making and tinkering, they usually think about the physical world, and of course. There's so much great opportunity for tinkering with materials in the physical world, but I think we're also interested to see how can we provide opportunities for people to tinker on the computer screen. Although kids spend a lot of times these days with computers and on computer screens, a lot the time it's just. Interacting and pointing and clicking and browsing or playing a game, it's not about designing and creating and tinkering with a computer. Creating things with the computer. So that's we really want to give kids the opportunity to design, create, tinker and express themselves on the computer. And that's why we developed Scratch. Which is a programming language that makes it easy for kids to create their own interactive stories and games and animations and simulations that share their creations with one another. In fact, I think the thing that I'm most excited about with our work on scratch, although we're proud that there's four million projects and lots of people are participating. If all those projects were very similar to each other, I wouldn't feel very good about it. So I think what I'm proudest of is the fact that there's this incredible diversity, you know within the scratch projects. And many things we never imagined. Kids will work on all sorts of things that we couldn't imagine before we did it. You know, of creating their own contests, of you know engaging others to make characters like a dancing contest and asking other people. To make their own dancers and integrating them together into a project. Or making a reflect test project that then you can use online to test the reaction time of kids around the world and do your own experimental studies. These are things that kids are using Scratch for that we never imagined. So you can just see how kids using what they're interested in and what they're, you know, use their own passions can approach in all different ways. No matter how they approach it, they learn some of same the core ideas about how to become a creative thinker. So what we want to do is, we don't just want to. Design creative technologies. We want to design technologies to let other people do their own creative designing and creating and expressing. I think that's sort of the driving force of how we can design for designers. How can we design things to let people, especially young people, grow up. Expressing themselves, creating things with the technologies we designed. And we think that's important for kids to see that that's part of what you know, being a creator is in today's society. It is you know, about trying things out, experimenting but also re-using and re-mixing what other people have done. And of course as much as we think it's great for kids to create on the screen. We also still love creating the physical world, so we're trying to bring the two of them together, so with Scratch we've created a circuit boards called the Scratch censor board or the Pico Board that allows you to connect physical things to control what you've created in Scratch. For example, kids have created like a say a card game in Scratch on the screen. But then in the physical world, they'll like build their own physical steering wheel out of craft materials and use a tilt sensor, so it can tell when you're moving it to control what you've done on the screen. So, rather than just hitting the keys on the keyboard, you've made your own, you know, you, physical object control the things on the screen. I think we're excited about that because. It involves kids making things in a variety of different media. They're both making things on the screen and making things in the physical world. And I think when you make things in different media, you get a deeper understanding about what the whole process of making is about and you start learning about you know, the strategies of making. And, it gets reinforced when you do it both on the screen and in the physical world. So I, I guess ideally, in my mind, we'd love to see a new generation of kids growing up that feels comfortable and fluent in creating in all different media. Whether it's with everyday materials or, you know, using new fabrication tools, or creating new animations and simulations on the screen. It should all be part of their repertoire of how they can express themselves and share their ideas with the world [SOUND]. [MUSIC]
