Description:
In the 1980s, many people talked about the transition from the Industrial Society to the Information Society. In the 1990s, people began to talk about the Knowledge Society. But I prefer a different conception: the Creative Society. Success in the future (for individuals, for communities, for companies, for nations as a whole) will be based not on what we know or how much we know, but on our ability to think and act creatively.
In this presentation, I will discuss new technologies and new educational initiatives designed specifically to help children develop as creative thinkers so that they are prepared for life in the Creative Society. In particular, I will focus especially on two projects we are developing at the MIT Media Lab:
Scratch is a new programming environment that makes it easier for students to create their own animated stories, video games, and interactive art and share their creations with one another across the Internet. To create Scratch programs, students snap together graphical building blocks, each representing a different command or action. Students learn important computational ideas as they transform images, mix in sound clips and drum beats, and integrate inputs from real-world sensors. Scratch has many of the same educational goals as Logo, but Scratch simplifies the programming process through its building-block approach, makes it easier for students to share projects and ideas with one another over the Internet, and resonates with todays youth culture through its support of media-rich activities.
Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. Students can plug lights, motors, and sensors into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, students can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process. Crickets are similar in many ways to the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kits, but Crickets are designed to support a more diverse range of projects, and thus appeal to a more diverse audience (in particular, appealing to girls as well as boys).
