Siftables: Intelligent Building Blocks
Mikey 3 commentsI'm a big fan of educational technology, anything that helps kids learn better and faster, and this TED video hosted by David Merrill from MIT Media Labs is truly astonishing.
Merrill's new invention is something called Siftables, a high tech take on the old baby blocks most of the past and even current generation would have played with while infants.
The premise is simple, allowing the user to learn math, music, spelling and other skills by organising (playing with) the blocks. But like many other seemingly simple devices, some insane technology is usually happening behind the scenes. Each block has it's own colour screen and thanks to inbuilt wireless communication, each is 'aware' of the other making for some potentially awesome learning applications. And of course they are light and small enough for little hands.
By my little spiel here can't possibly do justice to the video below.
Gong
Saturday 14th February 2009 | 09:13 AMthis is one of those toys that are just classic
so much value
Jake Farr-Wharton
Monday 16th February 2009 | 10:00 AMI enjoy playing with flash cards with my girls before we read and put them off to bed, but I can see that this is quite practical. Often kids need to engage learning by themselves in order to retain.
I do question the value of teaching kids anything didactic so early on in their life though, more research needs to be done on the effect of teaching children during infancy. I wouldn't be surprised if those who were taught didactics early had a greater incidence of learning and attention disorders compared with those left to their own nature/nurture based learning until old enough to grasp concepts.
Haddy
Friday 13th February 2009 | 08:39 PMI for one welcome our new toy overlords