Research Group Projects and Descriptions

The Lifelong Kindergarten group is sowing the seeds for a more creative society. We develop new technologies that, in the spirit of the blocks and fingerpaint of kindergarten, expand the range of what people design, create, and invent—and what they learn in the process. Our ultimate goal is a world full of playfully creative people, who are constantly inventing new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

A camera for exploring and experimenting with the urban environment. The camera doesn’t sense light, but rather things that the eye can’t see like C02, temperature, or wind.

At Computer Clubhouse after-school centers, young people (ages 10-18) from low-income commmunities learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. Clubhouse members work on projects based on their own interests, with support from adult mentors. By creating their own animations, interactive stories, music videos, and robotic constructions, Clubhouse members become more capable, confident, and creative learners. The first Computer Clubhouse was established in 1993, as a collaboration between the Lifelong Kindergarten group and The Computer Museum (now part of the Boston Museum of Science). With financial support from Intel Corporation, the network has expanded to more than 100 Clubhouses in 21 countries, serving more than 20,000 young people. The Lifelong Kindergarten group continues to develop new technologies, introduce new educational approaches, and lead professional-development workshops for Clubhouses around the world.

Alumni Contributor(s): Leo Burd, Robbin Chapman, Tim Gorton and Michelle Hlubinka

We are creating an online community, called the Computer Clubhouse Village, to connect people at Computer Clubhouse after-school centers around the world. Through the Village, Clubhouse members and staff (at more than 100 Clubhouses in 21 countries) can share ideas with one another, get feedback and advice on their projects, and work together on collaborative design activities.

Alumni Contributor(s): Elisabeth Sylvan

Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. With Crickets, kids can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions—and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process. Lifelong Kindergarten researchers previously collaborated with LEGO on the development of the LEGO MindStorms robotics kits, now used by millions of people around the world. Crickets grow out of this same tradition, but with greater emphasis on artistic expression. Crickets are now sold as a product through the Playful Invention Company (www.picocricket.com).

A pencil that draws music. You can sketch out your musical instruments on the fly and play them. You can collaborate through skin-to-skin contact. You can touch your drawings to bring them to life.

Facilitorials are tutorials that try to act more like a facilitator. By mimicking a real facilitator, facilitorials end up prioritizing a healthy learning environment over maximal transfer of information. Facilitorials wait to be pulled rather than pushing themselves, and when they're pulled they try to communicate by "doing" more often than by "saying." We are focusing especially on video facilitorials for the Scratch programming language.

"Hook-Ups" help young people learn by designing and constructing physical objects that can control games, animations, and other computer programs they create. Hook-Ups can be modified versions of traditional computer interfaces (e.g., joysticks) or entirely new types of interfaces (e.g., a spaceship steering wheel). In creating Hook-Ups, young people learn to integrate virtual media with familiar materials from the world around them. In the process, they gain confidence and motivation to explore topics within fields such as interface design, programming, and physics. Applications for physical therapy and learning are currently being explored.

We are developing the next generation of invention kits for kids, expanding the range of what kids can design, create, and invent. This project builds on our previous work on programmable-brick technologies, which led to the LEGO MindStorms and PicoCricket products.

We are developing a special version of our Scratch programming language to enable people to play and share interactive media on their mobile phones. For example, kids can create interactive greeting cards that respond to input from keypad, microphone, or camera on mobile phones—and then send these creations to their friends, and track how their creations spread through their networks of friends.

We are extending our Scratch programming language to interact across networks. This extension will enable kids to bring information and artifacts from the Web and from other users' projects into their own Scratch projects. In designing interactive networked projects, kids are able to think about how their individual ideas and creations can connect to the Internet, their friends, their communities, and the world.

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art—and share your creations on the Web. Scratch is designed to enhance the technological fluency of young people, helping them learn to express themselves creatively with new technologies. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, and they gain a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Alumni Contributor(s): Margarita Dekoli and Evelyn Eastmond

With the Scratch Board, people can use sensors to control interactive stories and games that they create with the Scratch programming language. By connecting the physical and virtual, the Scratch Board extends the range of what people can design—and extends what they learn in the process. The Scratch Board comes with several built-in sensors: a light sensor, sound sensor, touch sensor, and slider. It also has four ports where you can plug in your own resistance-based sensors. For example, you can create a Scratch program that controls music and animation on the computer based on your interactions with sensors connected to the Scratch Board.

What if everyone could create their own interactive content in virtual worlds? We are putting the playful and intuitive features of Scratch into a new programming language for Second Life. We hope to make it easier for everyone to create their own interactive virtual pets, dancefloors, games, clothing, houses, and whatever else they can imagine.

ScratchR is the engine behind the Scratch online community, enabling people to publish and share the interactive stories, games, and animations that they create with the Scratch programming language. Unlike other user-generated content communities, ScratchR makes it easy to reuse, remix, and build upon other people's creations—a process we call creative appropriation. ScratchR is to programming what YouTube is to video production. Although ScratchR was developed with Scratch in mind, it could be reconfigured to share videos, images, or any other type of media.

Computer games and learning environments increasingly involve humans relating to computational avatars and robots. Intelligence-modeling software requires real-time interaction between the parts, with channel capacities that must match the best of human-human performance. Many multi-modal activities challenge the real-time communication and comprehension speeds between participants. This project aims to enhance human-machine and machine-machine communication capacities between entities in order to encourage new models of interaction.