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Demo of Spatially Aware Blocks
Chris Anderson writes "This 5-min demo just posted from last week's TED — got a big crowd reaction. It's a new technology coming out of MIT, about to be commercialized. Siftables have been seen before, but not like this. They're toy blocks/tiles that are spatially aware and interact with each other in very cool ways. Initial use may be as toys, but there's big potential for new paradigm of spatially-aware physical mini computers."
I subscribe to the TED channel in Miro, and it so happens that I watched this last night with my 11-year old son. I was impressed, but for me a better indicator of a product's viability is how my son perceives the product. He thought they were awesome.
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
I was thinking along the same lines.
They'd probably be excellent for teaching children to read and write. Just combine it with software that reads or tries to read the words the child spells by combining the letters. The child could be given a specific set of letters and rewarded by how many words they can spell correctly using the set. Or you could have the program pronounce words and the child then reproduces the word with the blocks.
Granted these are all things you could do with a computer now, but this obviously allows for easier manipulation by the child and is more intuitive than using a keyboard. Not to mention it might be indistinguishable from a game in the childs eyes. And getting kids to enjoy and actively seek out learning is probably the biggest hurdle in our educational system.