While Russia may have taken first place in the race to put both K-9 and Man in space, a team of enterprising Canadian students recently achieved a previously unclaimed milestone in intergalactic exploration: First MiniFig in Space.
As followers of our blog can readily attest, we’re suckers for all things LEGO, Kids, and Space… so no surprise that the team here at LPT headquarters cheered the whole way up. Gooooooo Canada! (PS: we like TimBits!)
Our friends at Latitude Research and Project Synthesis just partnered with the LEGO Learning Institute (let’s be friends too!) to produce a great report on three of our favorite topics: kids, storytelling, and ROBOTS!
With this study, the team asked a group of elementary school students to tell a story about what life would be like with their own robot. The research team then coded the stories to see what commonalities existed across stories and learn more about how robots might help to encourage play, learning, and creativity. Without spoiling too much of the report, we were particularly interested to hear that (unlike many adults), the kids tended to talk about their robots as friends and mentors rather than tools – a sibling or cousin with just a bit more knowledge/experience (but, as Vygotsky would note, still well within the ZPD).
It’s a great read for anyone interested in qualitative research, education, play, sentient beings… you know all the cool things in life. Here’s the Full Report.
Here at Launchpad Toys, we’re big believers in the powers of ALL media to educate and inform. Some do it better than others, of course, and some subjects/curricula (i.e. storytelling) carry more value than others (i.e. alien brain munching), but its not as binary as some “experts” or retail store shelves would make you think. With that in mind, we really enjoyed this graphic put together by Online Colleges and KQED MindShift (one of our favorite EdTech blogs). From Oregon Trail to SimCity to Angry Birds, all video games (if used correctly) can be effective tools for education.
Check out the full infographic after the break. (more…)
We’re big fans of Story Arcs here at Launchpad Toys and, of course, big fans of Kurt Vonnegut (particularly Player Piano). A good story isn’t just a simple narrative sequence (beginning, middle, and end), but a carefully structured series of events (Setup, Conflict, Challenge, Climax, Resolution) that sweeps the reader/viewer through an undulating swing of emotions (see the first 10 minutes of Pixar’s UP). Imagine our delight at finding this video of Vonnegut teaching Story Arcs to a class of college students… now if only they had played with Toontastic as kids!
Frequenters to this here LPT blog may have noticed a bit of a dropoff in the past two weeks: along with new updates and new hires, Thushan and I have spent the summer hacking away at Y Combinator (a startup incubator here in Silicon Valley) and have been quite sidetracked in the ramp-up to YC’s vaunted Demo Day. After a few whirlwind weeks of pitches, interviews, hooplah, and ballyhoo, I sat down yesterday to reflect on the big takeaways of the summer… and how YC has shattered my childhood dreams.
Like most kids of the sci-fi loving 80’s, I grew up under the general assumption that my not-so-distant-future would be shared with robots, androids, clones, and other mass-produced sentient beings. As sure as we put a man on the moon, it was only a matter of time before I’d have my very own gold-plated personal translator, a laundry-folding domestic servant, and a fully programmable baby sister. Sure, there was the off-chance that Skynet would turn on us or that my Boombox might one day transform into a Decepticon, but I was fairly optimistic about a harmonious union of robot and man.