Crickets, by Mitchel Resnick Natalie Rusk Brian Silverman Robbie Berg

Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, and sensors into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, you 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 based on more than a decade of NSF-funded educational research. Lifelong Kindergarten researchers collaborated with the LEGO company to create the first “programmable bricks,” squeezing computational power into LEGO bricks. This research led to the LEGO MindStorms robotics kits, now used by millions of people around the world. While LEGO MindStorms is designed especially for making robots, Crickets are designed especially for making artistic creations. Crickets were refined in collaboration with the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) museum network, and are now sold as a product through the Playful Invention Company (PICO).’ More…

Scratch is a new (open source) programming language, by the LifeLong Kindergarden@MIT media lab, that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web. Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design, more…

Revolution (MIT) is the Education Arcade’s multi-player, American Revolution-themed role-playing game based on historical events in the town of colonial Williamsburg. By allowing role-play from one of seven social perspectives — from an upper class lawyer, to a patriotic blacksmith, to an African American house slave — Revolution places students in a situated learning context about their neighborhood. More…

Here are two projects by the MIT Teacher Education Program, in collaboration with K-12 Education projects.

01_Environmental detectives.

Players are briefed about rash of local health problems that are linked to the environment. They are also provided with background information and budget. Their mission is to reach the source of pollution, that is causing the health problems, by drilling sampling wells and ultimately re-mediate with pumping wells. By using their PDA’s players navigate themselves around the campus, receive and send information to, by other players. Finally, they have to form teams, negotiate and represent differents interests (EpA, industries etc).

similar to this project is mystery at the museum