WHEN one builder moved into CitySpace, others didn鈥檛 like his tone. First, he
built a huge mansion way out of town. Then he built a gigantic park around his
estate so that nobody else could build near him. Only when other planners took
him firmly to task did he scale down his structure.
Meanwhile, another builder, in San Francisco, decided to erect a casino in
CitySpace, and to furnish it with chairs created by an up-and-coming designer in
Boston. The designer objected. She was concerned that the casino would attract
crime to CitySpace, and didn鈥檛 want her chairs to be part of it. Only after
delicate negotiation during a video conference did she agree that the casino
could use her chairs so long as its proceeds were ploughed back into CitySpace.
Satisfied, the builder and designer shook on their deal by touching images of
their hands on each of their computer screens.
Planning cities is never easy鈥攅specially when the designers are not old
enough to vote and the city is inside a computer. But Zane Vella and Coco Conn,
who run the CitySpace project, think that kids, with their wilder, less-fettered
ideas might be better placed to tell us how the networked worlds of the future
could look. And so, for the past two-and-a-half years, they鈥檝e been helping kids
at museums, schools, homes and science centres to build a prototype, online city
with state-of-the-art computer graphics tools.
Advertisement
The CitySpace project is just one of a growing number of projects aimed at
exploiting the heady mix of childrens鈥� creative talents and the latest
technology. Last year, for example, 70 groups including high tech companies such
as Madge Networks as well as NASA and various nonprofit and educational
foundations formed a consortium known as the Broad Alliance for Multimedia
Technology and Applications. BAMTA will provide school projects with the latest
in graphics workstations, fast network links and software.
The young designers will use the technology to create their own multimedia
productions with video, sound and graphics and virtual worlds on the World Wide
Web. In return, the donor companies hope the children will come up with novel
ideas for educational software and computer interfaces. In many ways, these
companies are hoping that the kids will help shape their own future.
But there are other motives for working with kids and technology鈥攐nes
that have more to do with the kind of adults we want running tomorrow鈥檚 world.
Companies in America are concerned that teenagers leaving school simply do not
have the skills that industries need. Their heads are stuffed with facts, but
they can鈥檛 tackle difficult, open-ended problems, nor can they work well with
others.
Alan Kay, the 鈥渇ather鈥� of personal computing and now a research fellow with
Apple, who has worked with children for 25 years, argues that today鈥檚 world is a
place where critical, analytical thinking skills are vital if we are to solve
the political, technological and environmental problems confronting us. Such
thinking doesn鈥檛 generally come naturally; it must be taught from an early age.
鈥淥ur civilisation is an artificial construction. It鈥檚 at odds with how our
brains are wired. What has to be done is to get kids into 20th and 21st-century
thought patterns,鈥� says Kay.
But it鈥檚 also true that kids do have a freshness and looseness that helps
them do things differently鈥攁s Vella discovered with CitySpace. 鈥淲e find
that kids come to projects such as CitySpace with far fewer preconceptions than
adults,鈥� he says. When older people are given a powerful computer with the
latest in graphics software, he says, the temptation is always to try to create
the most realistic image possible. For example, adults have been known to spend
hours trying to make the texture of the gravel on a computer generated road look
just like the gravel on their drive.
Dream on
鈥淲hy bother going for realism?鈥� asks Vella. Some of the abstract ideas and
simulations created by kids are far more interesting. You can have gravel on a
real drive any day, but you don鈥檛 often see multicoloured 鈥渉over cars鈥� whizzing
past your front door like you do in CitySpace鈥攁long with futuristic spires
and structures daubed with blue and turquoise fractal designs, swirling clouds
and other hand-drawn graphics.
鈥淎nother regular thing we hear whenever presenting the project is that adults
get very excited and they want to start applying their real-world systems to
this imaginary space,鈥� says Vella. 鈥淪o you get people saying `Oh, well, so
you鈥檒l have a mayor and a zoning commission and you can propose your building to
the planning commission and they can approve it or disapprove it鈥�.鈥�
Psychologists such as David Fontana, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the
University of Wales, Cardiff believes that involving kids in such projects is an
excellent idea. He says that studies have already shown that when children are
allowed to experiment in a stress-free environment where there is no right or
wrong answer, they tend to be more creative. That creativity, says child
development psychologist Linda Dunlap of Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New
York state, is usually hammered out of children by both school and home. 鈥淲hen
children first enter a formal educational setting they are very creative and
very uninhibited about what they say and do,鈥� she says. 鈥淏y the time they get to
college鈥攚hen I get to teach them鈥攖hey can鈥檛 do it any more. They
need `one right answer鈥�.鈥�
And recent history does seem to support the notion that youngsters can grasp
novel technologies more readily than adults. Back in the 1970s, for instance, a
team of pioneering scientists led by Kay, who was then at Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center, developed object-oriented programming. This is based on the
idea of reusable and modifiable chunks of programming code that can communicate
with each other by passing messages. Object-oriented programming is behind
most of the graphical user interfaces that we now take for granted, such as
clicking from window to window on a computer and being able to develop
interactive graphical simulations.
Flexible minds
The young people Kay involved in the project took to this style of
programming immediately. But some of their older mentors, who were used to a
more linear, sequential approach to software development, had a harder time. 鈥淚
was trained in a particular way of thinking that was very foreign to what we
were giving birth to,鈥� says Ted Kahn, who was a graduate student with Kay at
that time. 鈥淚t was harder for me as an adult to quickly acclimate to something
so new because I had so many biases. But these kids had no biases. They didn鈥檛
have all that formal training. In fact, one of the kids wrote the program for me
that I used as the basis for my dissertation research. He was 16 when he did
迟丑补迟.鈥�
Today, Kahn is still working with kids in his position as a research
scientist and technology strategist at the Institute for Research on Learning
(IRL), in Menlo Park, California. He鈥檚 helping seven schools work together over
computer networks to design their own multimedia programs鈥擟D-ROMs, Web
sites, simulations or even humble videos. The hope is that by using these
technologies to create new learning materials for maths and science-related
projects, the children will better understand some of the basic concepts of
these subjects. Kahn even hopes that the multimedia materials that result will
be of such high quality that they can be used as part of maths and science
courses throughout the US.
This is a far cry from the usual approach to developing multimedia programs
in schools, where learning to program or create a Web site or even working your
way through a CD-ROM is the only goal. Kids rarely do their best when they know
that all they are doing is a class exercise, says Kahn. IRL鈥檚 credo is that
children start to shine when they collaborate in larger 鈥減rojects鈥� with a real
point to them, and when they work closely with experts who give them feedback
and show them what it takes to operate in their professions.
Kahn has high hopes for his project, which he calls Multimedia Makers. If
products do emerge, he believes that they will be first-rate. The schools taking
part have been hand-picked for the different skills they can bring to bear.
鈥淚t鈥檚 synergy,鈥� he says. 鈥淥nce you start to bring together kids and schools with
different talents and different intelligences, you鈥檒l produce something that鈥檚
far better than any one of them might be able to do alone.鈥�
For instance, one school in Los Angeles has long had close ties to
Hollywood鈥檚 animation industry: many children there have top-notch animation and
storytelling skills. Another school, in Silicon Valley, has excellent technical
skills in electronic arts, and two others in California are helping IRL develop
a new maths curriculum.
The projects these kids are embarking on with Kahn include a study of
rainforests, exploring the history of Silicon Valley (a land of fruit orchards
not so long ago), designing research stations to support the environmental
science going on in Antarctica, and modelling the effect of wolf populations on
caribou in Alaska. One group has already completed a CD-ROM on the effects of
microgravity on the cardiovascular system after spending eight weeks at NASA鈥檚
Ames Research Center at Moffet Field, California.
Key to the Multimedia Makers project is a way to send large volumes of
graphics, text and sound back and forth between schools with comments from the
kids attached to them as draft after draft of each project is slogged through.
BAMTA is keen to help with the project and has donated sophisticated software
and expensive high-speed telecommunications lines. BAMTA members are interested
to see how the kids use the technologies. After all, collaboration from a
distance via the Internet is fast becoming common in the business world. Kahn鈥檚
kids may highlight some of the technological troublespots.
Another BAMTA venture in the works is a 鈥渄igital clubhouse鈥� where not only
kids but also senior citizens and disabled people will be able to use the BAMTA
consortium members鈥� latest technologies. Employees from the companies involved
will be on hand to help out with technical problems, but they will also be
listening very carefully to the frustrations of the users. They want to know
what the children and the elderly would like their technology to do.
But if some BAMTA members want kids to show them the way to tomorrow, Kahn
and others think that involving kids in invention will better prepare them for
tomorrow. This has been a key theme in Kay鈥檚 work with kids. He has long
supported the idea of learning through experimentation. Too often, he says,
computers are considered an end in themselves, instead of what they should be
treated as鈥攑owerful tools, just like books, paper and pens. Nobody designs
a 鈥減aper-based鈥� curriculum in schools: why should they design a 鈥渃omputer-based鈥�
curriculum?
Joe Oakey is another who is keen to see project-based learning spread through
schools. As president of the Autodesk Foundation in San Rafael, California, a
nonprofit-making corporation founded by the computer company Autodesk, he鈥檚 been
working in schools throughout the country. Children in the programme have done
everything from implementing strategies to save an endangered freshwater shrimp
and building robots that can pick up eggs, to designing their own solar powered
car.
Fast track
Getting kids鈥� inventive juices really flowing is not a trivial task, stresses
Mitchel Resnick, professor of epistemology and learning at the Media Lab,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not just a matter of going into a
classroom and saying, here, design something,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here are a lot of
experiences that can contribute to being a good designer.鈥� Kids need mentors
from whom they can learn what it takes to 鈥渋nvent鈥�, he says. They need real,
deep proficiency with sophisticated programming tools.
Several years ago, Resnick set up an after-school 鈥渃omputer clubhouse鈥� at the
Computer Museum in Boston. Children, many of whom have no access to computers at
home and few facilities at school, can drop in after school to bathe themselves
in this atmosphere of invention.
Resnick points out that this isn鈥檛 a place where kids go through
mouse-clicking drills. Far from it: it鈥檚 a place where children can really get
their hands on technology and invention.
So far, the kids at the clubhouse have come up with many novel and
interesting ideas, says Resnick. One produced a laser show by bouncing light off
mirrors glued onto the axle of a motor. Other kids are using computers built
inside large plastic bricks, which were designed by Resnick鈥檚 group, to make a
computer-controlled city.
Other kids, meanwhile, have shown Resnick new
uses for his computer-in-a-plastic-brick. One fastened the brick to his bicycle
along with a sensor so that it could record the number of wheel rotations over
time, so he could create a graph that represented his ride using a desktop
computer.
Another put a brick in his pocket and used a sensor on his leg to track how
many steps he took during the course of a day.
As time goes by, more and more projects aimed at developing children鈥檚
creative abilities are emerging. And even if their inventions don鈥檛 change the
course of technology in any radical way, mentors such as Resnick, Kay, Kahn and
Oakey hope that children will gain all the creative, analytical and
collaborative skills that future businesses, colleges and governments will
need.
鈥淭here鈥檚 a fond myth called `the children will show us the way鈥�,鈥� says Kay.
鈥淭hat has never been true in history. Children never invented calculus, children
never discovered science. But that鈥檚 not their job. Their job is to carry the
torch鈥攁nd we have to get them to recognise the torch and help them learn
how to carry it.鈥�