Researchers at the MIT Media Laboratory are developing a system that enables young children to program interactive robots by affixing stickers to laminated sheets of paper.
Not only could the system introduce children to programming principles, but it could also serve as a research tool, to help determine which computational concepts children can grasp at what ages, and how interactive robots can best be integrated into educational curricula.
Last week, at the Association for Computing Machinery and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, the researchers presented the results of an initial study of the system, which investigated its use by children ages 4 to 8.
“We did not want to put this in the digital world but rather in the tangible world,” says Michal Gordon, a postdoc in media arts and sciences and lead author on the new paper. “It’s a sandbox for exploring computational concepts, but it’s a sandbox...
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