Chapter 4: Thinking
73 - Artificial Behavior (Part One)
Robotics programs that look to biological models are a familiar presence now at schools with engineering programs. But people like MIT’s Mitchel Resnick see that as only the beginning. Resnick is a tall, lanky scientist with a big grin and an engaging manner. With his curly hair, oversize glasses, and rumpled demeanor, he looks a bit like an overgrown kid and in some ways is. But when he talks about the computer toys he designs, he is clearly a thoughtful man. “My academic degree is in computer science,” he remarks, “but I have always been very interested in educational issues.
“I want to help get these ideas about biologically based thinking—or what is sometimes called decentralized or ecological thinking—out into the broader culture,” he explains. “Because, for me, I’m excited about not just when these ideas start influencing researchers but especially when they enter into the lives of children…I think the types of models and metaphors you have for understanding the world as you grow up are very much going to influence the way you see the world later on.”
Resnick’s group developed the ideas used in the Mindstorms toys now being marketed by Lego—the Danish firm that, with the help of small children, has distributed billions of sharp little plastic blocks beneath the bare feet of yelping parents around the world. “With traditional Legos,” he explains, “kids build structures and they build mechanisms but they can’t build behaviors. We want to let kids build behaviors.” Taking two small gadgets he calls crickets, he places them so that they face each other. “When they see each other, they’re so happy they do a little dance,” he says, demonstrating. “Now, if I stop them from communicating, they stop dancing. When they see each other again, they start dancing.
“If kids can give simple rules to different robotic creatures and then see the patterns that form through their interaction,” Resnick says, “they have to start thinking about that.” The Lego Mindstorms series allows children to build robots with some three thousand different programmed behaviors. They can also post their own software creations on the Lego Web site for other kids to try.
With all that, he adds, “ideas about feedback and control—which have traditionally been taught in university-level courses—all of a sudden become accessible to fourth graders. Before, if you went to a school and said, ‘We want to add the concept of feedback to the fourth-grade curriculum,’ they would say, ‘No way. That’s an advanced concept. You can’t do it here.’ But the idea is not an inherently difficult one. It’s just been seen as an advanced idea because in the past the only way we could study it was through advanced mathematical formulations. Now we can study it in a way that is accessible to fourth graders.”
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