LOGO-L> lifelong kindergarten

["Dale R. Reed" <dale-reed@worldnet.att.net>]

Surf to http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/981228/28resn.htm to read:

Visit with Mitch at his MIT faculty home page. Then explore the
concept of lifelong kindergarten at the MIT Media Laboratory Projects
site.
Read about programmable bricks and Lego Mindstorms before checking out
MIT's "Unofficial Questions and Answers" on the relationship between
the two.

Find out more about the $27 million gift that will establish the Okawa
Center for Future Children.

 Outlook 12/28/98

OUTLOOK 1999
THE INNOVATORS

Mitch Resnick
Imagine if all school was like kindergarten

BY RUSS MITCHELL

Kindergarten as a paradigm for life. How's that for an idea? It's "one
part of the educational system that people think works really well,"
says computer-education pioneer Mitchel Resnick. By pushing "lifelong
kindergarten," Resnick isn't literally promoting a future filled with
crayons, finger paints, and white nontoxic paste. Instead, he's making
the point that children learn best when they're playing around, and
that the top-down, drill-instructor style of education that pervades
the school system from first grade on up is antithetical to the kind
of self-motivated, interactive play that makes learning come alive.
"The most important thing for kids to be learning is how to become
good learners," says Resnick, a 42-year-old professor of research in
education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media
Laboratory. "We want to innovate in education so that children will
become innovators themselves."

In Resnick's school of the future, teachers would be less like
lecturers and more like guides, coaching children who are pursuing
individual learning projects driven by their own passions and
interests. What makes this work: the cheap ubiquity of computer chips,
whose programmability lets kids customize interactive projects,
freeing them from a standardized, one-size-fits-all curriculum.

Resnick left his job as a writer at Business Week in the early 1980s
to earn a computer science Ph.D. at MIT under Seymour Papert, who'd
been researching technology and education since the early days of the
computer. Like Papert, Resnick is no mere theorist. Consider
"programmable bricks," one of the inventions produced by his research
team at MIT's Media Lab. A combination of computers, software, and
Lego blocks that provide raw material to build robots and other
electronic creations, the project evolved into Lego Mindstorms, one of
this Christmas season's hottest-selling gifts. Other Media Lab
projects: tiny computers called Crickets that let kids build their own
scientific instruments; and Computer Clubhouses in Boston, Brooklyn,
N.Y., and other cities, for children in low-income neighborhoods.

Resnick says his keen interest in children and education can be traced
in part to his mother, who was a teacher. Now he will put his zeal
into action with an ambitious new project–the Okawa Center for Future
Children, which will be housed in its own custom-designed building at
MIT. The research center's initial funding, $27 million, comes from
Isao Okawa, the chairman of video-game manufacturer Sega Enterprises.
Society has marginalized children, Resnick believes, but he predicts
that through easy, cheap computer connections worldwide, kids will
begin to create institutions of their own–such as a kid-managed
international newspaper, developed with the Media Lab, that will debut
on the World Wide Web in January ( www.jrsummit.net).

By allowing experimentation, competition, and freer choice in the
school system, Resnick believes that the best solutions won't come
down from an educational bureaucracy but will rise from the bottom
up–from parents, and from kids themselves.
---
$ dale-reed@worldnet.att.net  Seattle, Washington U.S.A. $

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