Intel Smart Toy Lab



In 1998, Intel Corp. and Mattel, Inc. joined forces to create a "Smart Toy Lab" in a small, trendy office space located in the northwestern part of Portland, Oregon, USA. The lab was to bring together the best toy design and consumer marketing practices from Mattel with the technology expertise and innovation of Intel engineers. The opening of this office marked the beginning of the Intel Play brand of technology toys, starting with the flagship QX3™ Computer Microscope.

Animallandlord
A software-tool to analyse and annotate videos in the classroom.
"Students can select from a total of nine digital video clips of animals,
capture the frames that are indicative of the behaviors they think are
important to annotate and after they label these with the appropriate
scientific term, they then reflect on their observations."

Child Culture - Play Culture
The concept Children's Culture refers to two different types of cultural manifestation.
1. The cultural products made for children mainly by adults in different classical and medias, such as children?s literature, toys, TV and computergames.
2. Children's oral culture and play culture produced and performed by children and transmitted within the frames of a special type of social network. This culture includes aesthetic expressions such as games, tales, songs and a variety of other activities which play an important role in children?s lives and development. The paper describes these two types of child culture and their interplay and has its focus in outlining the field and establishing a framework for the understanding of play culture, children?s lore and other symbolic aesthetic forms of expression.

Programmable Bricks
The Cricket is a tiny computer, powered by a 9 volt battery, that can control two motors and receive information from two sensors. Crickets are equipped with an infrared communication system that allows them to communicate with each other.
Crickets are small and light enough that they can be carried around in a shirt pocket, collecting data about body activities. Crickets are programmed in a dialect of the Logo programming language (developed for "Lego Mindstorm"), a procedural language that includes constructs like if, repeat, and loop, global and local variables, 8-bit numeric operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, comparison), motor and sensor primitives, timing functions, a tone-playing function, and a random number function.

Lifelong Kindergarten - Digital Manipulatives
Here's the MIT group that has written several papers on educational toys and Digital Manipulatives: "...With our new digital versions of these toys, children can learn concepts (such as process, probability, and emergence) that were previously seen as too complex for children."

Computer-augmented toys
An der Uni Paderborn enstand innerhalb der Mensch-Computer-Interaktions-AG diese informative Semesterarbeit: Der Autor stellt innerhalb dieser Arbeit drei verschiedene Instrumente vor, die Kinder dabei unterstützen sollen wissenschaftliche Inhalte leichter zu erlernen.
The report is manly a translation of a MIT paper Digital Manipulatives, but also gives some interesting views on "interactive Barny".

Jochen Denzingers Links
on smart toys and domestic robots.

Experimental School Environment (ESE)
Twelve i3 projects research the school of the future for the 4-8 year old. One of the projects called Pogo involved the Philips design Lab. It seems to be the most advanced project within ESE.

Kids Design the Future
At the Human Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Maryland we believe that children should have a voice in making new technology for kids. Children's ideas need to be heard throughout the entire technology design process. Therefore, in 1998 we began a unique technology design team. Seven children, ages seven to eleven, join with researchers from computer science, education, art, robotics, and other disciplines, twice a week. Together we have become an intergenerational, interdisciplinary design team. The team pursues projects, writes papers and creates new technologies. Allison Druin is part of the team and has edited several books on new learning technologies.
Jesterbot (Mpeg, 68MB), the latest development within PETS is a "story telling" robot, children can interact with. A partner in this project is Dr. Cori Lathan, the head of the company anthrotronix who provide the same technology for military combat aswell.

Using Plush Toys to Direct Autonomous Animated Characters
Swamped! is an interactive experience in which instrumented plush toys are used as a tangible, iconic interface for directing autonomous animated characters. Each character has a distinct personality and decides in real time what it should do based on its perception of its environment, its motivational and emotional state, and input from its "conscience," the guest. By manipulating a stuffed animal corresponding to the character the guest can influence how a given character acts and feels.
A video can be downloaded here!