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Siftables - The Smart Toy Blocks

Posted: February 13th, 2009, 10:33 am
by Yoon
MIT grad student David Merrill demos Siftables -- cookie-sized, computerized tiles you can stack and shuffle in your hands. These future-toys can do math, play music, and talk to their friends, too. Is this the next thing in hands-on learning?

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_merrill_ ... locks.html
This is pretty cool; an MIT grad student developed smart toy blocks that can interact with each other. The blocks can display letters, numbers, do math, and even play music. :o This'll probably end up being the next generation "toy blocks".

Re: Siftables - The Smart Toy Blocks

Posted: February 13th, 2009, 12:41 pm
by Hadvi
before you know, we will have robots walking and talking on the streets like regular people :P.

very sci-fi XD

Re: Siftables - The Smart Toy Blocks

Posted: February 14th, 2009, 9:15 am
by ascot
Nah, the little child just piled em up XP
I like the idea of the toy, but I bet it would get boring for me after few days... Like this colour mixing stuff - i get all the colours, was funny, but I can't use them... no painting.
Technical toys get boring because they have limited number of options, but toy blocks or crayons give you so many possibilities to create things <3

Re: Siftables - The Smart Toy Blocks

Posted: February 14th, 2009, 11:13 am
by Hadvi
Yea, with crayons you can draw on the walls. parents are especially happy when their kids do that :P.
I used to do that XD.

Re: Siftables - The Smart Toy Blocks

Posted: February 15th, 2009, 8:21 am
by Slayer
they do sound cool so whats next to come? paper which you can jest think of what to put on the paper and it does it for you? :D

Re: Siftables - The Smart Toy Blocks

Posted: February 16th, 2009, 9:33 pm
by Jaegar
Reminds me of my classes recently. One of them is an introduction to abstract data structures or something like that. It's essentially just learning about how to model relationships in a way that makes sense to people and can still be used by computers.

Makes me wonder how human/machine interaction will change. In the opposite direction, one of my other classes in an introduction to Unix. The professor told us how he used to operate a computer from a deckwriter. Really old technology O.o