Siftables

Have you seen the TED talk with David Merrill yet? The one where he demos these little building block thingies that are actually computers and can communicate with one another? While it’s over a year old, if you haven’t seen it yet, I’d highly recommend you take a look at it. The objects in the video are called Siftables and they are a product of work that Merrill started at the MIT Media Lab along with his partner Jeevan Kalanithi. Recently, Merrill and friends formed a start-up company called Sifteo to continue their work. They are closing in on a commercial launch of the product. From their website, Siftables are:

…sets of cookie-sized computers with motion sensing, neighbor detection, graphical display, and wireless communication. Siftables act in concert to form a single interface: users physically manipulate them—piling, grouping, sorting—to interact with digital information and media. Siftables provide a new platform on which to implement tangible games...

When I ran across the TED video this morning (below), I was really excited. I still am, quite frankly. However, I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly it is about Siftables that I’m so intrigued by. Perhaps it’s the little kid in me that has always loved to build with blocks, Legos, Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. Maybe it’s the early elementary educator in me that sees these mini computers as an opportunity to reach young children in a way we’ve never seen before. It could be the eBook research that I’m currently immersed in, I don’t really know. So I’m throwing it out to you, the dedicated 13 or so readers of Raised Digital. What do you think about Siftables? How can you see them being used in the classroom? What questions do you have about them? Here’s a couple thoughts I have.

  • Teaching letter/sound correspondence. For example, could a letter appear on the block and the child touch another block to it which would play the letter sound?
  • Reinforcing consonant blends. Could a child combine a T block and an H block to produce a resulting “th” sound?
  • Story retelling. Could images or passages from a text be placed on each block so that the student could sequence them and self-monitor?
  • Sorting and ordering. Images of objects with multiple attributes could be sorted and/or ordered from largest to smallest and the learner would receive real-time feedback.

Photo credit: Siftables by burnto, on Flickr