A Robot with Pom-Poms

The Media Lab toy makes programming children's play.

The decades-long partnership between the Media Lab and Lego has spawned a new company and an innovative robotic toy that blends craft activities with engineering. This fall, the Montreal-based Playful Invention Company (Pico) will launch Cricket, a programmable computer about the size of a candy bar.

Cricket, which comes with kid-friendly software, is part of a craft kit that contains familiar art-class materials. In addition to pipe cleaners, fuzzy pom-poms, felt, and popsicle sticks, there are Lego bricks and electronic components such as motors, lights, and sensors. With Cricket, kids can, say, build a xylophone out of pieces of fruit, programming it to play different notes when fruit chunks are touched with a metal wire to complete an electric circuit. "It's a balance between traditional craft activities and engineering," says Media Lab professor Mitchel Resnick, SM '88, PhD '92, whose team invented Cricket.

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The Pico Blocks software that accompanies Cricket gives kids an easy introduction to programming. Instead of struggling with a complicated computer language, kids click, drag, and snap together blocks of commands, controlling how and when a motor should start or a light should go off. The on-screen command blocks look more like puzzle pieces than code.

Already, a number of science museums across the United States have test-driven Cricket during creative-invention workshops. Karen Wilkinson, a science educator at San Francisco's Exploratorium, says that she is especially pleased to see that Cricket appeals to a more diverse group of kids than do straight robotics or programming classes. -- By Tracy Staedter