Building Blocks

Students remember the allure of things.

For more than 25 years, MIT professor Sherry Turkle has given her students the same assignment at the start of every semester: to write an essay about a childhood object that, above all others, sparked their interest in science. The exercise often raises doubts and anxie­ties among the students. Swept up in a sea of freshman labs and problem sets, many are initially baffled by an assignment that requires more than textbooks and calculators to complete.

Falling for Science: Objects in Mind By Sherry Turkle MIT Press, 2008, $24.95 Credit: Technology Review

So students call home to reminisce with their parents and siblings. On visits home, they ­rummage in attics in search of objects or memories; inevitably, they return to MIT with stories. Turkle, who is the Abby Rocke­feller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, has compiled the best of these stories in her latest volume, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. "Over the years, it has become clear that this assignment stirs something deep," she writes.

The essays range widely. Odes to the ever-popular Lego bricks describe the pure joy of building without a blueprint. Other compositions extol the pleasures of taking things apart. And some capture memories that seemed at the time to have nothing to do with science: braiding a stuffed animal's hair from ever thinner sections taught one student about recursion; baking a chocolate meringue pie helped another to understand geology and the formation of planets. Some students describe finding refuge in objects: a made-up game with a die filled countless hours for a shy child; a Basic manual inspired another to write programs on paper until he finally got a computer of his own.

Turkle's volume also contains essays from such luminaries as artificial-­intelligence ­pioneer Seymour Papert and MIT president and neuroscience professor Susan ­Hockfield. A light microscope that absorbed much of Hockfield's attention from the time she was 10 taught her to consider situations at different scales, a habit of mind that has stayed with her through the years. ­Papert reminisces about the gears he fooled around with and which, after hours of concentrated play, helped him make sense of mathe­matics. "I saw multiplication tables as gears, and my first brush with equations in two variables ... immediately evoked the differential," he writes. "By the time I had made a mental gear model of the relation between x and y, figuring how many teeth each gear needed, the equation had become a comfortable friend."

In her introduction and epilogue, Turkle highlights significant moments within each essay and teases out trends and themes across generations. For example, she notes that despite a subtle shift from analog to digital interests over time, the desire to look under the hood, to seek transparency, and to understand how things work remains constant.

"Objects inspire theories--not all of them can be right," says Turkle. "But wrong theories give the young scientist a sense of intellectual ownership that is heady, powerful, and leads to more theory-building. This collection suggests that for the developing scientific mind, the power of being right can be highly overrated. It seems more important to feel that you 'own' an idea."