Abstract
Construction kits—toys designed for the building or assembly of physical
models—often play an important educational role in children’s lives. While such kits have
tremendous strengths (e.g., they permit children to build three-dimensional models and to learn
through tactile experience), they also have interesting limitations. Traditional construction kits
offer little in the way of direct communication with their users—for example, a traditional kit
cannot offer a student information or advice about how to proceed in building a model. More
generally, traditional constructions—i.e., the models produced—tend to be aesthetically and
behaviorally limited. This paper argues that through the use of embedded computation, pieces
within a construction kit may communicate with each other, with desktop machines, and with
their users; and overall, by integrating construction kits with computation, the educational power
and expressiveness of these kits can be greatly increased. As an example of many of the ideas
presented here, we describe a prototype of a computationally-enhanced construction kit: a set of
speech-enabled alphabet blocks. We conclude by discussing a variety of related research efforts and
directions for future work.
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