Hi all,

Anisha here – Art lead and sort of the Historian/videographer of the project.  I’ve been steadily documenting the project through video and photo through our first few weeks (and I’m not about to stop!) and have gotten some awesome research captured.

A few of the things we’ve looked at so far, from an interaction perspective, are Jenga blocks, Legos, and a slough of different kinds of stacking and building blocks that children interact with.  One of the best things about Digital Dream Lab is that we get to play with a ton of cool, FUN, technology, too!  We’re taking a look at anything we can find related to tangible and visual programming – from robotics to Scratch.

Our advisor dropped off a set of Modrobotics’ Cubelets and we had a grand time playing with them for an afternoon, figuring out how to put them together and make some really cool modular sensing robots.  Matt, our Producer, is taking a robotics course on main campus and has especially been having a blast playing and experimenting with all the different kinds of robots we’ve made!

We also visited the CREATE Lab on main campus to check out their work on visual programming interfaces, and found some pretty cool robots there, too!  We were especially captivated by the Robot Diaries project, where people both young and old can make robots out of a kit that includes servos, LEDs, and sensors of all kinds – and can program it through a visual interface to create simple expressions and sequences of gestures.  Matt had a ball with a dog robot, which we leave you with below.

Stay tuned for more cool updates!