9-year-old Caine Monroy spent his summer vacation building an elaborate cardboard arcade inside his dad’s used auto parts store. The entire summer went by, and he never had a single customer. But Caine didn’t give up. Then, on the last day of summer, filmmaker Nirvan Mullick walked in by chance to buy an auto part[…]
To thrive in today’s rapidly-changing world, young people must learn to think and act creatively. This paper discusses how our Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab designed the Scratch programming language and online community with the explicit goal of helping young people to develop as creative thinkers. The paper analyzes the design of[…]
In January of 2008, with a thousand dollars, a laptop and an outsized conviction that design can change the world, rising San Francisco-based product designer and activist Emily Pilloton launched Project H Design, a radical non-profit that supports, inspires and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design. “We need to go beyond ‘going green’ and to enlist[…]
Every few decades or centuries, a new set of skills and intellectual activities become crucial for work, conviviality, and citizenship – often democratizing tasks and skills previously only accessible to experts. Digital fabrication and ‘making’ could be a new and major chapter in this process of bringing powerful ideas, literacies, and expressive tools to children.[…]