The Playful World [Hardcover]

Your imagination will be stimulated by this book . . . perhaps even more than by any other book you will read this year.

The book begins innocently enough by explaining some of the newest technologies that are affecting toys and games. You begin with Furby, an interactive toy that "comes alive" and requires care. Furby can learn language, and responds to its owner.

Next comes Lego's Mindstorms kit for making robots. These toys have a computer in them that allow them use sensors to take purposeful actions. Soon, adults were writing software for this so you could program in more actions.

You move on from there to see how these toys are built around a model of how children learn, by trial and error. Simulations then become a powerful technology for helping create more capable learners, by accelerating that learning process. You are introduced to a new product, the Sony Play Station 2, which will offer simulations with learning capabilities in complex games.

Then, the author takes to off into the Web and points out that youngsters are sharing their experiences with Furby, robots, and simulation games so that they all learn faster.

You begin to see the possibilities of a whole different paradigm for learning, that will proceed much faster and advance both individual and human development in more fundamental ways. This could be the big payoff from information technology.

He then takes you over the rainbow into the future with the potential of next generation toys and technologies. Virtual reality will be at full potential with the next generation of Playstation in 2005. Electron microscopes will allow us to peer routinely and inexpensively at the atomic level. Nanotechnology will have developed to allow us to manipulate atoms and molecules to create molecular machines.

If you then create convergence of artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and the Internet, you can have a society where the most advanced problems can be attacked simultaneously by hundreds of millions of people sharing their experiences and insights. That's where he lets your imagination take over.

Obviously, the potential for good and harm is magnified in such an area. The harm can come from overdeveloping technology without putting in sufficient limitations required to overcome its potential dangers.

I prefer to focus on the good. I hope you will, too. Although the author exhorts us to encourage our children in this area while upholding important human values, I think that we need to get involved with the new technology, too. Playing with your child is good for you both! It's also going to be even more fun for you, with these neat new capabilities. Your child can teach you how to use them!

Here's how the book leaves it: "If we fail to listen to our own children, how can we expect them to listen to us when we try to teach them of older, but still essential, human values?"

Whatever you conclude about where this technology convergence will lead us, I encourage you to become familiar with these toys and technologies. Simulations are a terrific way to advance learning for adults as well as children. The sooner you understand the potential, the sooner you and your peers can make faster progress.

Enjoy a more knowledgeable future!

There will be implications for our children deriving from this new category of object, Pesce states, but doesn't take it much further than that. For instance, one might ask will this new category of object somehow work to erase the line between machine and humanity, to blur the boundary between our bodies and technology, a boundary already blurred by the objectification of the body in consumer culture? Will the difficulties encountered in making and refining this third class of artificially intelligent object help us to form a more complete understanding of the capabilities and capacities of humanity? Is that something we want to do? Why? Why are the dystopian implications of such technology always more compelling of our attention than the utopian implications?

These are questions that are really not within the stated scope of the book. But, of course, these are the most interesting questions.

He takes off from where Seymour Papert's Mindstorms left us with technologies that create toys that help us to develop our mental models of the world. Toys that make us think.

As a generation of children grow up playing with Lego Mindstorms, Furbys, AIBO's etc.. they will develop their mental faculties that will come into play as they define the future.

I grew up with a BBC micro and started programming adventure games in BASIC, which opened up a whole new world to me. As a generation we played computer games while growing up. These were rich interactive environments that left us feeling unchallenged in a schooling system, which was still geared towards to old teaching techniques. These techniques seemed totally inadequate in coping with children who could solve complex mathematical problems at home whilst programming. So I am not sure how the schools of today handle children who are building robots and playing with toys that they can not only interact with, but ones which can learn and change as they are interacted with.

Do we need to change the way we approach education? Instead of complaining that children have MTV (Short) attention spans, we should be creating an education system that can cope with the speed at which these young minds are working at. I think we should be encouraging children to be thinking faster and day dreaming and using their imaginations, instead of trying to get them to fit an out dated model that will leave them totally unprepared for an ever more complex world.

I digress, but these are thoughts that come to mind while reading this book, as you whisked off on this tour of future mind toys.

If you can't tell, I love this book! Anyone interested in toys that can help them or their children think, should read this book.