Let’s distribute the future

What would you give a child to inspire an interest in technology?
A box full of awesome things perhaps?

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When I was a child, my parents would bring home all sorts of exciting things for me to play with and do at home. That exposure at a young age to technology and creativity inspired me to do what I do today.

I distinctly remember exploring the Domesday Project on a “laser disc” connected to a BBC Micro B, messing around with one of those glass plasma globes and learning about geometry using a programmable “turtle”.

Using a simple programming language LOGO you could make the turtle draw patterns on a sheet of paper with a pen mounted inside it. It was loads of fun.

Messing about with turtles got me onto programming and I later learned all about how to make computers do interesting things through tools like Hypercard. I’ve been messing about with computers ever since!

Modern-day tinkering?

Nowadays children have access to tablets and computers that are so much more powerful and are radically different to those I had when I was learning about computing. These are amazing devices and lots of people are building wonderful educational apps for screen-based learning. I’m always installing them and leaving them for my children to explore on the iPad. “I’ll just leave this here” is my usual approach.

Yet there’s recently been an explosion in another area that I think hasn’t been explored as much yet – physical computing, electronics kits, Arduinos, educational robots, Raspberry Pi-based computers, sensors, gyro-copters, and lots of other exciting things.

Could we get some of these modern physical computing kits, robotics and futuristic gadgets in front of more children and inspire them about being producers as well as consumers of technology? In a way that doesn’t necessarily involve sitting behind a screen?

An awesome box?

I’m starting a new project to answer these questions, in collaboration with my local primary school. This week we won a £50,000 ($80,000) grant from the Clore Duffield Foundation’s 50th anniversary Clore Prize to kick it off. Amazing!

We’re going to prototype an “awesome box” — a custom-built flight-case filled with inspiring, hackable, educational technology – electronics kits, video microscopes, gyrocopters, robots, sensors, and lots more. We’ll have lesson plans included, so the box could arrive one day in a school, and by the next, children could be using them in lessons. The box would be something that you’d have in your school for a term and then pass it on to another school.

The box would contain things that will give children a similar “wow, awesome!” reaction to the one I had when I was young. Things like this…

Watch a short video about the project

Video on Vimeo

We’ve got the beginnings of some simple principles for choosing what goes into the box:

Is it awesome — could you imagine a child saying “wow that’s awesome” when they see it for the first time?

Is it hackable — can you plug it into something else and change the way it behaves?

Is it educational — can you see ways to use it for teaching?

We’re co-designing the box with children, so I’m hoping they will have a hand in choosing a name for it once we’ve prototyped it.

Right now we’re gathering ideas for what to put in the box, gathering people who could help with writing lesson plans for the things it will contain, and researching the design of the custom case we’ll be making.

Distribute the future!

Once we have the prototype together we’ll be sending the box on to another school to see how they get on, then improving the design before we go to the next phase and create several boxes that travel the country going from school to school, one term at a time.

William Gibson, the prolific sci-fi author who coined the term “Cyberspace” has inspired me so much with his writing over the years. Famously he made this remark:

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

So this project has a simple aim behind it: let’s distribute the future.

If you have an idea for something that could be in the box, want to help with writing lesson plans, would be interested in having the box in your school, or are interested in getting involved, get in touch.

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