Power play

Bridging the divide between screen time and quality time

Many profound challenges of our time spring from a passel of vexing disconnects. Take for example the frightening obesity epidemic in Oklahoma, especially among kids. It’s a result of the wide chasm between our need to get more exercise, eat better and live healthier vs. the overwhelming convenience of the car, our auto-centric cities and the ubiquity of cheap fast food. It’s part of the reason a cadre of T-Town planning advocates (including yours truly) are obsessed with sidewalks, neighborhood connectivity and mixed-use development in Tulsa.

Consider another staggering asymmetry: the growing imbalance between screen time (the hours we spend staring at computers, smart phones, tablets, televisions, etc.) and the quality time we spend engaging with our physical world. This disconnect is especially powerful with kids. Some believe a big part of our failing school dynamic is the inability to lure children away from the seductive “screen world” to the sometimes dull-as-dishwater real world. MIT’s Seymour Papert and his “constructionist movement” believe American kids are not fully motivated because they often can’t see the visceral, living nexus between abstract instruction and the world of race cars, hospitals, spaceships, factories, robots and computers. 

Steven Johnson’s new book and PBS series, “How We Got To Now: Six Innovations That Made The Modern World,” features some of the most important figures in American science, industry and business. Johnson reveals a cross-section of folks who got their hands dirty as children—mucking around with engines, farming, early-stage computers, plants and animals and the agile mathematics that show how these phenomena work.  Conventional classroom instruction and even video games can give kids grand insight into the “real world,” but there’s no substitute for playing with a small machine, sitting in an airplane cockpit or seeing the giant tools that bio-engineers and particle physicists gen up to do their magic.

Super toys

In the late ’60s, award winning UK science writer Brian Aldiss wrote “Super Toys Play All Summer Long.” It’s a wild imagining of a future with a largely sterile humanity aching for kid champions. The need is filled with a new line of human-like robot children. Aldiss’s short tale later became the first, very evocative chapter in Steven Spielberg’s  “AI,” an underrated, propulsive meditation on what it really means to be human.

I recently stumbled upon a fascinating new venture called Wonder Workshop, a fabulous toy company based in San Mateo, Calif. Wonder has produced early-stage products that exploit what some call “physical computing.” Their novel new toy line, Dot and Dash, blurs the line between the physical world and digital space and pulls kids into the realm of programming. Unlike some of the earnest (but limited) kinetic games pioneered by the PlayStation and Xbox folks, the Wonder experience requires kids (and adults) to actively learn how to control robot-like objects and on-board/situational sensors that scope out the real world. When the new Wonder bots are properly commanded, they can walk around, play tunes, even engage with pets. But the user has to learn the rudiments of programming to get the thing to go.

“We want to draw kids out of a two-dimensional screen, to blend a hands-on physical experience with an app, and make something new come to life,” Vikas Gupta, co-founder and the chief executive of Wonder Workshop, told the New York Times. 

Making a connection

In the early ’90s, I served as a technology consultant to Tulsa’s then-new Mayo Demonstration School—an elementary school for curious kids interested in science, engineering and the emerging digital world. I taught an after-hours class on simple robotics at the school. Mayo had purchased a series of motorized Lego accessories and some simple BASIC programs that worked with their cutting edge Apple III. I worked with highly energized, awesomely engaged kids who wanted to master every facet of the Lego/robotics kit—the kinds of kids who complained when their parent came to pick them up after the assigned hour because they wanted to hang around to get more exposure to coding and robotics. Somehow, they got my cell phone number, and the kids called me for weeks after the class was over to get additional insight into how to play around with the package.

The whole episode was a wonderful, electric instance of how inspired kids can become when they grasp the link between the screen world and the real world—how it all fits together.

Wonder Workshop exploits the major increases in processing speed, sensor capability and powerful but simple computer programming conventions and mobile apps that make my adventure at Mayo seem neolithic. The company boldly exposes kids to the screen world and its real-world applications. If we’re to foster the next generation of innovators, we need to embrace this new conflation.

Want more stories from Ray? Check out his stories on the winds of change, walkability and police transparency.