Banapana » MIT

Haugeland 1997

admin — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:49:53 +0000

Haugeland, John (Editor) Mind Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, and Artificial Intelligence The MIT Press: Boston, MA

Searle’s Chinese Room: Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

MIT moves forward with $100 laptop

admin — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 12:54:46 +0000

Nicholas Negroponte is moving forward with his plans to unveil a sub $100 laptop to provide to children around the world. I posted on this a while ago on Banapana but despite my suggestion, it’s great to see them moving forward with this project and creating what looks like a really innovative laptop.

Video Games for Children Everywhere

admin — Thu, 07 Apr 2005 14:33:15 +0000

As usual today it wasn’t so much one article in particular that caught my eye but rather the overlap that existed between several. MIT has gotten serious about building a $100 laptop for kids. But kids don’t want laptops, they want video game machines — especially portable ones. MIT’s whole point is that the computer is the perfect tool to “learn how to learn”. With thousands of texts online, information and all kinds of multimedia, it just seems obvious that getting cheap laptops to poorer children all over the world would be a fantastic way to create innovation and give a greater education to those less fortunate. I don’t disagree with this goal. Hardly. I think it’s an imperative. Giving children of Third World countries technology will least begin to close the gap between economies the world over and improve life for everyone.

I just think MIT has its form-factor wrong. The PSP is a great example of a computer that is lightweight, portable, rechargeable, rugged and maybe most importantly of all: engaging. It’s not just a video game machine either. With wifi and a web connection, virtually anyone, anywhere can engage. In fact, I think the PSP has another going for it besides having a better form-factor and being a serious computing platform: you don’t have to know how to read to use it. I’ve played more than my share of games in Japanese though I don’t read a word of it. You can still figure it out. Video games, for all their entertainment value, are still at the height of the usability curve.

It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine the kinds of educational video games that are possible for such a device. There aren’t a lot for the PSP just yet and frankly I think we’ve only begun to take the idea of the educational game to the level it could be taken.

Oh yeah. The PSP is $250. Sell them in bulk units of 1 million (as MIT plans to do with their laptop) with pre-loaded educational tools to governments and educational organizations and you could easily reach the $100 mark. I say give the kids what they want. Give them portable game machines!

P.S. If your only protest is “There’s no keyboard!” then I should like to point out that teenage girls in Europe are quite capable of typing on their cell phones. Kids learn quick.