To Mindstorms and Beyond: Evolution of a Construction Kit for Magical Machines Fred Martin, Bakhtiar Mikhak, Mitchel Resnick, Brian Silverman, and Robbie Berg [fredm, mikhak, mres, bss, rberg]@media.mit.edu MIT Media Laboratory 20 Ames Street Room E15-020 Cambridge, MA 02139 Introduction When does something stop being a machine and become a creature? From a very early age, children find movement captivating. For centuries, we have been fascinated by the inanimate brought to life. The Jewish legend of the Golem, a hunk of clay brought to life by God, has been succeeded by the story of Frankenstein, mechanical automatons, 2001’s Hal, and a myriad of other myths. For the last fifty years, computers have allowed us to create worlds that live inside of the electronic box, creating artificial creatures in the sense of these stories. And over the last fifteen years, children have been able to play in these worlds (e.g., video games) and build in them, using tools like the Logo programming language. But only now can children embed computation into physical artifacts. In doing so, they create objects that, in a real sense, are brought to life, animated by a computer program also created by the child. These playthings, enabled by computational construction kits and living at a boundary between the animate and inanimate, allow children a special relationship to the world of technology we are living in. The magic of technology, so much a part of all of our lives, is both revealed and revered. Children realize that sophisticated behaviors can emerge from interactions of rules with a complex world, but at the same time, are still captivated by the wonder of a machine acting like a pet. Designing tools that allow children to add computation to traditional construction—and recognizing the learning opportunities afforded by this activity—has been the focus of our work over the last number of years. This paper explores this work as part history, part design narrative, and part vision. In the first section, we explore a 30-year trajectory of computational design environments for children, beginning with Seymour Papert’s original Logo work at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and ending with our recent Cricket computers. We refer both to Seymour Papert’s