View source for Crickets

{{Stub}}

== Introduction ==

"Crickets are small programmable devices that can make things spin, light up, and play music. You can plug lights, motors, and sensors into a Cricket, then write computer programs to tell them how to react and behave. With Crickets, you can create musical sculptures, interactive jewelry, dancing creatures, and other artistic inventions -- and learn important math, science, and engineering ideas in the process.

Crickets are based on more than a decade of NSF-funded educational research. Lifelong Kindergarten researchers collaborated with the LEGO company to create the first "programmable bricks," squeezing computational power into LEGO bricks. This research led to the [[LEGO Mindstorms]] robotics kits, now used by millions of people around the world. While LEGO MindStorms is designed especially for making robots, Crickets are designed especially for making artistic creations. Crickets were refined in collaboration with the Playful Invention and Exploration (PIE) museum network, and are now sold as a product through the Playful Invention Company (PICO)."

([http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=1942 Crickets project home page], retrieved 10:28, 9 July 2009 (UTC)).

See also [[tangible computing]]

== Links ==

[http://www.picocricket.com/ Crickets web site]

[http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=1942 Crickets project] (Lifelong Kindergarden, MediaLab, MIT)

== Bibliography ==

Rusk, N., Resnick, M., Berg, R., & Pezalla-Granlund, M. (2008). ''Journal of Science Education and Technology'', [http://web.media.mit.edu/~mres/papers/NewPathwaysRoboticsLLK.pdf PDF Reprint]

Young, Jeffrey R. (1997). MIT Scholar Brings Legos Into the Digital Age, ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'', November 14, 1997. [http://chronicle.com/data/articles.dir/art-44.dir/issue-12.dir/12a00101.htm HTML]

More articles are available from the [http://llk.media.mit.edu/projects.php?id=1942 Crickets project] page.

[[Category:Microworlds]]
[[Category:Educational hardware]]
[[Category: educational robotics]]