top of page
Signs from children
Doors to Signs
Computers & Robots
Examples
The hand drawing of a mouse is by a 4 old kindergarten kid. The digital picture of a robot (software Personal Paint, on Amiga) is by a 5 years. Brescia, Italy, 1997
Computers are all "intelligent" and interactive machines: PCs, smartphones, tablets, and so on. They process data for a lot of tasks and make connections possible among the humans and the machines themselves.
Robots do "real" things also without need of humans, as moving in the space, building other machines, but also washing clothes and preparing meals.
Nowadays kids are familiar with computers and robots, though this does not mean that they are skilled in using them.
This is what we did with an old (for those times!) "home" computer at the kindergarten in Brescia, Italy, 1992! How many people so easy talking of "digital" today, know that 30 years ago we could do with babies things like this? (various software on an MSX2 machine, with video superimpose and digitizer.
Kids love very much "changing voices" using a computer. We collected several examples, the drawings and the voices themselves, very interesting if we can recover them from the the oblivion of time. This is from Brescia, italy, 1997
Giovanni Lariccia is the man who in the early Eighties brought to Italy the LOGO programming language, created by Seymour Papert just for kids. Since then, he has never stopped.
LOGO is a powerful and interesting textual coding. Here is in its version "Iplozero" and the video is from Milan, Italy, 2014.
Workshop at Arte in Gioco Fair (Art at stake), Arcore - Milano, Italy, 1999. Soft Elastic Dreams, on Amiga
Very few things here! We have more and we need many, many more! For knowing, thinking, help the kids to really know the tools and use them to express themselves!
Here we call "e-drawing" the pictures made by children with a computer. There are (or were, who ever noticed them, where are they now?) programs directly suggesting to kids not only to draw lines, squares and circles, but also to discover and explore signs otherwise impossible to be made by hand. If not, why using a mouse or a finger on a screen rather than a pencil, a crayon, a brush on a sheet of paper? Here are examples using the software Flying Colors for PC or Mac, from Brescia, Italy, 2002.
Almost every "virtual" (not material) work today is made using computers, by everyone, kids possibly included, with a huge variety of solutions.
But most are not used to think of this and go on imagining only few conventional, professional or commercial uses of electronic devices.
For a multimedia communication of their activity (in the video on the left, many software on MSX2 and Amiga computers, MM software Scala on Amiga), the children of kindergarten chose this title: "With the mouse we can do many things!" Brescia, 1997.
Workshop at Amico Libro fair (a book as a friend), Belgioioso - Pavia, Italy, 1999. Soft Power Goo, on PC and Mac.
bottom of page