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If I were Gaia Zuckerman I would wear a pink dress and run like a waterbug. I would have two pigtails and go to school in a building which looked like a huge sil-ver and orange jungle-gym, with two Rapunzel towers. My dad would be a toymaker at MIT and go to a lab called Kindergarten. We would both play with Legos, but he would get paid to do it.

Gaia’s father, Oren Zuckerman, is a tinkerer studying how to incorporate technology in toys. In his most recent project, Oren and his wife, Orit, and their friends, Susanne Seitinger, Elizabeth Sylvan, and Mar-ko Popovic, built a piece of playground equipment for the Stata Technology Children’s Center. They asked: what would happen in a playground, a communal space returned to again and again by groups of children as they grow up?

The group first tried asking the children what they wanted in their playground, but at ages between two and five years, “it was hard for them to imagine if it was not already there,” according to Susanne. “They would say ‘we want a big huge everything.’ They could only answer in superlatives.”

Oren and Susanne are part of the Reactive Playground

Group, an interdisciplinary team at the MIT Media Lab curious about how digital technology can influ-ence how children use a space. While Oren’s world view is “of a sequence of behavior over time, usually involving flashing lights,” Susanne focuses more on fitting digital pieces in at the right scale to an environ-ment. Oren favored the swings as a child, Susanne the merry-go-round. Both of these were vetoed for safety reasons by the Stata playground monitor.

After watching the children play in the existing play-ground, “we asked ourselves, what makes you run,” Oren explained. “A teacher or a parent runs after you, or your friend starts running and you run after your

Research ProfileReactive playBY EMILIE SLABY

GRADUATE STUDENT NEWS • NOVEMBER 2005 http://gsn.mit.edu

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friend.” They had noticed children zipping back and forth on the path that winds its way through the play-ground. What if that path was closed?

The idea of the path became a boardwalk: two thin ocean-blue tracks connected by fat orange mats. The spongy mats are pressure-sensitive and wired individu-ally to paper plate “flowers,” decorated by Gaia and friends with bells and glitter and then planted in small boxes along the tracks. The boxes, custom-cut by Susanne on the laser saw, conceal Lego motors. The entire path is powered by a 10V battery, and the wires are carefully concealed. When a child steps on a mat, a circuit is completed, and the adjacent flower spins en-

couragingly. With each step, the path cheers you on.

The boardwalk consists of ten mats, spaced Gaia-strides apart, in a closed loop. This configuration encourages multiple simultaneous games. Gaia can jump up and down on one mat while her friend Marcus slowly pushes a truck around her, and other kids can dart in and out, making all the paper plates spin.

Stepping on a mat, if I were Oren, I would think, “it’s like pushing a button; cause and effect are mediated with a digital microcontroller.” If I were Gaia, I would step on a mat, and kneel down to look at the spinning paper plate, bells ringing.

The graduate students of the Reactive Playground Group are:

• Marko Popovic, Biomechatronics Group• Susanne Seitinger, Smart Cities Group• Elisabeth Sylvan, Lifelong Kindergarten Group• Oren Zuckerman, Lifelong Kindergarten Group• Orit Zuckerman, Ambient Intelligence

RPG can be reached at:

reactive-playground[at]mit[dot]edu

or on their website at:

web.media.mit.edu/~susanne/reactive-active.html