Why “Siftables” (They’re New Digital Blocks from MIT) Are Not, Not, Not Better Than Regular Blocks.

Children’s blocks have gone electric.

Two researchers at MIT, David Merrill and Pattie Maes, have digitized children’s blocks.  They’re called “Siftables,” each a small battery powered wireless tile, about two inches square and a quarter inch deep, something like little televisions, with screens that display shapes, colors, letters, numbers or other forms of digitized information and speakers that make musical tones. 

Kids (or grown-ups) play with them by manipulating them, forming words or solving equations where each Siftable takes on a shifting numerical or variable letter value.  They can sense their proximity to each other, sense motion, react to one another, create graphic or visual patterns, or become different musical instruments playing different parts of a sampled musical composition—the possibilities are infinite; “a new generation of tools,” the promotional material promises, “…allowing people to use their hands and bodies to manipulate [these] data instead of relying on virtual cursors and windows. “ And: “Siftables radically simplify the way we interact with information and media.”

I’m no Luddite, but part of me says, “Hold your horses.”

At one level, I don’t need more little plastic kid-gizmos to lose under the sofa cushions or step on barefoot in the middle of the night on my way to the bathroom, but it goes deeper than that.  Of larger concern is the claim that Siftables “radically simplify the way we interact with information and media.”  What simpler way is there to interact with information or media than to hold a plain wooden block in your hand?  To teach a child the idea of “one,” hand him one block.  To teach him “two…”  You get the idea.

In one sense, Merrill and Maes are on the same page with the progressive 19^th century educators who believed that children were best taught through play, using objects they could hold and manipulate.   Friedrich Fröebel, the German who invented kindergarten, opened his first school in 1837 for children aged 3-7 and called it a Kleinkinderbeschäftigungsanstalt (“small-child-keep-busy-institute”) before arriving at a more manageable name for it. Prior to this, children ages 3-7 were either taught at home or left to fend for themselves, and as I recall, many ended up kept in cages and eaten by ugly old witches or imprisoned in pumpkins or large shoes. 

A follower of philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Fröebel believed the very young were hungry to learn but weren’t ready to sit still, listening to lectures, and were best allowed to follow their own self-generated interests and imaginations.  To help, he provided them with the pedagogic tools or “gifts” that remain vestigial in today’s preschools and kindergarten classrooms, plain geometric blocks, metal rings, wooden sticks, paper to weave or sew and sew on. ( I wrote a piece for Wondertime Magazine about Herr Fröebel and his ideas about kindergarten, if you want to dig deeper.)

Fröebel’s ideas went global, kindergartens popping up all over the western world.  It was only a matter of time before his blocks became corrupted by commercialism, where someone thought it was an improvement to put letters or numbers on the blocks, to help kids learn to spell words or do math.  To Fröebel, this was exactly what he didn’t want—according to his philosophy, to learn the letter A, you assembled your blocks or sticks until you had, on the table before you, two angled lines of equal length that met at the top in an inverted V, connected by a horizontal line. You made A.  You didn’t passively observe a picture of A.

By making A, you owned it.  A came from inside you, not from outside.  You made A from Not A and understood A forever, just as, later, older children used blocks and sticks and yarn to fashion farm scenes or landscapes or animals, manipulating objects that were otherwise blank and which did absolutely nothing until you did it to them.

Here’s my question.

The children who first played with Fröebel’s blocks and gifts had a sense of agency and grew up to participate in one of the greatest creative explosion this world has ever known.  The 19^th century Impressionists and Expressionists, the Dadaists and Surrealists and Bauhaus designers and craftsmen and typographers and Modernist architects all began by playing with plain unmarked blocks and shapes.  Frank Lloyd Wright said (words to this effect) that every idea he ever had started in kindergarten, playing with geometric blocks and folding and cutting and weaving paper shapes. 

So, if plain blocks worked that well, why do we need new ones?  Is the rate of cognitive development in children ages 3-7 faster today than it was 172 years ago?  Or do brains still grow at the same speed they used to?  Fröebel understood that it was wrong to teach kids things before they’re ready, akin to trying to pour a quart of milk into a pint-sized glass, not just a waste of the teacher’s time, but counter-indicated when kids feel stupid or incompetent, failing to learn the things they’re not ready for and aware of that failure.  Today, we want (some even expect) our kids to all be “Baby Einsteins,” as soon as possible, and we’re drawn to schools and programs that profess to teach first graders what other schools teach to third graders. 

Not necessarily a good idea.

Siftables, like so much that is digital and computerized, offer infinite possibilities, endless variables. Except that to a child’s imagination, so do sticks and blocks and spheres and cones and cubes and polygons.  The difference is that everything a Siftable does is one more thing the child playing with it can’t invent, one more creative opportunity he no longer has, one more thing he can’t do himself, because it’s being done for him, by a block with a brain in it, and in the end, one more reason not to use his imagination, and one more reason to disengage.