Just what are siftables?

Mr. Buracas — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:21:53 +0000

Siftables are cool. They’re small, block-like, wireless, and interactive computers. They look like this:

And you can do many things with them beyond playing games… like sequencing music, or creating interactive stories.

I introduced my grade 6 students to siftables during my InfoTech classes recently, and they were very impressed by the cool things they can do. So impressed, in fact, that many of them chose to write David Merrill, the inventor of Siftables, a short email note letting him know as well.

Many of my students received a response from David Merrill, including David B, in grade 6. Here’s his response:

Hi David,
Thanks for your message. I have been hearing from many of your classmates
also — it seems like my video was a bit hit.

I invented Siftables because I thought that the world needed a more
physical, hands-on way to use computers. It took a few days to come up with
the specific idea, but I have been thinking about this kind of thing for a
long time. Here is a longer answer, that I wrote in response to an email
interview request:
http://tinyurl.com/dh4oog

We are working to make them available to the world, so please stay tuned!
I’m not sure yet how much they will cost.
Take care,
-David

Hey… technology works. I it when stuff works!

Intelligence on a chip

Mr. Buracas — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 02:58:48 +0000

A few weeks ago, I led a group of our students on a trip to a Science Cafe, hosted by Winston Churchill High School. The topic, presented by Dr. Naweed Syed, had to do with the interface between the human brain and the silcon chip.

On a not unrelated topic, researchers in Germany and Switzerland, have built a full scale simulation of the human brain on a silcon chip.

From Technology Review, a chip simulates the learning capabilities of the human brain:

An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain’s ability to learn more closely than any other machine.

Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.

I’ll be sending an email to Dr. Syed with this link to see how this research might influence his own work. Stay tuned.

PDQ Science Gateway » computers

Just what are siftables?

Intelligence on a chip