What´s in your Toybox? Vehicles for learning

The relationship between play and learning has long been a source of fascination to educators. Some toys have a remarkable capacity to reward our efforts to play harder or better. We learn to be better players for the sheer pleasure of it. This paper describes our effort to design toys so that what is learned in the enjoyment of play, supports our objectives as educators. Our strategy is to populate virtual worlds with toys designed to stimulate creativity and learning, and promote knowledge transfer. We have extended a digital classic to teach math and physics concepts to undergrads in our programming for digital media course. Turtles — those trainable, extensible favorites of Logo fame, power the characters in our toy box. Our turtles have been upgraded to facilitate learning experiences in trigonometry, vectors, physics and AI. The latest models incorporate Craig Reynolds´ steering behaviors and thrive in sandboxes like those created in Flash and Unity 3D. Our students are challenged to populate virtual worlds with characters whose behaviors reflect their mastery of skills we want them to acquire. In this paper, we will discuss the construction of our toys and share some of our students´ creative play.