Lesson plan
Siftable
Siftables are small computers that display graphics on their top surface and sense one another and how they are being moved. Siftables were developed as a platform for hands-on interactions with digital information and media and were the prototype for Sifteo cubes. Siftables were created by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi when they were graduate students at the MIT Media Lab. Merrill and Kalanithi are friends from their undergraduate years at Stanford, where they both majored in symbolic systems, Merrill focusing on human-computer interaction and Kalanithi on artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Merrill and Kalanithi were surrounded by colleagues at the Media Lab who were working on wireless sensor networks (e.g. the Tribble project, ) and tangible user interfaces (e.g. Topobo ). Merrill and Kalanithi wanted to create a general-purpose tangible user interface that leveraged the technologies of wireless sensor networks. From this idea came the idea of interactive tiles that would enable people to interact with collections of virtual objects—digital pictures, document files, etc.—in the same way that people interact with collections of small physical objects like LEGO —another common sight at the Media Lab.…
Article summary
Siftables are small computers that display graphics on their top surface and sense one another and how they are being moved. Siftables were developed as a platform for hands-on interactions with digital information and media and were the prototype for Sifteo cubes. Siftables were created by David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi when they were graduate students at the MIT Media Lab. Merrill and Kalanithi are friends from their undergraduate years at Stanford, where they both majored in symbolic systems, Merrill focusing on human-computer interaction and Kalanithi on artificial intelligence and neuroscience. Merrill and Kalanithi were surrounded by colleagues at the Media Lab who were working on wireless sensor networks (e.g. the Tribble project, ) and tangible user interfaces (e.g. Topobo ). Merrill and Kalanithi wanted to create a general-purpose tangible user interface that leveraged the technologies of wireless sensor networks. From this idea came the idea of interactive tiles that would enable people to interact with collections of virtual objects—digital pictures, document files, etc.—in the same way that people interact with collections of small physical objects like LEGO —another common sight at the Media Lab.…
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.