The Okawa Center for Future Children

Background Information

MIT Media Laboratory

November 1998

The Need

Children are the future. If we hope to solve the world’s major problems– achieving world peace, healthy lives, economic development, and global sustainability–we must provide richer learning opportunities for the world’s children. An educated and creative population is, without a doubt, the best path to global health, wealth, and peace.

But throughout today’s world, educational practices are woefully outdated. Even as scientific and technological advances have radically transformed agriculture, medicine, and industry, the way children learn has remained largely unchanged, based on ideas inherited from previous centuries.

New digital technologies are now providing a historic opportunity for fundamental and global-scale changes in children’s learning and education. Just as advances in biotechnologies made possible the "green revolution" in agriculture, new digital technologies make possible a "learning revolution" in education.

The Okawa Center for Future Children is the first serious, large-scale effort to lay a foundation for a global learning revolution. It is founded on the belief that new digital technologies can (and should) transform how children learn, what they learn, and who they learn with.

• How children learn. Digital technologies can enable children to become more active and independent learners, taking charge of their own learning through direct exploration, expression, and experience. The focus shifts from "being taught" to "learning."

• What children learn. Much of what children learn in schools today was designed for the era of paper-and-pencil. With new digital technologies, children can undertake projects (and learn concepts) that were seen as too complex for children in the pre-digital era.

• Who children learn with. Global connectedness makes possible new types of "knowledge-building communities" in which children (and adults) around the globe collaborate on projects and learn from one another. These efforts require new multicultural, multilingual, and multimodal approaches to computing and learning.

Foundations

The Okawa Center for Future Children is made possible through a $27-million donation from Isao Okawa, founder and chairman of CSK Corp. and chairman of SEGA Enterprises Ltd. Part of a major expansion of the MIT Media Laboratory, the Okawa Center will be housed in a new building next to the current Media Lab facility on the MIT campus. The new building, designed by architect Fumihiko Maki, is expected to open in 2003.

The Okawa Center will build on the Media Lab's long tradition of developing new ideas and innovative technologies to support children's learning. The pioneering research of Professor Seymour Papert established the Media Lab’s distinctive "constructionist" approach to learning and education, in which children learn through a process of designing, inventing, and experimenting. The goal is "hard fun": projects that are challenging but playful, demanding but rewarding.

To support and propagate this style of learning, Media Lab researchers have invented technologies used by millions of children around the world. This year, the LEGO company introduced a line of "programmable bricks" based on Media Lab research. Recently, the Media Lab established a new consortium of toy companies and electronics companies with the goal of inventing the "toys of tomorrow."

The Okawa Center will extend and broaden this work. Researchers from around the world will collaborate on the design of new digital environments, drawing on all forms of human expression. Advanced techniques for music, dance, storytelling, and the visual arts will be developed hand-in-hand with the most advanced computers, networks, and interface designs. The Okawa Center's research agenda will include active connections with countries around the globe, with special focus on the world’s poorest countries. Researchers will work closely with children in diverse cultural settings, from inner-city neighborhoods to rural one-room schoolhouses.

Children will play an important role at the Okawa Center itself, as partners in research. The Okawa Center will be designed as a place where children will participate actively in the development of new technologies and new approaches to learning.

Guiding Principles

Research at the Okawa Center will be guided by the following principles:

• Direct exploration. The traditional view is that children learn about the world directly (by crawling, touching, chewing – that is, by exploring) until elementary school, but then they need to be "taught" more advanced ideas. The Okawa Center will aim for "lifelong kindergarten" – developing digital technologies that enable children to continue to learn (and learn more advanced ideas) by direct exploration and experimentation even as they grow older.

• Direct expression. The traditional view is that children should focus on "absorbing" ideas from adults, not on expressing themselves. Even what children know about themselves often comes from what they hear from adults. The Okawa Center will develop digital technologies that help children find their own voice, enabling children to relate their own stories and ideas (and relate them to a broad and diverse audience), rather than having adults do the talking for them.

• Direct experience. New communications technologies will extend children’s reach, enabling them to connect with others around the globe. This experience will diminish the impact of national frontiers, although local cultures (what children experience in their own schoolyards and homes) will remain important. Children will develop a different sense of themselves as intellectual agents – as valuable members of real and virtual communities. Children will become accustomed to expressing themselves across boundaries of geography, culture, language, and age.

• Multicultural. Most technologies support only a limited set of cultural styles and approaches. With global connectedness comes both a need and an opportunity for more encompassing approaches, encouraging participation by children from all different cultures. The Okawa Center will develop new digital technologies that provide multiple paths of entry and multiple patterns of use, while also encouraging children around the world to share and learn about one another’s cultural traditions.

• Multilingual. The great variety of languages spoken around the world has been perceived as a major obstacle to the development of global community. The Okawa Center will develop new tools that enable children to communicate with one another across linguistic boundaries, while supporting their learning of other languages and enhancing the value of their own.

• Multimodal. The channels of communication between children and computers have been extremely limited: keystrokes and mouse clicks in one direction, text and graphics in the other. The Okawa Center will enrich the nature of interaction between children and computers, by extending computers to understand and produce speech and gestures. These new technologies will open up computing to a broader range of ages and cultural traditions (including nonliterate people).