MindFest 1999

"Mindstorms - A Gathering of Playful Inventors". Between meeting the other members of the "Extreme Team" of Mindstorms hackers, seeing amazing machines, and listening to the likes of Mitch Resnick and Seymour Papert discuss the future role of play and discovery in education, I had little time to really think about the experience I was having. Now I'm on the plane back from Boston to Toronto, and I'm just about unconcious from being so wound up that I could hardly sleep.

I am hard pressed to single out the most significant event over the weekend, so I'll just summarize things in no particular order. OK - I'll do things in the approximate order that they happened. You can also read the complete text of my Extreme Mindstorms Panel opening remarks.

Day 0

Everything in computer science starts at 0, so why not Mindfest? The opening reception on Friday afternoon was a chance to meet everyone informally and to get set up. Markus Noga called me out of the blue and we went over to the Media Lab with my wife, Christine. We saw the First Lego League entry by the Benilde-St. Margaret's School - an impressive array of young inventors working together to get their robots working. High fives and screams of delight puctuated the air at frighteningly regular intervals.

Over the course of the afternoon, we met up with Mitch Resnick, Fred Martin, Suzanne Rich and many other characters that make up what has to be candyland for engineers - a room called the "Cube". I actually did a double take when I walked through the doors for the first time. Imagine two stories of glass-walled offices looking into a courtyard strewn with workstations, printers, and the motherlode of Lego that we all dream of - and it's organized too!

Larry Piezeniak had set up a small oval to exhibit his trains - and if you have never seen them or the PNLTC layouts they are well worth a visit the next time they stop in your neck of the woods. Eric Kingsley and NELUG had also set up their modular starbase and a huge AT-AT that had kids and adults gawking with amazement.

Anthony Fudd breezed in with a box full of his famous Mindstorms inventions and Ben Erwin's whimsical creations and RoboLab simulations were wonderful to look at. Almost under the staircase descending to the cube, the Danes had set up their soccer playing robots and specially graded playing field. With "standard" robot platforms, they were able to design a higher level environment that allowed children to program their robots with instructions like "turn left" or "go backwards" without having to deal with the nuances of figuring out which way the motors should be set.

Dinner out at a Jamiacan restaurant with Jonathan Knudsen capped off the evening. We hooked up with Gilliad who is working with Seymour Papert in an experimental education program at the Maine Youth Center - more on this on Day 2.

Day 1

Opening remarks by Mitch Resnick on inventing, play, and the role of tinkering inspired us all to enjoy the panel discussions and workshops that day. Unfortunately, I had to struggle with a photocopier to get some handouts together for a tutorial on pbForth and my new pbForth MazeWalker later that afternoon.

Over the course of the morning we hooked up with Dave Baum, Kekoa Proudfoot, and finally Mike Gasperi. At lunch we were all surprised to see Mario Ferrari, his brother, and Marco Beri - a fun bunch if I ever met one. These guys had left their faimilies at home and were seeing the sights of New England on a "guy's holiday". I probably don't need to mention that meeting all my on-line friends was exciting. I do need to mention that everyone was friendly, engaging, and animated. Either miserable folks don't play with Lego - or they like to stay at home!

The panel discussion at 1 o'clock had me a bit worried, but everything went smoothly. See the complete text of my panel remarks online. Kekoa, Markus, Dave, Mike, and myself fielded questions from the audience and generally had a good time. The I was off to the tutorials.

The tutorials were a bit ambitious on my part and I probably should have prepared something a bit different. For those of you interested, the pbForth Tutorial and pbForth MazeWalker are available as PDF files that you can print out. Dave was good enough to lend me the 'bots his class made, but the huge screen monitor interfered with IR transmission and only the group farthest from the monitor got anything to work.

After all that, the LEGO reps treated the "Extreme Team" to dinner and we had a great round-table discussion. Actually the tables were very rectangular so we switched around once in a while to get to know everyone. We met the webheads from New York, designers and multi-media experts from London, the Mindstorms product team from California, and model designers from Billund. What a night!

Day 2

After a great address by Seymour Papert on everything from "Mindstorms the Book" to "Mindstorms the Thing" and the state of modern and future education, I have to admit I was a bit burned out. I ended up taking my wife out to lunch in Old Boston and walking around Beacon Hill. Larry is right, the transit system in downtown Boston is fantastic! The Head of the Charles Regatta was on and the transit system was well used. The truth is that Boston is so old that it's almost impossible to find parking anywhere. Also, it lies on land reclaimed from the Charles River delta so underground parking was difficult to install.

We did go back to the show-and-tell session at the end to watch all of the great creations working. Mario Ferrari and Marco Beri had their TicTacToe Mindstorms 'bot that uses Dave's NQC. These guys know how to build - and program! I even got a chance to demonstrate my mazewalker. We said goodbye and thankyou to everyone we met and left for the airport. I guess I just ran out of steam. I don't know how Anthony Fudd and the LEGO reps do it!

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