Craftopolis
Jane Meyers, Jeffrey LaMarche, Michael Eisenberg · 2010
The last decade has seen a blossoming of creative online activities for children in which groups, or communities, of youngsters participate within (e.g.) multiplayer games, social networks, shared programming environments, and so forth. Despite the marvelous features of these environments, they all share the limitation of being exclusively "virtual" in their design: children can play in virtual worlds, create virtual buildings and farms, or design programs, but they cannot experiment or create with tangible materials in these activities. In this paper, we present a prototype of a shared online children's "world" in which the basic elements are tangible, informal, "rooms" or constructions that can be controlled computationally and accessed over the World Wide Web. This system, Craftopolis, enables users to make their own computationally-enriched physical models (e.g., of dollhouse rooms, dioramas, game boards, and so forth), using any materials whatever, and to link those rooms into a shared online space.