Project Synthesis partnered with Latitude Research and the LEGO Learning Institute in 2011 to under take a project that explored children’s expectations and understanding of how they wanted technology to shape and be a part of their learning environment. The project report for Robots @ School has just been launched.

The Robots@School Project was a narrative-driven research exercise that involved asking children across the world to write and illustrate a short story answering this question: “What if robots were a part of your everyday life – at school and beyond?” The goal of the study was to provide educators, entrepreneurs, technologists, and interactive content creators with insights about the close, often overlapping, relationship between learning and play for today’s children, to identify common frustrations in the learning process, and to suggest possible solutions – both high- and low- tech.

The project offers a range of insights that are less about robots and more about understanding the ways children learn, how they interact and expect to interact with technology and what they value and appreciate in school and learning environments. Through the analysis three key insights developed. They were:

Smart = Social, Machines Tell Us

Nearly 2/3 of kids took for granted that robots could make excellent human friends in spite of their machine intelligence. In most cases, kids conceived of their fictional robots as humanoid peers that they could identify with and aspire to be like. Moreover, children imagined robots that were considered popular and socially successful by their human peers precisely because they’re smart; in other words, being perceived as a “nerd” actually creates, not detracts from, social opportunities – giving children a solid motivation to learn. This is, no doubt, also true in the real world (sans robots) for today’s digital natives – robots simply helped to illuminate what many kids already value in social scenarios.

Robots Free Us to Learn and Create in New Ways

Kids imagined robots that were, essentially, better versions of our teachers and parents, offering limitless time and patience, encouraging confidence and self-direction, and allowing us to make mistakes sans self-consciousness. The majority of kids’ robots (75%) acted patient and supportive in educational contexts. Kids also saw robots as figures that could inspire them to take more creative risks: emotionally, without the risk of becoming a social outlier, and practically, by taking on boring tasks so they could be freed up for higher-level pursuits (which 25% of kids explicitly conveyed in their stories).

Let’s Close the Divide Between Learning and Play

While one might expect kids to create more stories about play than learning, an equal number (38%) focused on each of these themes. In fact, kids didn’t make much distinction between the roles of “playmate” and “study buddy” when describing their robots; they tended to view learning and play as related, often overlapping, pursuits, moving fluidly between the two – even if their lives appear much more compartmentalized in practice.

Robots @ School demonstrates the importance of respecting and engaging with the ideas and expectations of children. This study gives us an early insight into the world they want to create, how they expect technology to interface with their lives and their positive aspirations for the future. This is a project that further asserts our need to listen and respect children’s perspectives, support them as self-directed learners and give scope for them to image, play and build their own world for the 21st Century.

Robots @ School study findings are now available: 
A complete PDF study summary is available for download at http://bit.ly/robotstudy

You can read the project lead, Latitude’s blog post discussing the findings of Robots @ School:
http://latd.com/2012/01/16/robots-at-school-findings/.

We also have a great Flickr gallery of the images of robots that children created as part of their storytelling and the research process(cc-licensed):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/37527143@N03/sets/72157628799529293/

Change is hard.

There are people out there who say they thrive on change. These people say they love it. People who travel the globe many times a year. People who buy the latest gadgets. People who make lists of new experiences to try and then go about sky diving or eating at a new restaurant every week and blogging about it. I think these people have learnt to deal well with change. Some of them are addicted to the adrenalin that change brings, a remnant of our “fight or flight” reflex. An approach that demands we be ready for change when it comes because once upon a time change was regularly very dangerous. Others are probably running from the anxiety of change in the only way they know how – towards it. They embrace their fear, for no other reason that to run away seems futile. A small few, actually do enjoy every moment, thrive on things being different. Somehow they tap into an old genetic line that recalls when people moved regularly, from hunting ground to hunting ground. Before agriculture. Before villages. Before domesticity.

But, it does not make the fact any different – change is hard. And, we don’t have to like it.

Change is inevitable.

However, whether we want to try and manage the path of change or resist it – it is coming at us, either way. Time is a constant and it demands that we age, that we evolve and that we change.

Project Synthesis arrives amidst much change in my life. Thinking about it. Reading about it. And doing it. Personally, professionally- all over and inside out.

Our experiences at Project Synthesis have largely shaped the way we go about things. We like to sit with change. To respond to it in a measured and thoughtful way. We want to change ourselves, our work and those we work with in ways that are positive, useful and take us forward in a way that improves.

Change for the sake of it (and lots of this happens) is not of any value. It expends a lot of energy and uses up all that adrenalin for no real outcome. We love new ideas, but we want to make sure they will work and are worth effort before we thrust them into the world and begin a change process.

So, don’t be fatalistic about change. Be thoughtful. Sometimes it will feel excruciatingly difficult. But it is what helps to shape us. It is where we learn how to be better people, how to run better organisations and make for a better world.