Vanessa Colella

Abstract

New technology developed at the MIT Media Laboratory enables students to become active participants in life-sized, computational simulations of dynamic systems. These participatory simulations provide an individual, "first-person" perspective on the system, just as acting in Hamlet provides such a perspective on Shakespeare. Using our Thinking Tags, small, name-tag sized computers that communicate with each other via infrared, we add a thin layer of computation to participant's social interactions, transforming a group of people into participants in a dynamic simulation. Participants in these simulations get highly engaged in the activities and collaboratively study the underlying systemic model.