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The Romance of Objects

MIT professor Sherry Turkle has a brief piece in Seed encouraging children to fall in love with the world of things after noticing that her students and colleagues developed scientific curiosity "by the physics of sand castles, by playing with soap bubbles, by the mesmerizing power of a crystal radio."

Objects don't nudge every child toward science, but for some, a rich object world is the best way to give science a chance.

Objects, Turkle argues, inspire scientific inquiry and encourage children to construct relationships with their environments. Turkle starts with relatively low-tech objects, but even though she touches on beginnings of computer culture, she seems hesitant to  include computers in that category of objects that motivate young children to learn. If you pick up some of her books (The Second Self, Evocative Objects) it becomes clearer that—at least with those she's interviewed, both children and adults—computers are some of the most influential and intimate objects of our lives.

Though Turkle has widened her studies from computer culture to a broader understanding of material culture and the role of objects in our lives, the Seed article merits a second read with a tech context, since that's the focus of much of her previous research, and, after all, technology is encorporated into many of the objects we use. Replace "object" with "computer", and the argument becomes a little more contentious:

...Many of us discourage the object passions of children, perhaps out of fear that they will become "trapped," learning to prefer the company of objects to the company of other children. Indeed, when the world of people is too frightening, children may retreat into the safety of what can be predicted and controlled. This should not give objects a bad name. They can make children feel safe, valuable, and part of something larger than themselves.

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