Situated in Oakland (about half an hour drive from San Francisco), Dynamicland is a “computer where people literally work together, face-to-face, with eye contact and many hands.”

Not quite sure what that means? How about “No screens, no devices. Just ordinary physical materials — paper and clay, tokens and toy cars — brought to life by technology in the ceiling. Every scrap of paper has the capabilities of a full computer, while remaining a fully-functional scrap of paper.”

It’s fascinating.

Operating as a non-profit space, the Dynamicland vision was first started as a lab research project back in 2014, and the space today in Oakland, which only opened this year (2018), essentially functions as the ‘full-scale realisation’ of the vision they had built out, albeit just the initial steps of a much longer term vision – think 50 years.

During our visit, the team gave us an in-depth tour of the space and introduced this new computational medium they’ve created and envisioned, where people work together with real objects in the real world, not alone with virtual objects on screen. What was intriguing (beyond the technology itself) was the team’s vision to challenge the conventions, on how people can leverage technology to learn in fundamentally new ways, and how they basically created a live programming environment where the building itself is the computer. It all sounds rather out there because it is, and is worth a visit the next time you’re in San Francisco to experience it for yourself and to have a glimpse into what a humane dynamic medium in the world of computing might look like).

In the meantime, if you want to geek out and find out more, pop over to their website, and also check out this extensive review with plenty of video demos written by GP (our Chief Tinkerer in San Francisco – yes more of that to come later this month). Thank you GP for introducing us to this space!

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In June/July 2018, the Saturday Kids team spent 2 weeks in the US. Read more about the intention of this trip, what we’ve learnt from Mitch Resnick on putting fun back into learning, and what Andy Weir (author of The Martian) had to share about pushing through failure. 

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Our first stop is Chicago where the ISTE conference is held from June 23-27. ISTE is recognised globally as the most comprehensive educational technology conference in the world, and for more than three decades, educators and education leaders have gathered to engage in hands-on learning, exchange ideas and network with like-minded thinkers seeking to transform learning and teaching. Our curriculum has benefitted from previous visits to similar conferences such as BETT (held in London), which has led to the introduction of a few of our new courses e.g. Robot Safari, Back to Basics and Become a Rockstar Code DJ. Beyond curriculum design, we are keen to identify ways on how we can innovate in the delivery of our classes and experiences.

Following the conference, we’ll continue on to San Francisco to spend time with our partners there to work on something exciting which we’ll be launching later this year. We’ll also take the opportunity to visit a few other schools and spaces that are doing amazing work in the field of education.

Innovation and collaboration are key to what we do at Saturday Kids. With this trip, we hope we’ll bring back lots of inspiration and to translate the learnings to something meaningful to our Saturday Kids community here in Singapore.

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Join us behind the scenes over the next 2 weeks as we share our journey on Facebook and Instagram. If you know of any interesting people or places that we should connect with / visit, or has a specific topic that you want us to look into while we are there, drop us a note at [email protected].

(Featured image source: ISTE Facebook Page)

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