When you think about MIT, many things may come to mind. New mathematical formulas. High-level cryptography. But what you probably don't think of are toys.
However, in the MIT Toy Lab, as you might imagine, toys are exactly what students are thinking about. Professor David Wallace and a then-doctoral student Barry Kudrowitz started it together back in 2006. Beginning with a question of what students could relate to, it wasn't farfetched to believe toys would fit the bill. An early result of the lab? The Nerf Atom Blaster. Yes, they actually were part of a product getting to market but that, Wallace assures, is not the main focus. "We're teaching product design and our goal is to try and give skill sets and be technical innovators," Wallace says.
Still, that's not to say fun is nonexistent. Steven Keating, a course instructor for the lab, excitedly explains about the toys: "There was one called the Techno Turtle, a DJ-like sequencer that could
program musical notes on the back of a turtle and would play it back to
you and spin. Another toy made with the idea was you could become a spy
and navigate through a laser maze by setting up emitters and detectors,
and if you broke a beam, the alarm would go off…Or we did a ....
Read the full article in: http://www.asme.org