Popup is an installation where children can make their own performance by playing with intelligent blocks. The design is based on the ‘Baushaus-Spiel’, a box of small wooden blocks with all kinds of geometrical shapes and bright colors. To enlarge the play field, actions and interactions, these wooden blocks are scaled up and therefore allow a group of children to interact with them and change their surroundings. Because the Popup project has a variety of intelligent (lighting up, playing sounds, vibrating, moving, and so on…) and non-intelligent objects it allows the kids to switch roles (i.e. from being a director or actor to being the audience) and find out the possibilities of the intelligent blocks in an explorative and intuitive way as well.
For more in-depth information and a great example of how the Fablab website is used for project documentation go to http://fablab.waag.org/popup.
The pictures below show Popup’s guts.
End of the activity
