A Playground for the Brain

Sesame Place develops gadgets to make pedagogy a pleasure

Through the cheerfully gaping maw of Big Bird, beguiled children with parents in tow enter a dazzling futuristic playground designed to make pedagogy a pleasure. Created a year ago by the same people who brought you Kermit the Frog, Ernie and Bert, Sesame Place, in the tamed wilds of Bucks County, Pa., unites outdoor "participatory" playgrounds with "handson" scientific exhibits.

Various slides provide the perceptive skidder with firsthand knowledge of the battle between gravity and friction. By plunging into a sea of green plastic balls, the playful student can know what it feels like to be a mutated molecule in a densely packed universe.

The news at Sesame Place, though, is in the inner sanctum of the Computer Gallery, where the creators of Sesame Street are perfecting computer software programs that they expect to sell to the general public. Scores of children sit in communion with batteries of special computers. The keyboards are arrayed with numbers, arrows and letters from A to Z in alphabetical order. In the Dial-A-Muppet game, Oscar the Grouch might pop up at command, grumbling encouragement. A science game called Spotlight utilizes a ray of light and two mirrors to illustrate how beams can bounce across space. The player manipulates the spotlight to illuminate a character named Steve waltzing back and forth across the stage.

For beginning readers, the computer combines high technology with the tried-and-true game of Hangman. Called Raise the Flags, this program features a sprightly, beaked electronic being named George who introduces the alphabet and a series of flagpoles. "My job is to spell a word," writes George. "Your job is to guess it." George gives the player a category such as food or nature, the number of letters, and seven guesses. After the player hazards a letter, George ambles across the screen to the proper place, peers down, and then shakes his head yes or no. If yes, he raises the letter up the flagpole.

Computer dialogue can be surprisingly Socratic. One program asks the child to think of an animal. "Does it live on land?" inquires the computer. "Yes," the child may reply. "Does it fly?" "No." "Is it a wild animal?" "Yes." "Is it a lion?" "No." The computer writes, "Type in the animal you were thinking of." The child spells out tiger. "I don't know the difference between a lion and a tiger," the computer responds. "Press Go to help me learn the difference." The screen flashes four possible descriptive sentences that the child must complete. "A tiger 1) has, 2) will, 3) is, 4) can." A player might write, "A tiger has stripes." The computer counters: "Does a lion have stripes?" The child answers "No." Then the computer asks, "Does a tiger have stripes?" The child replies, "Yes." "Thanks," says the computer politely. "I'll remember that." The child has actually been programming the computer and vice versa.

Many teachers and parents are skeptical of computer-controlled, cartoon-like learning devices. They wonder, as Author Fran Lebowitz has put it, what happens when the child "discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around the room with royal-blue chickens." But the juvenile appetite for dancing letters appears to be insatiable. Indeed, this fall some of the computer software, designed by Children's Television Workshop of New York City, creators of Sesame Street and Sesame Place, will be available in computer retail shops and by direct mail from Apple Computer Inc.

Developed under the direction of C.T.W. Consultant Joyce Hakansson and tested at Sesame Place, each disk will contain four programs and sell for $50--playable, however, only on a $1,500 Apple II computer. Hakansson warns that "computers are just another tool." But, she adds, "They are very patient and nonjudgmental. They never tell a child that he is holding up the class.''

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