I teach Biology at Mesa State College, a small liberal arts college in western Colorado. Several years ago I became interested in how organisms with very small brains, such as mosquitoes, still manage to negotiate their world successfully. I began reading books and articles on artificial intelligence. At the same time I was serving on the local school board and attended a state wide meeting for board members. Someone had arranged a display of educational books in the lobby, one of which was a book entitled Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. I picked it up and, in reading it, started to run across some of the same names with which I was becoming familiar in the artificial intelligence field. I began to wonder if one could use the Logo programming language to explore artificial intelligence questions. Now, several years later, I find myself more interested in how students and I develop our intelligence, than in how computers can be made intelligent.

As a teacher of adults, I am constantly impressed with how much people learn without school. People pursue hobbies and memorize statistics for their sports hero's with seemingly little effort. Humans seem to be especially interested in other people or things we can do with our hands and bodies, whether it be sports, music, or art. It seems to me that our brains must have developed primarily for the purpose of negotiating the three dimensional world. This is born out by theories of evolutionary development as well as what we know about brain structure which allocates close to 90% of the brain to sensing and responding to the environment. Humans seem to have developed the ability to utilize these same brain structures in a new way that yields abstractions and mental concepts.

If this is true, then working with Logo and robotics appears to closely mimic how we actually learn about our world through exploration. In addition, we must formalize in our mind, processes we have done intuitively. Directing a robot is a way of modeling what we think is the way we think, and seeing if we get similar results. It is a rich, tinkering, physical kind of learning. Along the way one learns a tremendous amount of physics, math, engineering, and even biology.

At my small college I teach a course called Technobiology. In contrast to Biotechnology, which is the use of biological principles to accomplish technological ends, Technobiology is the use of technology to accomplish biological ends. Along the way we are developing some interesting summer programs and local workshops in Logo and robotics for teachers and local schools. One of our fun classes allows a parent to come and learn LEGO Mindstorms for a small fee. If they pay and attend they can bring up to two kids with them. This one week workshop is very popular way for a parent and child to spend some quality and quantity time together. Of course we host a Logo Foundation Institute every summer as well.