Biographical sketches of authors
Fred Martin
MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307 (electronic mail: fredm@media.mit.edu).
Dr. Martin has been fascinated with computation since he was a small child. As a teen he longed to connect computers to the physical world—a passion he was able to fulfill as a computer science undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined MIT's Media Laboratory in 1986, where he had the privilege of pursuing his doctoral work, supervised by Seymour Papert and Edith Ackermann. Dr. Martin co-created the MIT LEGO Robot Design Competition, a project-oriented course used worldwide as a model in undergraduate engineering education. He worked on a series of “programmable bricks” for young learners, which led directly to the LEGO Mindstorms Robotics Invention System product. Mr. Martin's textbook, Robotic Explorations: An Introduction to Engineering, will be published by Prentice Hall in 2000.
Bakhtiar Mikhak
MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307 (electronic mail: mikhak@media.mit.edu).
Dr. Mikhak is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab. His research interests include developing new programming environments and computational construction kits for science and engineering education, and for rapid prototyping by professional designers. For the past three years, he has worked closely with educators and children in classroom and after-school settings, and with designers from a number of Media Lab sponsor companies. Dr. Mikhak received the B.A. degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley (1988) and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in theoretical physics from the University of California, Los Angeles (1989, 1995).
Brian Silverman
MIT Media Laboratory, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139-4307 (electronic mail: bss@media.mit.edu).
Mr. Silverman divides his time among the MIT Media Lab, Metrowerks, Inc., and Logo Computer Systems Inc. (LCSI). Mr. Silverman was one of the founders of LCSI, the world's leading developer of Logo software. He directed the development of more than a dozen commercial educational software products (including LogoWriter, MicroWorlds, and the Phantom Fishtank), many of which have won major awards from industry groups and publications. As a visiting scientist at MIT, he has been centrally involved in the development of StarLogo, Programmable Bricks, and Crickets.
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