Unlike the artificiality of the classroom, everyday situations permit - even demand- shared cognition (i.e. group problem solving) reliance on external tools, and a much greater emphasis on the manipulation of objects rather than abstractions.

Digital manipulatives (programmable building bricks, most fully developed digital manipulatives, and communicating beads) aimed to enable children to continue to learn with a kindergarten approach even as they grow older and also to enable young children to learn concepts (in particular, systems concepts such as feedback and emergence) that were previously condiered too advanced for them. Resnick hopes that DM will enable children to continue to learn new concepts with a “kindergarten approach” as they progress through school, and hopefully their entire lives. In addition, Resnick hopes that DM will help young children learn concepts that were previously considered too advanced for them. Research is guided by three principles:

1. Encourage design projects
   
2. Leverage new media
   
3. Facilitate personal connections
   

DM is part of a broader effort to develop new technological tools that help children work on design projects (and learn through their work on design projects).

Constructional design - the developin of new strategies and materials to help children construct. It is a type of meta-designL: it involves the deisng of new tools and activites to support children in their own design activites.

Progammable bricks, newer smaller crickets, Encourage children to use Crickets to create their own scientific instruments to carry out their investigations. The National Research Council, 1996 (science-education researchers) argued that children should develop their own scientific investigations, rather than carrying out prescripted experiments.

Resnick and his team are also designing programmable beads intended to engage children in dynamic patterns. Each digital bead has a built in microprocessor and LED, and it communicates with its neighboring beads by simple inductive coupling. String beads together in different ways and you get different dynamic patterns of light. They are believe that digital beads can enable children to begin thinking about probabalistic behaviors.