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Siftables–aka the coolest toy blocks you’ll ever see in your life.

Okay, well, maybe they aren’t known as the “coolest” toy blocks you’ll ever see in your life, but I certainly think they are. However, they are known as the toy blocks that can think.

Thinking blocks? Indeed! Developed by MIT grad student David Merrill, these toys can do math, play music, talk, and more! They’re like little blocks that you can stack and shuffle in your hands, but they do ridiculously amazing things because they are tiny computer blocks that can interact with each other to make networks. They are tools for manipulating digital information.

Where to start? It’s hard to describe just what these blocks do. They look like thin blocks that are about the size of a cookie and that have a screen on top. The best thing for you to do would be to watch this video of Merrill demonstrating the “toys.” In his demonstration Merrill takes the blocks and shows some “simple” examples. For instance, for those of you who have seen or read Harry Potter, remember how the people portraits would look around, move around, and interact with the characters? Well, you can configure many blocks to each have their own portrait on them. Once the Siftables are brought toward each other, each block can sense another block’s presence, and the people in the portraits will become interested in each other. Merrill also took one block that had a red paint bucket on it and “poured” it into another Siftable. He then took a block that had a blue paint bucket on it and “poured” that one into the same Siftable that the red was poured into. What happened? Well the Siftable turned into a mixture of red and blue, otherwise known as purple!

The Siftables can do math problems, you can play word games on them (rearranging the letters to create words), and more. One of the coolest things that that Merrill demonstrated was assigning each of the blocks an instrument and then adding them all in to create a song. He even used Siftables and would tilt them up and down in order to control the volume, re-verb, and more.

I don’t think that this article does these “toys” justice, so check out the link above.