A few things come to mind. First, I've been reading a lot on the science behind Montessori education, and there's a lot to support the idea that our brains are

A few things come to mind. First, I've been reading a lot on the science behind Montessori education, and there's a lot to support the idea that our brains are much more active when we're physically interacting with something. Would be logical to assume that the richer the physical interaction, the more meaningful the connection. Second, reading Jaron Lanier's somewhat recent book on VR I was struck by how far ahead of its time the 'data glove' was. Early VR may not have had the dazzling eye-candy of today's graphics, but on interactivity we just seem to be catching up. (As an aside, I never realized the Nintendo PowerGlove was basically Data Glove 'lite'; developed by VPL.) Edit: Third, I recently read Carl Sagan's "The Dragons of Eden" which he wrote in the 1970s. It's about the evolution of the human mind. It's SO worth reading today, even if its outdated and proven wrong at times by contemporary discoveries. One thing that really stood out was this idea that it wasn't so much that humans evolved and then invented tools – but that perhaps tools shaped our evolution as much as we shaped tools. Invent a simple tool -> use the tool -> brain develops as a result -> invent even more complex tools -> etc.