AI-Chalk

Those of my generation have solved equations with them while wearing our clothes lost in their white dust. We have drawn maps and made lists on gigantic blackboards that engulf you with their lush greenery. We've erased them by exercising our arms as they drew big circles like a fun big eraser. We have even drawn with them in our adolescent hearts on which we stamped our name and that of the beloved to whom we directed our cupid arrows. I am referring, of course, to chalk.

Does it still make any sense to continue using it in the age of AI? For those who are quick to answer with a resounding no, I would ask them to think twice after hearing about this recent example I came across a few days ago at a school near where I live. The interesting thing is that I did not actually attend the activity that took place. I have deduced it all from the traces left by the activity. Let's see.

In the playground, someone brilliantly unfurled an initial line (a Big Bang) of white chalk that turned into many things as the story of the person telling it progressed in conversation with the children who attended (I am sure enraptured). The line has been transformed into a 9-step description of what a dinosaur is and how to draw it, part by part (trunk, head, limbs, etc - see photograph of this article).

At a certain point, the line changes color to yellow, violet, and orange to draw and name other dinosaurs (perhaps the children's favorites? Tyranousarus Rex, Spinosaurus -with Z!- etc). From there he zooms in to draw a gigantic jaw with huge teeth that surely provoked the astonishment of those who peered into the jaws.

But the line continues to mutate because it has now split into three more lines that extend in all directions like an athletics track for snails, marbles, or toy cars. The lines climb up benches and twist around the legs of the ping-pong tables in the courtyard, demonstrating a portentous ability to work all kinds of volumes in space from two dimensions. The tracks describe more and more forks, roundabouts, parallel roads that merge and then separate, drawbridges, ramps, mountains, undulations taking advantage of potholes in the road surface, curb humps, and much more. It seems that you can hear the joy of the participants creating worlds, expanding without limiting what is there. Lines that are also, and extremely beautifully, ephemeral and will gradually disappear before our eyes, worn away by the rain and the passage of time. Another important implicit learning for children.

The lines end up merging with some areas of access to the playground connected with trees, hedgerows, hedge mazes, vegetable gardens, etc. The adventure continues as it is a permanent invitation to make it bigger, more imaginative, more varied.... until it includes the whole school, all its pupils, and all those who, like me, simply strolled around one autumn afternoon and stopped to look at some chalk lines drawn on the ground. One of those lines leads into a computer room. I am sure it will enter one of them to continue growing and growing, this time using bits and pixels instead of lime through an AI program that is up to the task of such a marvelous resource as this.

Maybe one end of the line will end up in one of my online workshops where we combine materials like this. wood. water or clay to create anything we can imagine, playfully. I see these natural materials blending with AI as something expressed in the Japanese word Engawa, a kind of roofed wooden walkway that connects the windows and doors to the outside, but is a place of daily life in itself. This space merges with nature by being both inside and outside, public and private at the same time. There is no separation possible because everything is in constant, smooth transition, without stridency. Towards an AI-Chalk.