WE’VE SEEN HOW kids take to touchscreens. To them, our unfathomably sophisticated smartphones and tablets are about as hard to figure out as a bucket full of blocks. It’s a little bit eerie, watching a youngster prod his or her way around an iPad; it makes you wonder if future generations will ever have a chance to foster any of the skepticism we feel towards cyborg enhancements and brain implants and other unsavory flavors of invasive, singularity-style computing. Hopefully they’ll grow into it.But while all their deft, chocolate-fingered swiping might make a future of baby’s first tablet seem inevitable, a project out of UC Davis offers a glimpse of an entirely different type of high-tech educational engagement–one that doesn’t involve youngsters pressing their faces up against screens for hours on end. It’s a sandbox that lets kids mold its contents into miniature mountains, lakes and rivers–and then, with a little high-tech magic, brings that terrain to life before their eyes.