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Handsprings for Kids?
matt conway asks: "I'm working in an alternative school for 'at-risk' kids: Inner-city, economically disadvantaged, K-8, in a midwestern rust-belt city. Seems Handspring has a program to provide their hardware for these kids. I'm looking for suggestions on how to use their products to give these kids a leg up in life. Obvious uses are collaborative class projects beamed back and forth, GPS to map out neighborhoods and incidental environmental data, digital photography and writing to produce a school paper. I'm not a CS major, so I wondered if ./ readers had more suggestions for turning hardware into better brains." If Handsprings aren't ideal for this sort of thing, what handhelds might be a decent replacement?
One thing that you could do is have a class or classes on programming the handsprings. Get ideas from the class for something simple and of use to them, then teach them how to make it on the PDA. (Even a game would be fine.) It both gets them something they need, and teaches them a useful skill.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
How about teaching them to use time/task/project management software to complete projects and assigments for their various classes. I suppose it's reasonably safe to assume that some of these kids aren't completing assignments solely because they aren't organized, and that's what a handheld does best.
Programming for the handheld. Teach them to make games, software, whatever gets them into it.
Well, my $0.02, and that's probably over priced.