Slashdot Mirror
Palms in the Classroom and a Contest
gfoyle writes "There is an article at Education Week about the PalmPilot's growing place in classrooms. The article mentions a contest for Palm programers sponsered by the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies to address the shortage of software designed to enhance students' education. The contest closes Jan 15, 2000, and prizes include Palm VIIs and Vs. "
Oh, I agree, the phonetic method is the way to go. That's why I listed writing first. IIRC, learning phonics consisted of repeatedly writing and saying phonemes and then of course concatenating them into words.
Arithmetic is certainly rote, the deeper learning in more advanced math (algebra and up) is not entirely rote, but I'll still say that's a large part of learning it. Note that you're already teaching algebra if you ask, "3 plus what is seven?" Although, it's usually not taught that way.
size - it was a bit big, but not overly so./palm fits in my pocket.
apps - not as many./palm growing
dev tools - unkown/palm well known and free.
emulated - unkown/free emulator.
suppliers- hardware is now extinct./palm, mindspring, symbol, qualcom etc...
notice that most are related to advances in engineering prodution and volume. This explains the size and cost. I think the Internet helped with the development of the software (free tools and knownledge). But a biggy in my eyes (and often undermentioned) is the emulator. You dont have to buy one to try one. Just download the emulator and ROM and a few apps.
pose (palm os emulator) - http://www.palm.com/devzone/pose/pose.html
I'll let you decide which PDA is the apple, orange and lemon.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
"Ok class, let's review what happened in our little sim world"
"Day 1, all the civs started building up, Bobby took a commanding lead with his resource rich starting country"
"Day 2, Jimmy was the first to put out a serious military, he also started a triple alliance with Billy, Jack, and Jason"
"Day 3, Jimmy and his thugs sent out soldiers in a rush and captured 90% of the sim world" "Day 4, The sim world is now totally under Jimmy's dominion, Bobby's resource rich country was squandered on playing a defensive game against the overwhelming might of Jimmy, Bobby fails the class for being an idiot, Jimmy is now the teacher as he apparently knew exactly how to manipulate alliances and use military might to crush the idiots who tried to perform non-military related activites
I'd still rather have a Newton I think, but they were always too expensive back then, and now they are discontinued. $1000 for something you can easily drop or lose is way too much. But I still think discontinuing it was Apple's worst decision ever; Jobs probably did it for personal reasons rather than rational ones, because it makes no sense at all. Somebody should buy the technology and put them back into production.
I always did the fast-sci track.
Got things like muskets and such by 200BC.
No legion could stand a chance to me!
The whole point of the game, if it is as well designed as Civ, is that there are several viable strategies; expansion at the sacrifice of construction, science/military/happiness/wealth strategies, diplomacy and cooperation vs always attacking (and consequently always being a target)
Here's my average Civ scenario:
1: Grow like crazy. take over half a continent and have 10 cities within the first 30 rounds.
2: Cities only have defensive units. Science like crazy.
3: Cities build key strategic wonders. Increase taxes and trade. Increase scientific growth. Increase happiness.
4: Switch over to Monarchy by the time I build my first granary; this is usually by the time I have 12 or 15 cities.
5: Now that everyone is happy, I ratchet down science some and build up my money. Still not militarily significant. Get gunpowder and musketeers.
6: Still very defensive. Build a wonder every 5 turns now. Become democracy by 100AD. Ratchet down science to 40%, taxes to 20%, and luxuries go up to 40%. Cities now grow like crazy(in a democracy city sizes grow by one every turn if a city is happy). 10 turns later every city is size 16 or so. 20 if well managed.
7: *Now* I can become a military machine; go from musketeers to riflemen. Or mechanized infantry. Battleships. etc.
Take over the world.
Wanna play sometime?
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
High school is where you learn the rudimentary stuff you'll use for more advanced stuff...for example calculus.
A pilot in the school that a kid could use to solve an equation, rather than do it himself has him fail to learn those basic skills. Sure it's nice to automate it, but at some point, it SHOULD be done by hand to understand the concept. If school kids have a computer that fits in their hand, they will not get these rudimentary skills.
I would have killed for a pilot in some of my college classes for exams. Ever try to solve Finite Element matrices, or a Routhe table in a 2 hour exam....by hand? A symbolic manipulator during the test sure would have been nice...one wrong number and your whole hour's worth of simplifying the equation is for nothing. That's where palm pilots and such are powerful tools...tools to keep out human error. NOT replacements for thinking! But at the basic math levels in high schools? No way.
No wonder this country is lagging in technology.
Yeah, I'm a highschool student. Ordered my Visor(PalmPilot type-dealy) a few weeks ago, eagerly awaiting its arrival. Some of my friends have Palms, and they seem to love them. It just seems like a useful thing to have. While it will be incredibly useful to jot down notes, take down homework, and generally flaunt my technical skills, I'll also use it for fun and such. In my opinion, these new tech-toys are going to be picked up by the technically inclined, and the other people will still view computers as "nerd stuff". While I don't see these views changing, I know I would've never thought of buying a Palm before I saw my friend with his Wizard a few years ago. Playing around with proggramming calculators is not dead, or close to it, I constantly program my TI-83 calculator in class, and will continue to, at least until I get my new toy, the Palm, and figure how to mess around with that too.
/. and other techie havens, but I feel it is preparing me for what I need when I go out and get a job.
Palms are by no means required in school these days, just they would be very useful for a person who has a thirst for a thing like that. They don't let you use them during exams either. =\ Nothing with an easily used text entry system. *sigh*
I guess it is preparing me for the business world as well, but other things are also. I don't know how many people my age read the Washington Post business section, check tech stocks daily, read
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts." -- Cecil Adams
Barring for a moment the logistical problems of attempting to implement a widespread distribution of portable computers(not necessarily Palms) and the current dearth of "educational" software for Palms, the usefulness of universal portable computing is significant, at all age levels. Morning announcements could be transmitted by IR, instead of loudspeaker. High School students at a Model Congress competition could trade AIM and ICQ accounts in seconds, fostering contact between like-minded students across school district lines. Students could keep their schedules organized, viewing their own scheduled activities as well as a schedule of all school extracurriculars.
There are wider uses for universal portable computing in education than just collecting science lab data. With some improvement in handwriting recognition, penmanship could be taught at an individual's speed, with comments and corrections flowing from computer to student constantly. If reasonable security could be enforced, a variety of tests could be taken directly on the portable computer, and graded by software, with persistent problems flagged so that the teacher can help the student personally. Any electronic implements to diminish the teacher's workload increases the quality of education as the teacher can subsequently allot more time to individual and small group teaching, which is much more efficient than the lowest common denominator that permeates most classrooms.
The technology just isn't here yet. The computers powerful enough to have decent security and advanced enough software to be useful are much too expensive to be universally distributable, even when manufactured in the huge quantities that universal distribution would entail. But prices are always coming down and hardware is always improving, and I don't doubt there won't be a day when fourth graders are just as wired as business execs are now. It will happen slowly, first in colleges(bundled with tuition), then private schools, but eventually universal portable computing, with it's myriad and unpredicable applications, will trickle down to every student.
Is this really possible? I was under the impression that the Palms use irOBEX and can not do the low frequency remote control IR stuff. At least, I know that my laptop's IR port can't turn TVs on and off, but it can talk to my Palm.
:-)
I use my Palm III to control my TV, cable box, and stereo reciever with the built-in IR port. The only real problem is the range - it's just long enough to control everything from my couch, but no farther (but that's not really a problem, is it?
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
-Linus Torvalds
yeah i agree. speaking also as a highschool student with a palm. Luckily I've about reached the phase where the jaws don't drop as much when i whip it out to write my homework down. However most people are stunned by the price when i tell them(especially when i tell them it was the cheap model at 230 dollars)
.sig
i see a LOT of potential for these in the future, but first they need to be water/drop/and scratch proofed. I've dropped mine twice from about 3 feet onto carpet, and that's plenty. Also a girl I sit next to has spilled juice on her books several times this year, so i wouldn't trust her with one.
I think these will really start to catch on when they're the size of one sheet of paper(8.5inchesX 11 inches, of coarse not that thin), can store the equivilant of 8 700 page text books, have color screens, and cost less than 200 dollars. Until then only the few geeks of us will us them.
matisse:~$ cat
For reading slashdot on my Palm, I use sitescooper. There's another web site viewer that is reputed to generate better output than AvantGo (because it does a good bit of the rendering on the PC), but I don't remember the name at the moment. I'm quite happy with sitescooper.
--Phil (I'm quite pleased with my Palm III. My life has gotten a good bit more organized.)
355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!
I've been carrying a palmpilot professional to high school for almost 2 years now and I'm seriously wondering how I managed to get along without it. It's great for organizing my assignments on the to-do list and for impromptu note taking. (After some practice, graffiti is just about as fast as writing legibly)
:) Of course, anyone can take a look at it here.
:)
As for software, PalmOS is a lot like Windows in its choices of software: little open source software to choose from. But hey, I'll take what I can get.
Mini-success story: My high school has a rotating 6 day schedule. Classes differ depending on which day (A-F) it is. As far as I can tell, this is done primarily to confuse people. Now, the application launcher replacement LaunchPad opened its source (I don't believe it's GPL, but it's close enough). On the bottom of the screen, you can toggle between a display of the weekday, the date, and the time. I thought it would be great if it could also display the Letter A-F day.
So, I grabbed a PalmOS manual, found the date functions, bashed them together, and came up with the most useful feature I have on the thing to date
Naturally, the full integration of my schedule comes next. Soon, I'll never have to remember anything again!
F0 07 C7 C8
Playing games seems a sensible thing to do with a platform that supports it. My experience based on both high school and college (done with both a little while ago ;) )is that the people who play games are often the same ones who are curious and willing to test out the capabilities of their calculators / palm pilots etc.(In my school's case, it was the TI-81, and then the rad HPs, not to mention the Macs in the back of the journalism room.)
They (the kids who play with their stuff) are expressing natural curiosity, and often probably shouldn't be being forced to sit through school at all.
(Note: I was not a calulator player, and as a result am now failing to collect on a large CS-based salary. My mistake.)
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Heh, you just got me thinking about the onhandpc: http://www.onhandpc.com
It has a built in image viewer. Heh, imagine someone looking at b&w porn on a watch!
Man, without that topic icon, "Palms in the Classroom and a Contest" doesn't sound like the best title to give a thread.
- Shaheen
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
I saw that a school in Austin, TX was giving freshman laptops, and I thought that was a horrible idea(the school had been given a huge endowment), and while it would be wonderful if they got some serious use out of them at school, I think that they'll be abused, destroyed, and used to surf net-porn long before they'll be used for schoolwork. The idea of palms in public schools is almost as silly as far as the students really using them for schoolwork. At least with palms it's a little more inconvenient to use to surf porn, and the obvious "just getting organized" factor is there.
It's hard to imagine the ramifications of having every kid equipped with his/her own computing device. At my younger brother's middle school, my brother reports lots of script kiddies doing their very best to foul up the (Windows-based) systems in the library and the computer labs. Can you imagine what might happen if kids started beaming potentially harmful applications or data?
BTW, I've owned a Palm for two years now -- bought it in high school, even. I love it, and I've only had a couple of problems with misbehaved apps. pilot-xfer is an invaluable tool to back up the entire unit in one shot (on OS/2, Linux, or Win32).
For more information, click here.
I don't know what everything else thinks about them, and the rest of the "PDA revolution", but I don't know if I could operate as efficiently without mine. Yeah, so it's only a 3x, and it doesn't play mp3's or play videos. Knowing a phone number to someone you can barely remember is awesome, (and having it with you on the road).
:)
My only wish is that someone would write a quick program to fix avant go for Slashdot... (Mine always looks really bad, even in "light" mode.) [HINT HINT]...
-Dextius Alphaeus
-- Java is not a Jedi trait... "do, or do not, there is no try" --
Well, 10 years on, kids now play with palm pilots!
Great stuff! you wouldn't want to know how much memory we had to play with, just the same way I wouldn't want to know what our elders had...
But still, there's something I kind of regret in this evolution: We were playing with calculators. Sometimes, we even did calculation stuff, like symbolic integrals, solving a NxN system or doing some chi square statistics stuff...
Anyway, how is a palm pilot required in schools nowadays? I mean, besides cheating at exams...
IMHO, those new toys are much more business oriented rather than science oriented... that's the scary bit.
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
"We have seen the potential for handheld devices to go home with kids," he said, "and to go out in the field, so kids could collect data and watch
visualization of graphs, and see relationships in the data they were studying--in visual concepts--and analyze them."
that's great you can also do that with graph paper.
The article is right,you can use a palm for a lot of neat stuff, but for three hundred dollars you can get a good enough computer and a free (cheap) os (won't mention names) and teach the kids how to use and think about computers instead of getting them stuck on a simple, limited pda os that is not going to be around too long.
You know I sometimes think that the reason there is so much hysteria and polarization about technology (I love it/hate it) is that they are trying to get computers into everything and everyone into computers. When the hurlyburly of the internet slows down a bit this won't be a problem. But untill that happens I'm having a tough old time seperating the gee-whizizm from the meat.
What kids need is a tablet like palm top that runs a barebones and robust os that can crunch numbers, render grahics in color, connect to the web, email, take notes, take a keyboard plug in for homework and maybe incorporate some thin client stuff so they could plug in at school and take advantage of more features, at or less than 300 dollars. Hell I want one too, I want a real freakin palm top and I'm not paying till I get all this. Maybe there's a market? anyone wanna get together and make a mint? we can call it a poke-palm.
I think I'll submit some of these. >:)
--
Ya know, if they changed the name to Center for Learning Innovative Technologies, they'd have a much more interesting acronym...
-Steve
My intelligence insults itself.
Heh, at my school, we have ti-82s and we just play video games all day. I dont think the kids with palm tops will be doing anything different. -jikuu
Take a classroom of about 20 students (wishful thinking considering school overcrowding I know). Add a PC with four Palm cradles and a Palm III for each kid. Send the kids out on a field trip to gather data. Have them hotsync when they get back and play around with said data. You can set up some pretty nifty projects this way.
Does this
This article sounds remarkably like any other arguments in support of the introduction of vendor-specific tools in the classroom. Remember these? In the past, companies like Apple, IBM and Microsoft have all played on this gimmick. Sure, it may not start as a marketing campaign but once articles like these start to proliferate, you can be sure that schools will be offered contracts, discount plans and compelling educational reasons why their school should be investing in technology "X".
Of course, we all know what the real mandate is: encourage consumer loyalty and product use when your potential clients are still young. It may not work for some, but it's an excellent marketing ploy.
The bottom line is that many schools make these purchases without researching cheaper or less vendor-centric alternatives or without making appropriate changes to the curriculum so that they can be taken full advantage of. Fandangled new hardware and software isn't going to solve your drop-out rates or low grades by themselves, but I think that there is the tendency to expect them to do miracles.
Meanwhile, the only miracle that occurs when product introductions like this happen is the miracle of consumerism. Yes, you can perform the experiments the article was talking about with a thermometer, a pad of graph paper and a bulletin board, but that's irrelevant because you're using TECHNOLOGY here, and we all know that technology, and not appropriate materials or better teaching, is the key to our children's future.
ian
As soon as teachers found out that you could beam information between them, they were pretty much banned at a lot of high/junior high schools in the area where I live.
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
This is a real deja vu for me because I had an HP calculator that suffered a similar ban because of the IR window...even though I was the only person who owned one in that particular class.
The most useful program for getting Palms into educators hands would be a program to lock off the IR access with a password. The teacher would enter a password and IR beaming would be disabled until the teacher unlocked it after class.
Of course, this would be cracked in ten seconds because pretty much anyone can crack 68K programs in just a few moments work. If you don't know what I'm talking about, read my posting on a previous article about reverse engineering.
In my opinion, they should forget about Palm and focus on Visor. Palms are really too expensive for studnets (except maybe the IIIe, which is in reality an ice Visor Solo). Visor has already announced hardware modules that will measure light, pH, speed, temperature, et. which would make them a nature for physics, chemistry and natural science classes.
They could possibly make a module that teachers could load with acceptable reference materials and would also disable beaming on a hardware level. I don't know if this is even possible but it seems a lot more plausible on the Visor than on the business-oriented Palm.
Just my thoughts.
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
i think its stupid that people think computers and stuff are gods gift to education. people were smarter before all this computer and compulsory education nonsense.
Recently there was an item in the local news about a school using laptops in classrooms. Very wonderstruck reporter talking about how these students of the future are prepared for the hi-tech 21st century (camera pans the classroom, with kids tapping away at keyboards). A lot of the educators and parents are clueless about computers, and assume that if children use PCs a lot, it somehow imparts them skills useful for this technology world we are immersed in.
Used correctly, PCs could be powerful tools, but so far their use in schools seems to be pretty superficial. The general public tends to be filled with indimidation and awe at the sight of a classroom of children sitting in front of PCs. Some months ago the head of a Texas initiative to replace textbooks with laptops was describing with great cluelessness how computers would be cheaper to maintain (haha) and instead of these textbooks which required repeated printing, they could "put cards into the computer, and when they need to study another book, they can put in a different card". Most educators' statements on how they plan to use computers tend to be similarly shallow.
With their Palms, students can graph temperature changes over
time in ponds and piles of leaves, at various depths and at different
times of day.
OK, so they are learning basic graph theory, ecology and temperature distribution. It's anybody's guess how much time they will spend actually learning these core science concepts and how much time will be spent learning how to use the Palm program to collect date, interface it with a laptop, and figure out how to collate multiple sets of data with another program. The gimmick leaves educators thinking students have mastered "hi-tech" skills and science, while it's likely the science will take a back seat to fiddling and configuring the programs. Great if you want a generation of tech support phone jockeys. Lousy if you want a better understanding of basic science.
w/m
-- I'm not a freak show, I'm a mammal. --
The great unasked question of technology.. why?
Figure $200 per palm pilot for 1,000 students. That's $200,000. $200k that will be broken, stolen, or sold in 2 weeks. The money would be better spent on charity, buying new books, fixing up schools, or hiring more teachers to get a better student:teacher ratio. There is nothing that can replace the educational value of a human being. Can a palm pilot, in all it's 512 kilobytes of glory, take a student under its wing and and encourage him to get out of a bad situation? Not likely.
Teachers are what makes a school good or bad. They can get students excited about learning and can help out students who are in need of someone to talk to. They can give advice to a 15 year old girl who just got pregnant. What can a palm pilot give? A phone number.
The money could be spent on much better things than a toy for the students. That's what the students will use them for. Maybe 5 students out of that 1,000 will use it for any school related activities. Another 500 will sell their palms and claim them to be stolen. 200 of the remaining students will actually have theirs stolen. The rest will be divided up between never using their palms or breaking their handheld wonders.
The palm pilots will not be used for any greater glory. For the price of one $200 palm, four $50 books could be bought. And trust me, public schools are in SERVERE need of new books. When I was in high school (2 years ago), our history books ended with President Reagan. And the teachers were limited to 3 copies per student per month.
It's interesting, eh?
Well, to me it was, link included.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Boo...my bookmark doesn't work after an article gets archived. Oh well...serves me right for not checking the preview. The cracking article I was linking to (to show that you can't ever stop students from using Palms to cheat) was
8 .shtml
= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/09/29/041820
Set threshold to five and look for "Start simple...start with Palm"
With apologies...
- JoeShmoe
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Well, I've been looking for cheap word processors that I could carry around school and type on.
What I've found are:
AlphaSmart
and
Dreamwriter
Alphasmart 2000 is around 229$ but there is a refurbished Alphasmart Pro for 99$ and an original Alphasmart for 69$ that they have run out of. Bulk packs and classroom racks that recharge the units are available, but I don't really care about those.
Dreamwriter has a couple models, even a Windows CE powered Internet one. I like the one with the disk drive. But, they are quite pricy. Ranging from 175 to 395$ They also have classroom packs available.
Still, I live in Canada, so the exchange rates make them more expensive. I'd consider a Palm, but I really don't want to write stuff in Grafitti. Plus, I'd rather have something more the size of a notebook. You'd really think that something as simple as a portable word processor with a disk drive would be pretty cheap, I mean, it isn't like you have to have much in it. You can usually find organizers for around 20$ can't you?
I've seen something by Brother called a Super Notebook, but I assume the price for that is pretty high as well.
Does anyone know something cheaper? Even something to build?
3 = 'Riting + Reading + 'Rithmetic ... well damnit, an education. (fscking bad analogies)
;) article.
+4 = History + Literature + Mathematics + Physics
--
7 =
You remember that seen in Pink Floyd's The Wall where all the children stood reciting lessons as the teacher walked around to keep them going? It was made to look very bad, but I think it usually worked. Why? Because the three R's are best learned by rote. Doing the right thing over and over so you always get it right. Understanding? Bah, you can't begin to understand something when you don't know anything about it. So drill them kiddies and drill 'em hard. But keep it brief! Don't make schools prison-daycares for children. Send them for less than 6 hours and then let their parents deal with them. They're kids for crying out loud! They need discipline and structure for part of the day, but they don't need the macabre sadistic school environment for the whole day! Let them play - that's where they learn to appreciate life and curiosity and sometimes their fellows.
If some of the kids are really bright, let them advance more rapidly; don't give them 'resource room' and more heaping BS. Sure maybe they'll be in classes with bigger kids for more hours as they advance and schoolwork becomes less drilling and more thinking. But they'll be learning, not playing school politics. When they get out of class they can play with age peers or intellectual peers.
So eventually they all have the 3 R's down pat. The foundation is laid. They can 'talk' to themselves (read think) because they've learned language and logic. Of course they start getting bigger and stronger and more often have to deal with adults. So prepare them. Not with DARE and other such crap. But by learning about what men have done (history), what men can do (physics), how they can do it (math), and what they might and should do (literature). Once they can a reason about the things a man in any time or place might find, that's it! They've been educated - i.e., "lead out" from the whims of other men or their ideas.
Keep the school day short, keep childhood education brief. Let them play and pursue their own interests whatever they may be. Some will find satisfaction and challenge in manual labor, others in more-trained jobs, still others might go to college.
Sorry, about the terseness and vulgarities. I'll exclude them from the final (and more researched
They're just gonna get more and more exposed to it on TV anyway, so why not give them values and education so that it doesn't really appeal to them.
Also, it is possible that maybe we shouldn't just make tests based on rote learned memory. Of course, that makes it pretty hard to mark, but whatever. Still, what is a good memory worth if you can't think properly?
Just because it didn't say "This is cool", this post gets moderated down to zero? The point of using schools as marketing targets for tech products is relevant. The abuse and worshipping of tech products as false saviours of education is relevant. So the article just wasn't another "Hey, wow" or "They could do this".
/. moderators.
Some days I don't understand
I'm a high school student (Junior). Last year my uncle gave me his used Cassiopeia A-10. I used it for about a month, and then went back to using a regular old planner. There were a couple reasons. A minor one being that, while everyone knows and accepts that I'm a geek, I try not to flash it around too much. More importantly, though, it was more of a hassle than it was worth. It's nice to be able to input as many notes as necessary, but it's a lot easier to open up your planner, turn to the right page, and just write down a page and problem number (the same basically applies for schedule keeping). Also, I agree with Mad Monk in that they probably will become highly abused. And what do you do if one student breaks his accidentally? Replace it or tell him "Tough"? I personally just think that its a little before its time. But, on the other hand, maybe I just didn't give it a chance.
I'm a high school sophmore right now and everyone (including me) who has a graphing calc just uses it to play games all day. I do use it for math too. While some kids would properly use Palm Pilots, the temptation of putting games on them and playing them is just too great to resist. Also, with the infared feature you could pass notes, and it my school at least, turn on the TVs during the middle of a test. =)
I can imagine quite a few nifty things that could be done with a Palm.
Imagine a tamagotchi like 'game' on the Palm, but it's end goal is to teach genetics. For example, every morning each Palm will get an allotment of resources for each digital petri dish, while the child also gets some 'moderation' points in order to enhance or modify their creatures. Periodically they will be given more points throughout the day.
This is actually non-trivial to do, as it should be, in terms of complexity, on the order of magnitude of a SimXYZ game.
Or a game/program in which children are running countries within their Palms with periodic trade, wars, information exchange, and communication with other players. Think net-civ or somesuch.
Another use would be a suite of tools: The HP scientific calculator in a Palm, for example.
It is not an idea without merit, though I suspect a cheaper device other than a PalmIII is necessary for the idea to be really useful
-AS
-AS
*Pikachu*
Grand Prize: A Palm VII(TM) connected organizer, a HandSpring Visor(TM), a full Code Warrior(TM) development environment...
Is it just me, or are these not very compelling prizes for someone who has the knowledge and resources to win a Palm programming contest?
Contest Winner: "Wow! I won a free Palm and compiler... always wanted one of these... Maybe I could use these to win a contest... no... wait a minute..."
I was bored enough to check out the SAT website (the classic "standardized test") and found their calculator policies for 98-99:
Newton?!? Well, I imagine that covers a Palm as well, under either "minicomputer" or "electronic writing pad" (or possibly "pocket organizer").
Way more info than you needed...
I found a rather useful program I'm using at college that'd work well in a HS environment too...called "Due Yesterday" - it does assignment/grade tracking, and the interface is easy. one tap to create an assignment, scribble in the info, two taps when it's done, and you can store your grades in it.
It's free (not open-sourced, AFAICT)...try any of the Palm software places...
There seems to be a lot of sound and fury over the whole Palm Pilot "thing." I feel like I have missed something. I don't own one, but have seen and played with a couple of them. Ok, you write on the screen with a stylus (in a strange proprietary language), you run preloaded PIM-purposed apps, you can load additional apps, you can beam information from one to another with IR, yada, yada, yada. Ok, neat.
:)
:)
/. community... it seems we are one of the last bastions of truly free speech left anywhere.
***And how does this differ from the Apple Newton that I have had and used for the last 5 or 6 years?***
Ok, I can answer my own question. It's somewhat smaller, has a longer battery life (both a result of the endless march of technology), and, most importantly (it seems) is not made by Apple.
Ok, so Apple didn't have the balls to stick it out and put some money in continuing to improve the Newton, but it seems like there is some descrimination going on here. Sort of a corollary of the NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) or ABM (Anything But Microsoft) rules.
It wasn't cool to use a hand-held personal organizer that was made by apple, but as soon as some company more closely related to the PC side of things comes out with the same product, all of a sudden it's the Next Thing (tm)?
And in this case, we're not even necessarily talking about Windoze compatibility as the selling point; the WinCE hand-helds don't seem to be doing so well.
My Newton does all of the things you described here, and, had Apple continued to develop it, there would be modules for this-and-that like the Visor is going to have. And I can write my characters, block uppercase or lower or cursive anywhere on the screen instead in a little teeny box at the bottom in Graffitti (of course Graffitti was a third party add-on product for the Newton years ago, so I had that option too.) I can use IR to transmit data, it had a PCMCIA slot and I could plug in a modem or print to an appletalk network/printer. Had development continued, I can see a USB port or two on the Newton or maybe even FireWire.
I guess I'm just ranting because people don't seem to acknowledge the origin of the Palm and the craze.
There seems to be a universal pattern; some company makes a Really Cool Thing (tm). It's a little pricey, so they ooh and aahh and wish they could have one. Some other company makes a cheap imitation (can we say "MacOS 87 = Win 95" boys and girls?) and everyone jumps on the bandwagon. No one seems willing to pay for quality and instead just looks for cheap crap... and there is someone out there willing to create it and sell it to them. (Are 'ya listenin' Bill?)
And then GNU/FSF/Open Source/etc./etc. throws a monkey wrench into the whole works by proving that you can get good quality stuff for less than cheap, sometimes free.
My Newton is 5 or 6 years old, and I'm still using it. I wonder how many Palm Pilots will last that long either in utility or simply functionality.
I'm just wondering if owning or using Apple products is going to remain *outre'* for the rest of my life. It's a little disheartening, especially when day-to-day events prove the statement that:
"If you want to see where the PC industry is going tomorrow, look at Apple today."
Ok, *rant off*... and I have my fire-retardant undies on.
BTW, I really appreciate my
Russ
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
I sit in awe. Nice piece. No wonder it was moderated to 5. I don't know how why it could have been moderated down. Small minds, I presume. But it wasn't, so, moving on.. On a higher, uneducated, ignorant level (go ahead, moderate me down) could it not be possible to "reverse engineer" (more like, "copycat") a program by at least starting with some of the basic stuff and creating code that does all of the things that you can see it do? I realize that what this really is is just trying to see if you can re-write what they've already written, and not just exploring to figure out what they wrote and then work around the complications of copyright, etc, etc. I mean, on this small, narrow level of logic, you could, in effect, at least create the interface for something, the annoying little popup windows, etc, etc. That's something.
Either way, I just want to say that I think it's great that people can and do reverse engineer. I wish I had the know-how and patience to at least try. Kudos.
Insert mind here.
Is this really possible? I was under the impression that the Palms use irOBEX and can not do the low frequency remote control IR stuff. At least, I know that my laptop's IR port can't turn TVs on and off, but it can talk to my Palm.
About a half dozen posts take the tact that "Well, all educational technology fails to work, thus this contest is a waste of time."
There were a couple early Java system contests offering reasonable prizes (Sparcs) that were won by ridiculously simple programs. After that, there were a couple of contests that generated pretty good programs. Then an industry arose. Someone had faith at the beginning.
Faith takes risks. Risks make profits. Some slashdotter out there will write the cannonical multiple choice test with a 'beam results to teacher' option and score a new Visor. Maybe someone will get jealous, and make something new and useful.
Berkeley, California had been running a program for a couple years where each student needed to sit in front a computer for a few hours each week to run somewhat silly rote testing problems. Most students found it boring. Still, Berkeley persisted because it 'rescued' some students who could learn basic reading and math skills in a private setting instead of admiting illiteracy in front of a class. The technology did serve a purpose in a school.
Have some faith folks, someone will make a profit here.
Profit motivates invention.