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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. "
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*
"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.
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.
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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
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
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. --
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
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http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/09/29/041820
Set threshold to five and look for "Start simple...start with Palm"
With apologies...
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
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..."