Seconding Ender's Game, White's The Once and Future King and Philip Pullman. I remember reading Douglas Hill's Last Legionary quartet when I was around that age, straight-forward well-written sci-fi for young'uns. Also, for Terry Pratchett, start with his written-for-kids books, the Bromeliad Trilogy is a good one to get them to question perceptions of the world, his Johnny Maxwell books are centred around a 12/13 year old boy, which might help draw them in. Both series cover stuff like racism, dogmatic religion, war and other stuff in a subtle way (Pratchett calls it "Stealth Philosophy") , good for sparking discussions with your kids.
Other than that, let them loose in a library. Cheaper than a baby-sitter.
The system you learn on isn't the issue, it all depends on how it's taught.
My high-school art teacher knew a lot about traditional photography, but was only a beginner when it came to photo-editing software. The school system happened to have PhotoShop 7, so she basically told us how to import pictures, handed us a few print-outs of simple tutorials, and let us play around with filters and work out how best to use layers and all the complicated stuff for ourselves. A friend of mine had a teacher who studied graphic design, so her class got detailed instructions on how to do everything. Then, miracle of miracles, the school actually forked out the money to buy Photoshop CS for the art department's computers. My class, who had spent a few weeks exploring the old version and learning principles by trial and error, needed all of 10 minutes to get used to the changes and find out what new things we could do. The class that had been spoon-fed got really confused when menus had changed slightly or tools worked differently, and ended up learning again from scratch.
So, if you show students why things happen rather than how to do things, they'll adapt to the latest system much faster, no matter if they were taught on GIMP or PS.
(But I'll second everyone suggesting you use both, so they learn to deal with differences in programs all the time)
"We are designed by nature to live here, we fit here."
Up until we screw up the climate or the next ice age or a comet strike or multiple volcano eruptions or someone uses nuclear/biological weapons.
"But there's a reason people don't live in the arctic or the antarctic or the middle of a desert. It sucks, and living on mars would suck too, only worse."
People do live in the Artic or the middle of the desert, for the same reason that they will volunteer to live on the Moon or Mars. The urge to expand and explore is the reason we've survived long enough to even contemplate colonising celestial bodies. If you spread out, one sabre-tooth can't eat us all. And throughout history, colonists have been prepared to put up with a hell of a lot of suckyness in order to settle somewhere new- I don't imagine the Frontier was a cake-walk.
So putting some of your eggs in another basket may only help mankind in the worst case scenario, but who cares, it satisfies the monkey's urge to expand their territory. And wouldn't a Moon-base be kinda cool?
Re:The general public doesn't care
on
Irrational No More
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Not only won't the general public notice the swallowing of small developers, they wouldn't care if they did. Why should they?"
They should care, because the small developers are the ones with a bigger incentive to try something new. If they make a bland, generic game that's just like all the other bland, generic games in the genre, the general public will buy a ever-so-slightly different generic game from the big studio name they recognise. If a small developer makes something new, then they have a better chance of getting noticed.
(Yeah, I'm an optimist)
That's not what I found. I was browsing Google Earth a couple of months back, looking at the coast of Scotland. There's a British Naval base reasonably near a town my family live in. The photos of the town and its surrounding countryside were reasonably well defined, for a rather rural area. The base looked like someone had deliberately blurred the images. You could just make out lighter coloured blurs that could be ships in a dock, and some things that could be carparks, bunkers or shopping malls. It's hard enough to work out what a building is used for if all you can see is the roof, but you couldn't even be sure if these were buildings at all.
I've no real idea why this was done- to be honest, I wouldn't expect the UK navy to have enough influence to tamper with the satellite images bought by a private company. It may be so blurry because they were forced to use lower-resolution images- taking photos from orbit would be less of a security issue than from a helicopter or a jet. (I'm assuming that's how Google gets its better quality shots of cities and things.)
In both Google Earth and Microsoft's maps, it looks like more attention is paid to America than other countries- the images are sharper, even in the countryside, and seem more recent. It would be more noticeable if any pictures of military bases had been tampered with. Has anyone tried looking at Area 51?
Out of curiosity, piGeek, what did the guy at your school bypass the filters to reach?
It's possible my school heard about this, because there were vague threats about banning USB drives until the ICT teachers objected because pretty much all of the students use them for school work. To the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever used "inappropriate software", or at least been caught using it. My friend's school has actually banned USB drives, and put little labels over all the USB ports warning the students that they will be put into "Independent Learning" (taken out of class for a day) if they use one. They sell cheap floppy disks instead. So, if a significant portion of students brought in ghostzilla, they could end up carrying dozens of dvds instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Seconding Ender's Game, White's The Once and Future King and Philip Pullman. I remember reading Douglas Hill's Last Legionary quartet when I was around that age, straight-forward well-written sci-fi for young'uns. Also, for Terry Pratchett, start with his written-for-kids books, the Bromeliad Trilogy is a good one to get them to question perceptions of the world, his Johnny Maxwell books are centred around a 12/13 year old boy, which might help draw them in. Both series cover stuff like racism, dogmatic religion, war and other stuff in a subtle way (Pratchett calls it "Stealth Philosophy") , good for sparking discussions with your kids.
Other than that, let them loose in a library. Cheaper than a baby-sitter.
The system you learn on isn't the issue, it all depends on how it's taught.
My high-school art teacher knew a lot about traditional photography, but was only a beginner when it came to photo-editing software. The school system happened to have PhotoShop 7, so she basically told us how to import pictures, handed us a few print-outs of simple tutorials, and let us play around with filters and work out how best to use layers and all the complicated stuff for ourselves. A friend of mine had a teacher who studied graphic design, so her class got detailed instructions on how to do everything.
Then, miracle of miracles, the school actually forked out the money to buy Photoshop CS for the art department's computers. My class, who had spent a few weeks exploring the old version and learning principles by trial and error, needed all of 10 minutes to get used to the changes and find out what new things we could do. The class that had been spoon-fed got really confused when menus had changed slightly or tools worked differently, and ended up learning again from scratch.
So, if you show students why things happen rather than how to do things, they'll adapt to the latest system much faster, no matter if they were taught on GIMP or PS. (But I'll second everyone suggesting you use both, so they learn to deal with differences in programs all the time)
"We are designed by nature to live here, we fit here."
Up until we screw up the climate or the next ice age or a comet strike or multiple volcano eruptions or someone uses nuclear/biological weapons.
"But there's a reason people don't live in the arctic or the antarctic or the middle of a desert. It sucks, and living on mars would suck too, only worse."
People do live in the Artic or the middle of the desert, for the same reason that they will volunteer to live on the Moon or Mars. The urge to expand and explore is the reason we've survived long enough to even contemplate colonising celestial bodies. If you spread out, one sabre-tooth can't eat us all. And throughout history, colonists have been prepared to put up with a hell of a lot of suckyness in order to settle somewhere new- I don't imagine the Frontier was a cake-walk.
So putting some of your eggs in another basket may only help mankind in the worst case scenario, but who cares, it satisfies the monkey's urge to expand their territory. And wouldn't a Moon-base be kinda cool?
"Not only won't the general public notice the swallowing of small developers, they wouldn't care if they did. Why should they?" They should care, because the small developers are the ones with a bigger incentive to try something new. If they make a bland, generic game that's just like all the other bland, generic games in the genre, the general public will buy a ever-so-slightly different generic game from the big studio name they recognise. If a small developer makes something new, then they have a better chance of getting noticed. (Yeah, I'm an optimist)
That's not what I found. I was browsing Google Earth a couple of months back, looking at the coast of Scotland. There's a British Naval base reasonably near a town my family live in. The photos of the town and its surrounding countryside were reasonably well defined, for a rather rural area. The base looked like someone had deliberately blurred the images. You could just make out lighter coloured blurs that could be ships in a dock, and some things that could be carparks, bunkers or shopping malls. It's hard enough to work out what a building is used for if all you can see is the roof, but you couldn't even be sure if these were buildings at all. I've no real idea why this was done- to be honest, I wouldn't expect the UK navy to have enough influence to tamper with the satellite images bought by a private company. It may be so blurry because they were forced to use lower-resolution images- taking photos from orbit would be less of a security issue than from a helicopter or a jet. (I'm assuming that's how Google gets its better quality shots of cities and things.) In both Google Earth and Microsoft's maps, it looks like more attention is paid to America than other countries- the images are sharper, even in the countryside, and seem more recent. It would be more noticeable if any pictures of military bases had been tampered with. Has anyone tried looking at Area 51?
Out of curiosity, piGeek, what did the guy at your school bypass the filters to reach? It's possible my school heard about this, because there were vague threats about banning USB drives until the ICT teachers objected because pretty much all of the students use them for school work. To the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever used "inappropriate software", or at least been caught using it. My friend's school has actually banned USB drives, and put little labels over all the USB ports warning the students that they will be put into "Independent Learning" (taken out of class for a day) if they use one. They sell cheap floppy disks instead. So, if a significant portion of students brought in ghostzilla, they could end up carrying dozens of dvds instead.