At Edinburgh University, in my day, there was 5 or 6 different first and second year maths streams. One for the maths students, one for the science students, one for the engineering students, one for the computer science students and one for the students of numerically-inclined social science (economics etc). The content was substantially different. A textbook that covered them all sufficiently would have been massive.
But then again, there was no compulsory set text -- our lecturers and tutors taught us everything we needed to know in class. (Now there's a revolutionary idea....)
It's called "economy of scale". The state of California as a corporate body has far more bargaining power than an individual student. This means they can set the price they pay. The cost to them will be significantly lower than the total cost of individual purchases. For the author it's better too, because there's a guaranteed, pre-negotiated price as work-for-hire, rather than the uncertainty of royalties depending on uptake by the universities. The only people it's bad for are academic publishing companies, and given some of their antics, I'm not going to lose sleep over a publishing mogul buying one less ivory back-scratcher come Christmas....
In my university (Edinburgh, Scotland), I was in classes several classes where the lecturer had written the book. I could have cried "scam" -- or I could feel privileged that I was studying with genuinely world-class scholars. Perhaps it's different in the US? Except, no, it can't be, because one of my lecturers (OO software design) apologised that her book was written in US English, not UK English, because there was a bigger market for it in the US than the UK. It seems like lots of US professors were using her textbook... because it was the best thing on the market.
Not really. Do you know when he'll see your response, if ever? Will you ever know whether he reads it or not? And by the time he's read the response, will his head be in the right place to fully process the result? When a question presents itself, your brain is in the right state to start processing the answer. It will be in a less optimised state when your forum system says "you've got mail" or whatever it does when the response finally appears and you've just spent the last two hours doing something completely different.
1) When researching pedagogical issues, you want a large instructor sample size, as you need to eliminate the uncontrolled variables of individual instructor differenences.
2) a single 160k student sample set all doing the exact same thing is a total waste of time. 160,000 students could be doing 1600 different things in groups of 100 and provide us with statistically significant results that would profoundly and irrevocably change the face of education as we know it.
160,000 students doing one thing tells us "that kinda works". We can't quantify how well it works, as there is nothing to compare. There is no control group, there is no theory A, there is no theory B. A statistically significant sample size, yes, but one that provides us with no statistically significant data.
Re:It's not about education, it's about credential
on
The Rage For MOOCs
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· Score: 1
Everyone does not like learning. Yes, it's incredible to me too, but it seems to be true. Actual scientific studies have shown that the average (adult) person much prefers "learning" things he already "knows" (believes, rather) to learning things he does not. People like watching videos online and saying "ah yes, that confirms what I already knew." Videos that do that, or are designed so that the watcher can *think* they do that, are popular. Videos that challenge incorrect beliefs and confirm that the watcher actually learned something are not.
Learning is hard. Most people prefer not to do it unless they have a very strong motivation to do so.
I think you're heading off on a slight tangent here. Yes, confirmation bias is a very real phenomenon. I see it in others all the time, and I recognise it in myself. But my point about everyone liking learning still stands -- the actual process of learning is genuinely, universally enjoyable. Confirmation bias isn't a mechanism that's "more enjoyable" than learning, it's a mechanism that simply blocks us from receiving new information, and prevents the beginning of the learning process. And there is very little involved in, for example, a machine learning course that is likely to be subject to confirmation bias. Therefore, if someone isn't learning from a machine learning textbook/course, it's the textbook/course's fault, not a student's lack of desire to learn or lack of enjoyment of learning.
Oops, I didn't mean "carefully planned, scripted and edited pedagogical lectures", but "carefully planned, scripted and edited pedagogical documentaries".
The OU have been fantastic in taking their experience in producing factual television for the BBC and applying it to the problems of higher education. It's a model more people should follow, but the lessons learned look more and more like lessons lost....
Re:It's not about education, it's about credential
on
The Rage For MOOCs
·
· Score: 1
That's a bit harsh. Learning is much easier if you're taught.
In fact, everyone likes learning. Learning is the purest form of mental stimulation, and mental stimulation is the source of the sensation we call "fun". What people don't like is not learning. If a textbook is boring, it's because you're not learning. Most interactive textbooks fail to address this problem, and just add pointless bells and whistles that don't address the problem of poorly paced material. What online education does offer is a much tighter, better audited feedback loop, that should allow educators to build-a-better-textbook. That's what companies like Knewton are doing with their adaptive courseware. Unfortunately the big names -- Coursera, edX and Udacity aren't: they're saying "we're taking lots of data, and we'll you know, analyse it. At some point." They're not writing adaptive courses, which is a shame. They've had thousands of students follow a single iteration of the syllabus. In a real university, you'd revise the syllabus on feedback every year -- 20-100 students per iteration. If they'd iterated for every hundred students in the AI course, the course would now be damn-near optimised!
The issue is not technology, it is teaching methodology. It is not clear if we have developed teaching methods that are appropriate for large online courses, or even for small courses.
Exactly. And to quote the article's main criticism of current universities, Dropout rates are often high, particularly at public colleges, and many graduates display little evidence that college improved their critical-thinking skills.
That's one area that is very difficult to address with distance education. I've studied the best part of 3 undergraduate degrees, 1-and-a-half face-to-face and the other 1-and-a-half at distance, and I've taught languages to people at various levels, and it's abundantly clear to me that the sort of reasoned process of problem solving that we undertake in a guided tutorial just cannot (yet) be replicated by a take-home worksheet.
Online content can therefore only be used to teach... well... content, and the intellectual skills have to be taught elsewhere. To be fair, the UK's Open University always recognised this, and would offer local face-to-face tutorials as well as specific academic skills workshops for new students. (Unfortunately, financial pressures are causing these to be increasingly delivered online.)
I would argue, then, that university-level online education is best used as a "conversion course" for people who are already academically educated, or perhaps as a replacement for the first year of a degree. Perhaps even one or two modules throughout the degree, but I don't see MOOCs ever offering anything equivalent to a full degree.
Indeed. The crucial argument that gets lost in the methodology wars is between "top-down"/expressive/problem-solving and "bottom-up"/basic skills. Phonics is ostensibly a "basic skills" idea, but because it is only one basic skill and ignores the basic skill that is whole-word reading, it doesn't work, and is used to taint the whole idea of "basic skills" teaching. On the other hand, a lot of the "whole word" camp likes to call themselves "real books", claiming that they're teaching reading by a top-down approach, ignoring the fact that word recognition is indeed a basic skill in and of itself.
It is rather disingenuous of Thrun to complain about the use of filmed lectures in online teaching, while still himself using what is essentially a lecture format, when ignoring the work of one of the world's leading distance institutions who effectively ditched the video lecture years ago in favour of carefully planned, scripted and edited pedagogical lectures. Thrun has taken a massive step back and is well behind the state of the art in many respects.
Sadly, though, the OU is buying into the online "revolution" and moving more and more of there tutorials online. They even have courses with no synchronous tutorials, instead relying on text forums.
The fact that some people take no active participation in discussion isn't acknowledged as evidence of a problem, but heralded as proof of the superiority of the medium, by invoking the unproven idea of "learning styles". Yes, "lurking" has now been redefined as a learning style in online education land.
It's sad -- the OU risks destroying itself in the name of austerity...:-(
Because organized labor is detrimental to the economy and a joke.
What, you mean organised labour such as... oh, I don't know... companies? Corporations? Factories? The whole concept of the capital market was founded on the concept of the divisive of labour in a collectivised, organised manner. Read your economic theory more closely.
Unions will results in layoffs. Corporations will not just accept lower profits because their labor unionizes, they will layoff (Or go to India or the Philippines) until the costs are back in line to where they were.
One thing that unions should be good at is managing layoff payouts. There's a certain "first they came for the..." idea in layoffs. "It's not me, it's alright." People who're not getting laid off don't tend to make a fuss. The union represents the interests of both the continuing staff and the laid off staff, and makes sure there are adequate support networks in place for laid off staff (career consultancy etc). They've done this so successfully in the UK that many big non-unionised companies do it automatically to avoid looking bad in comparison to their unionised competitors.
There's a balance to be made. Militant unions who simultaneously refuse both pay freezes (or cuts) and layoffs are unrealistic and unhelpful. Most unions in Europe aren't like that, although that wasn't the case in the days of the UK miners' strike, where Scargill ruined the name of unions in the public eye for decades.
Yeah, sort of. They're a way to promote workers rights without direct government action, which makes it more "free market" than some alternatives.
But it's a way for workers to exert control over the market in a way that they would otherwise not be able to, which subverts some of the "free market" forces. You know when people claim that free markets drive prices down through competition? Same goes for labor markets. Unions remove some of the competition.
But the free market also works on economies of scale. Which shops (en_US: stores) are cheapest? The big chains. There's lots of small independent shops, so there's lots of competition, yet they are still more expensive that the big ones (of which there are fewer). The act of incorporation is directly analogous to the unionisation of the workforce -- several individuals band together and use their collective bargaining power to derive more benefit for themselves from the market. The only difference is that one very rich person can incorporate and form a powerful company (eg you could imagine a certain retired software CEO managing to establish a successful competitor to Wallmart in a very short space of time), whereas one individual cannot form a powerful union.
The founding document of modern capitalism is (in many people's eyes) Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and it was based on the notion of collectivisation, so that the workers owned the tools of production but were made efficient through cooperation.
So, yes, collectivisation to form a controlled supply of services is no different to any other form of incorporation. That said, genuine monopoly is damaging in any collectivity -- just as a single monopolistic supplier of a commodity (eg diamonds) can pay as little as they like and be as environmentally damaging as they like, yet still charge however much they like for the product, a truly monopolistic supplier of labour could demand to do as little work as possible for as high a wage as they liked.
The UK unions suffered due to seemingly unrealistic demands and cartel-like closing of ranks during the early 80s (miners), and they never really recovered in the public eye.
But there's another theory about the mammoth: disease. The last mammoths were in America, and round about the time of their extinction, the fossil record shows a notable rise in deformities, suggesting the possibility that the humans crossing the land-bridge to Siberia brought in a new disease.
How can we know for sure which species were a direct case of hunt-to-extinction...?
You're forgetting the effects of habitat destruction and the introduction of non-native species. Reintroducing many species would mean eliminating the introduced predators that killed them. Good luck in eliminating the ship rat from... ooh... 90% of the world's surface.
The dodo tasted rotten. The traditional myth says the dodo was made extinct because people were desperate for food, but there were other sources. The dodo probably went extinct due to predation of eggs by rats... who came on the same ships as the sailors we traditionally accuse of eating the manky dodo flesh.
Don't be too quick to ascribe the extinction of the moa to human consumption alone. The dodo was probably made extinct by the introduction of the sailor's constant shipmate -- the rat -- to Mauritius. Rats are a major problem for any bird (particulary ground-nesting ones) as they really love eggs. We say the Maori hunted the moa to extinction, but isn't it possible that what did for the moa was the introduction of the kiore when by the Maori when they first arrived?
If we really want to bring them back, it's going to require like a dozen Earths, one for every few hundred million years. We only have one at the moment. Perhaps we should wait until time-travel is in vogue, thus saving us a lot of work.
You didn't even have to RTFA... you only had to read the summary. The article is about "reintroducing species that humans made extinct".
Except that he wasn't claiming 50% inflation over 13 years -- he was talking about 100% inflation. (Think about it -- if one dollar is half its previous value, that means it takes twice as much to buy anything.) So that's... 13th root of 2... -1... *100... 5.5% p.a.
I don't know about the USA, but here in the UK, the official inflation figures use an index that doesn't truly match the individual's outgoings. Also, a lot of places have frozen pay over the last few years, which means that there's not even an inflation-linked pay increase, so inflation is a far bigger problem than the figures would imply...
Who came up with that, and was it just accidental myth-building, or part of a smear campaign?
(For an example of historical smear campaigns, one need look no further than the myth of a flat earth myth*. Mainstream Christianity at no point believed in a flat earth -- the myth belief was invented as a smear campaign in the 19th century....)
* That's intentional -- the two myths are not a repetition, as I'm saying "the myth that there ever was such a myth".
Wonderful... except that Amazon's free app of the day scheme appears to generate no income at all for the application developer, as the promised x% of normal price is normally "negotiated" to zero. This actually tends to cost the app developer money in the long run, because they have to deal with support costs (and any server costs) exactly the same as with any paying customer. The Amazon free "customers" are also usually entitled to free upgrades, which leads to a free->paying conversion rate of practically nill. (If you have a second app for sale, you might be able to convince them to buy this one too.)
Slashdot Mirror
At Edinburgh University, in my day, there was 5 or 6 different first and second year maths streams. One for the maths students, one for the science students, one for the engineering students, one for the computer science students and one for the students of numerically-inclined social science (economics etc). The content was substantially different. A textbook that covered them all sufficiently would have been massive.
But then again, there was no compulsory set text -- our lecturers and tutors taught us everything we needed to know in class. (Now there's a revolutionary idea....)
It's called "economy of scale". The state of California as a corporate body has far more bargaining power than an individual student. This means they can set the price they pay. The cost to them will be significantly lower than the total cost of individual purchases. For the author it's better too, because there's a guaranteed, pre-negotiated price as work-for-hire, rather than the uncertainty of royalties depending on uptake by the universities. The only people it's bad for are academic publishing companies, and given some of their antics, I'm not going to lose sleep over a publishing mogul buying one less ivory back-scratcher come Christmas....
In my university (Edinburgh, Scotland), I was in classes several classes where the lecturer had written the book. I could have cried "scam" -- or I could feel privileged that I was studying with genuinely world-class scholars. Perhaps it's different in the US? Except, no, it can't be, because one of my lecturers (OO software design) apologised that her book was written in US English, not UK English, because there was a bigger market for it in the US than the UK. It seems like lots of US professors were using her textbook... because it was the best thing on the market.
Not really. Do you know when he'll see your response, if ever? Will you ever know whether he reads it or not? And by the time he's read the response, will his head be in the right place to fully process the result? When a question presents itself, your brain is in the right state to start processing the answer. It will be in a less optimised state when your forum system says "you've got mail" or whatever it does when the response finally appears and you've just spent the last two hours doing something completely different.
Yes, but there's two important issues here:
1) When researching pedagogical issues, you want a large instructor sample size, as you need to eliminate the uncontrolled variables of individual instructor differenences.
2) a single 160k student sample set all doing the exact same thing is a total waste of time. 160,000 students could be doing 1600 different things in groups of 100 and provide us with statistically significant results that would profoundly and irrevocably change the face of education as we know it.
160,000 students doing one thing tells us "that kinda works". We can't quantify how well it works, as there is nothing to compare. There is no control group, there is no theory A, there is no theory B. A statistically significant sample size, yes, but one that provides us with no statistically significant data.
Everyone does not like learning. Yes, it's incredible to me too, but it seems to be true. Actual scientific studies have shown that the average (adult) person much prefers "learning" things he already "knows" (believes, rather) to learning things he does not. People like watching videos online and saying "ah yes, that confirms what I already knew." Videos that do that, or are designed so that the watcher can *think* they do that, are popular. Videos that challenge incorrect beliefs and confirm that the watcher actually learned something are not.
Learning is hard. Most people prefer not to do it unless they have a very strong motivation to do so.
I think you're heading off on a slight tangent here. Yes, confirmation bias is a very real phenomenon. I see it in others all the time, and I recognise it in myself. But my point about everyone liking learning still stands -- the actual process of learning is genuinely, universally enjoyable. Confirmation bias isn't a mechanism that's "more enjoyable" than learning, it's a mechanism that simply blocks us from receiving new information, and prevents the beginning of the learning process. And there is very little involved in, for example, a machine learning course that is likely to be subject to confirmation bias. Therefore, if someone isn't learning from a machine learning textbook/course, it's the textbook/course's fault, not a student's lack of desire to learn or lack of enjoyment of learning.
Oops, I didn't mean "carefully planned, scripted and edited pedagogical lectures", but "carefully planned, scripted and edited pedagogical documentaries". The OU have been fantastic in taking their experience in producing factual television for the BBC and applying it to the problems of higher education. It's a model more people should follow, but the lessons learned look more and more like lessons lost....
That's a bit harsh. Learning is much easier if you're taught.
In fact, everyone likes learning. Learning is the purest form of mental stimulation, and mental stimulation is the source of the sensation we call "fun". What people don't like is not learning. If a textbook is boring, it's because you're not learning. Most interactive textbooks fail to address this problem, and just add pointless bells and whistles that don't address the problem of poorly paced material. What online education does offer is a much tighter, better audited feedback loop, that should allow educators to build-a-better-textbook. That's what companies like Knewton are doing with their adaptive courseware. Unfortunately the big names -- Coursera, edX and Udacity aren't: they're saying "we're taking lots of data, and we'll you know, analyse it. At some point." They're not writing adaptive courses, which is a shame. They've had thousands of students follow a single iteration of the syllabus. In a real university, you'd revise the syllabus on feedback every year -- 20-100 students per iteration. If they'd iterated for every hundred students in the AI course, the course would now be damn-near optimised!
The issue is not technology, it is teaching methodology. It is not clear if we have developed teaching methods that are appropriate for large online courses, or even for small courses.
Exactly. And to quote the article's main criticism of current universities, Dropout rates are often high, particularly at public colleges, and many graduates display little evidence that college improved their critical-thinking skills.
That's one area that is very difficult to address with distance education. I've studied the best part of 3 undergraduate degrees, 1-and-a-half face-to-face and the other 1-and-a-half at distance, and I've taught languages to people at various levels, and it's abundantly clear to me that the sort of reasoned process of problem solving that we undertake in a guided tutorial just cannot (yet) be replicated by a take-home worksheet.
Online content can therefore only be used to teach... well... content, and the intellectual skills have to be taught elsewhere. To be fair, the UK's Open University always recognised this, and would offer local face-to-face tutorials as well as specific academic skills workshops for new students. (Unfortunately, financial pressures are causing these to be increasingly delivered online.)
I would argue, then, that university-level online education is best used as a "conversion course" for people who are already academically educated, or perhaps as a replacement for the first year of a degree. Perhaps even one or two modules throughout the degree, but I don't see MOOCs ever offering anything equivalent to a full degree.
Indeed. The crucial argument that gets lost in the methodology wars is between "top-down"/expressive/problem-solving and "bottom-up"/basic skills. Phonics is ostensibly a "basic skills" idea, but because it is only one basic skill and ignores the basic skill that is whole-word reading, it doesn't work, and is used to taint the whole idea of "basic skills" teaching. On the other hand, a lot of the "whole word" camp likes to call themselves "real books", claiming that they're teaching reading by a top-down approach, ignoring the fact that word recognition is indeed a basic skill in and of itself.
Yes yes yes.
It is rather disingenuous of Thrun to complain about the use of filmed lectures in online teaching, while still himself using what is essentially a lecture format, when ignoring the work of one of the world's leading distance institutions who effectively ditched the video lecture years ago in favour of carefully planned, scripted and edited pedagogical lectures. Thrun has taken a massive step back and is well behind the state of the art in many respects.
Sadly, though, the OU is buying into the online "revolution" and moving more and more of there tutorials online. They even have courses with no synchronous tutorials, instead relying on text forums.
The fact that some people take no active participation in discussion isn't acknowledged as evidence of a problem, but heralded as proof of the superiority of the medium, by invoking the unproven idea of "learning styles". Yes, "lurking" has now been redefined as a learning style in online education land.
It's sad -- the OU risks destroying itself in the name of austerity... :-(
Because organized labor is detrimental to the economy and a joke.
What, you mean organised labour such as... oh, I don't know... companies? Corporations? Factories? The whole concept of the capital market was founded on the concept of the divisive of labour in a collectivised, organised manner. Read your economic theory more closely.
Unions will results in layoffs. Corporations will not just accept lower profits because their labor unionizes, they will layoff (Or go to India or the Philippines) until the costs are back in line to where they were.
One thing that unions should be good at is managing layoff payouts. There's a certain "first they came for the..." idea in layoffs. "It's not me, it's alright." People who're not getting laid off don't tend to make a fuss. The union represents the interests of both the continuing staff and the laid off staff, and makes sure there are adequate support networks in place for laid off staff (career consultancy etc). They've done this so successfully in the UK that many big non-unionised companies do it automatically to avoid looking bad in comparison to their unionised competitors.
There's a balance to be made. Militant unions who simultaneously refuse both pay freezes (or cuts) and layoffs are unrealistic and unhelpful. Most unions in Europe aren't like that, although that wasn't the case in the days of the UK miners' strike, where Scargill ruined the name of unions in the public eye for decades.
Unions are a *function* of the free market.
Yeah, sort of. They're a way to promote workers rights without direct government action, which makes it more "free market" than some alternatives.
But it's a way for workers to exert control over the market in a way that they would otherwise not be able to, which subverts some of the "free market" forces. You know when people claim that free markets drive prices down through competition? Same goes for labor markets. Unions remove some of the competition.
But the free market also works on economies of scale. Which shops (en_US: stores) are cheapest? The big chains. There's lots of small independent shops, so there's lots of competition, yet they are still more expensive that the big ones (of which there are fewer). The act of incorporation is directly analogous to the unionisation of the workforce -- several individuals band together and use their collective bargaining power to derive more benefit for themselves from the market. The only difference is that one very rich person can incorporate and form a powerful company (eg you could imagine a certain retired software CEO managing to establish a successful competitor to Wallmart in a very short space of time), whereas one individual cannot form a powerful union.
The founding document of modern capitalism is (in many people's eyes) Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and it was based on the notion of collectivisation, so that the workers owned the tools of production but were made efficient through cooperation.
So, yes, collectivisation to form a controlled supply of services is no different to any other form of incorporation. That said, genuine monopoly is damaging in any collectivity -- just as a single monopolistic supplier of a commodity (eg diamonds) can pay as little as they like and be as environmentally damaging as they like, yet still charge however much they like for the product, a truly monopolistic supplier of labour could demand to do as little work as possible for as high a wage as they liked.
The UK unions suffered due to seemingly unrealistic demands and cartel-like closing of ranks during the early 80s (miners), and they never really recovered in the public eye.
But there's another theory about the mammoth: disease. The last mammoths were in America, and round about the time of their extinction, the fossil record shows a notable rise in deformities, suggesting the possibility that the humans crossing the land-bridge to Siberia brought in a new disease.
How can we know for sure which species were a direct case of hunt-to-extinction...?
You're forgetting the effects of habitat destruction and the introduction of non-native species. Reintroducing many species would mean eliminating the introduced predators that killed them. Good luck in eliminating the ship rat from ... ooh... 90% of the world's surface.
The dodo tasted rotten. The traditional myth says the dodo was made extinct because people were desperate for food, but there were other sources. The dodo probably went extinct due to predation of eggs by rats... who came on the same ships as the sailors we traditionally accuse of eating the manky dodo flesh.
Don't be too quick to ascribe the extinction of the moa to human consumption alone. The dodo was probably made extinct by the introduction of the sailor's constant shipmate -- the rat -- to Mauritius. Rats are a major problem for any bird (particulary ground-nesting ones) as they really love eggs. We say the Maori hunted the moa to extinction, but isn't it possible that what did for the moa was the introduction of the kiore when by the Maori when they first arrived?
If we really want to bring them back, it's going to require like a dozen Earths, one for every few hundred million years. We only have one at the moment. Perhaps we should wait until time-travel is in vogue, thus saving us a lot of work.
You didn't even have to RTFA... you only had to read the summary. The article is about "reintroducing species that humans made extinct".
That doesn't appear to be true. Indeed, the trend appears to be in the opposite direction.
India income inequality doubles in 20 years, says OECD
And there we have proof that India is joining western civilisation -- the poverty gap is increasing in most developed countries too....
Except that he wasn't claiming 50% inflation over 13 years -- he was talking about 100% inflation. (Think about it -- if one dollar is half its previous value, that means it takes twice as much to buy anything.) So that's ... 13th root of 2... -1... *100... 5.5% p.a.
I don't know about the USA, but here in the UK, the official inflation figures use an index that doesn't truly match the individual's outgoings. Also, a lot of places have frozen pay over the last few years, which means that there's not even an inflation-linked pay increase, so inflation is a far bigger problem than the figures would imply...
Really? That's quite interesting actually.
Who came up with that, and was it just accidental myth-building, or part of a smear campaign?
(For an example of historical smear campaigns, one need look no further than the myth of a flat earth myth*. Mainstream Christianity at no point believed in a flat earth -- the myth belief was invented as a smear campaign in the 19th century....)
* That's intentional -- the two myths are not a repetition, as I'm saying "the myth that there ever was such a myth".
Christians have been used as lion food since the heyday of the Roman Empire.
Wonderful... except that Amazon's free app of the day scheme appears to generate no income at all for the application developer, as the promised x% of normal price is normally "negotiated" to zero. This actually tends to cost the app developer money in the long run, because they have to deal with support costs (and any server costs) exactly the same as with any paying customer. The Amazon free "customers" are also usually entitled to free upgrades, which leads to a free->paying conversion rate of practically nill. (If you have a second app for sale, you might be able to convince them to buy this one too.)
What kid wouldn't be inspired by a live Tesla coil?
Particularly if it played a medley of popular sci-fi theme-tunes....