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Handhelds Hardware

Palms in the Classroom and a Contest 71

Posted by Hemos from the broadening-computer-usage dept.
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. "
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Palms in the Classroom and a Contest

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  • 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.
  • for it's time the the newton was king. It's truely a revolutionary tool. There's no real reason why it's redundant (hw keeps on living) but it does have a number of drawbacks wrt todays generation of PDA's.
    • cost - expensive...just over AUS$1000 when it came out/palm is about AUS$300-$900

    • 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.


  • 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
  • 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.

    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 /. and other techie havens, but I feel it is preparing me for what I need when I go out and get a job.

  • 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)

    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 .sig
  • For reading slashdot on my Palm, I use sitescooper [jmason.org]. 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.)
  • 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)

    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 :) Of course, anyone can take a look at it here [linuxstart.com].

    Naturally, the full integration of my schedule comes next. Soon, I'll never have to remember anything again! :)
  • 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
  • Man, without that topic icon, "Palms in the Classroom and a Contest" doesn't sound like the best title to give a thread.

    - Shaheen
  • 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).
  • 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
  • I had a 48SX and a casio 8000 before that, and spent a lot of time programming stuff and other challenging activities like playing hptris :-)

    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.

    ---

  • "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.

  • palm uses (Score:3)

    by Signal 11 ( 7608 ) on Monday November 01, 1999 @12:53PM (#1571664)
    Hmmm...... what could I use a palm for if I was still in high school:
    • Exchanging notes!
    • Tetris. Gotta love the TI-8x calculators - nice games. =)
    • Using your palm as a remote control for the TV...
    • Buzzword bingo! Hey, gotta start the kids early...
    • Cheating. Well, *duh* - with 512k of RAM, you can store a small book in there!
    • Beaming your latest comic strip to the hp printer down the hall.

    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


  • 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.

  • I don't see much of a problem. There are no known Palm OS virii or trojans much less virii or trojans that are smart enough to infect multiple platforms. Schools already have a much more serious threat in Word macro viruses that students can infect the school computers with by e-mailing Word documents (or by transporting them on floppy disks). This screws up far more computers than some exotic cross-platform hack that an aspiring young Kevin Mitnick could come up with.

    As much as I love my little Palm III, I don't think I'll ever be able to bring down a network with it. Well, I might be able to telnet into the school's server using my Palm III and a modem but I could do that with an old Commodore 64.
  • 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.
  • 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 [slashdot.org] 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

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
  • 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
  • Back when I was in high school, I would have killed to have the opportunity to play with an advanced device. I learned how to do Novell networks on a 386 based network. Where did it lead me? I have a great job doing IT now. Let the kids have the Palms, if it inspires just one or two of them do get into a career they never would have even considered, especially with a marketable skill, then high school is doing it's job. The whole point of school in the first place is to give kids the chance to learn. The ones who have no interest will not use them, but the ones who do have th opportunity will have an edge in the future. All of most good IT people these days spent their first few attempts of doing something cool causing trouble. But that can teach them the power of knowing technology. All you have to do is set up the infrastructure to educate students on the ramifications of their actions with them.

  • 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



    Umm...AFAIK currently available palm computers will do all of these things. Specifically I am thinking of the Handspring Visor. Along with either the GoType keyboard or Stowaway(?) keyboard, it will do all of those things except the "color" renderings, and what use are they? I currently use my TI-89 to to lots of graphs and such. Color? What do I need that for?


    Anyway, with a retail of $149 the standalone Visor along with a keyboard that can't cost more than $100 and software will (almost) fully satisfy your requirements...for $50 less than budgeted cost. How's that for functional?

    Mycroft-X

  • Why? (Score:1)

    by aphr0 ( 7423 )
    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
  • Boo...my bookmark doesn't work after an article gets archived. Oh well...serves me right for not checking the preview. The cracking article [slashdot.org] I was linking to (to show that you can't ever stop students from using Palms to cheat) was

    http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/09/29/0418208 .shtml

    Set threshold to five and look for "Start simple...start with Palm"

    With apologies...

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
  • 3 = 'Riting + Reading + 'Rithmetic
    +4 = History + Literature + Mathematics + Physics
    --
    7 = ... well damnit, an education. (fscking bad analogies)

    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 ;) article.
  • A $300 dollar piece of hardware is not a good way for students to collect data in the field.

    A $1 yellow legal pad and a $0.20 cent pencil is.

    Technology cannot make a bad teacher good, technology makes great teachers even better.
  • I seem to recall hearing that you could use any calculator on standardized tests that didn't have a qwerty keyboard.

    The Palm doesn't have a qwerty keyboard (well, as long as you don't tap the dot, at least), and does have various scientific calculatory utilities available for it...

    The mind boggles.
  • 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...

    This happened at my school too, except they weren't banned. And when it came time for the AP Calculus exam, they just put a little bit of electrical tape over the IR port. Easiest way to take them out of order, w/o breaking anything.
  • My mom somehow bought me Civilization many years ago thinking I'd learn something from it, ( an educational game). The only thing i learned was that I was just horrid at the game. I only ruled the planet once, in the Star Trek:TNG era (2370)
  • Yeah I should have been more specific. Ok you don't need color for graphing, what about a graphics app, what about illustrated encyclopedia articles, what about a color field guide to plants/animals? what about a way for wireless collaboration/drawing/commenting on the same image?

    I'm trying to say that this is a good idea, but it could go a lot farther, and a palm os driven platform ain't neccessarily the way to go...



  • Me, I think this is a naff idea, unfortunately.

    The way to stop kiddies looking at pr0n is not to stick some poxy Net Nanny in the way that obliterates just about everything (Scunthorpe!) but to educate them not to want to go looking for it.

    Similarly if teachers have to resort to banning calculators and Palm Pilots (eek!) because of the potential for fun with IrDA, they're not doing their jobs properly. They should be inspiring the kids to learn what they're teaching, not play network-reversi at each other or whatever.

    As for exams, well there shouldn't be line-of-sight, or maybe they should be blocked off with a password for that sort of thing.
  • I'm a high school student (Junior). Last year my uncle gave me his used Cassiopeia [casio.com] 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. =)

  • Sounds like you want something more like a PalmVII (for wireless Internet Access) with color and probably a lot more memory. Doubt you'll find what you want for $300. Not for a while anyway.

  • 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
  • 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 do agree that kids should have more strict education, but further I think this is impossible with the garbage of a curriculum we have our kids going through. We *could* keep the school day shorter if we actually spent time teaching the kids worthwile things (real math, real literature, real assignments.) Let them work hard and on pertinent intellectual things for a few hours and let the parents who complain send there kids back for extra time watching 'Sparticus' and reciting prayers.
    There's a school in my area that is requiring kids to have laptops (expensive prep school) and i constantly see these high schoolers using them for games, or trying to figure out how to work them while their books sit closed next to them. It's distracting! Personally I don't think kids should be allowed to use calculators for any math that they can't demonstrate on paper, but after that, let them do what they know faster. Technology is a time saver, not a short-cut for learning. "I don't need to know how to do square roots, my calculator can do it." How many of you can do a square root on paper? Of course I live in Louisiana and we're not known for having an excellent eduation system, but I've turned out well, and it had nothing to do with technology (we don't have enough chalk, much less computers.)
    However, I think the only reason kids would be sitting in class *playing* with Palms is that they don't have anything better to do; the teacher certainly isn't worth paying attention to. Give them some real, worthwile work, and they wouldnt have time to 'play on that plam gizmo.'
    ____those j-mice are EVIL!!!_____
  • Although the possibilities would be endless, and the mind does indeed boggle, unfortunately the standardized testing types are one step ahead. There's a laundry list of things one can't have on one's calculator, and IR is usually one of them. I believe they also usually specifically ban pen input devices (depending on the test).

    I was bored enough to check out the SAT website (the classic "standardized test") and found their calculator policies for 98-99:

    Any four-function, scientific, or graphing calculator is permitted. Excludes minicomputers, electronic writing pads (Newton), pocket organizers, models with QWERTY (i.e., typewriter) keyboards (TI-92 and HP-95), models with paper tapes, models that make noise or "talk," and models that require an electrical outlet.

    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 don't think a graphics app or multimedia fall into the range of uses something like this is suitable for. I can't think of any practical implementation of a product that would.


    As a graphic designer, I know I would almost never want to do my development on a pixelated LCD screen. That would be like doing all of my work set at 400% zoom.


    As for a multimedia encyclopedia...again, the resolution IMHO isn't good enough to get a good look at what you want to see. Might as well include the text, and if you really need to see a picture, refer to a workstation or hardcopy.


    Not only that, but a multimedia encyclopedia takes alot of space...so it would need either wireless networking or IBM Microdrives to hold it. I'm just guessing, but that MIGHT just put it over-budget. :-)

    Mycroft-X

  • I guess you can only claim to have learned something from it if you figured out a workable strategy.

    The difference being that in a classroom one could be taught strategies. What if students were assigned countries, as they were today? And then allowed to run their economic, diplomatic, military, scientific, and domestic policies? It could be a cool tool in learning about a whole bunch of things.

    -AS
  • There are some positive and negative things about what you say here. For instance, learning the three R's by rote is not necessarily a good thing. I learned how to read by using phonics, which is a system that allows you to look at a word and have an idea about what it may mean without ever having heard or seen the word before. This also helped me to become a decent speller, something that I have found to be severely lacking in today's society as a whole.

    As for mathematics, there is a small amount of rote memorization to be had there, but where you get real progress is where you teach the fundamental tools of mathematics and show how to apply those tools to solve any number of different problems. I used to have problems with teachers because they didn't understand how I could solve a problem in the way I did, even though there was a deeper mathematical reason behind my method compared to theirs.

    Making school days shorter is not necessarily the greatest idea either, not necessarily from the shorter period of time keeping them more attuned to what is going on in class (I agree with this concept), but with the problem of parents not being around to deal with them. We blame our schools for a lot of problems that are really generated in the home, but no one has the balls to point the finger at the parents (there are exceptions to this, of course.) You say that kids need discipline and structure for part of the day, but they are not going to receive that at home when mommy and daddy are off at work. I could go on here, but I think you get the point.

    I agree that kids that are bright enough to do the work should be allowed to advance and not stuck in some "resource room" to whither away and lose their edge. When something like this happens I feel that the kids feel that they don't really have a purpose. As an aside to this though, if they are good enough to advance, they should be advanced into classes that are advanced for that grade level as well. Kids that are in advanced classes understand in the first place, and so won't be causing too many problems with younger kids that are even more advanced than they are.

    Concerning the subject at hand, I think it is a bad idea for kids (at least before upper-level high school) should be getting palms in the classroom. Kids should be taught the fundamentals of things before starting to use a computer to display these things for them. The same goes for computers in the classroom. As an example, let's say that we want to graph a probability curve (i.e. the random bell curve). Show those kids on pen and paper and a couple of dice how a bell curve is developed, then bring it up on the computer and show them how to manipulate that information. How about taking notes on a palm, you ask? My experience with a palm so far is that you can take notes a lot faster with a pen and paper, and make those notes a lot more understandable, particularly if there is any sort of drawing or graphing involved, than you could ever do with a Palm. Scheduling? That is what a $0.50 schedule pad is for. Addresses? Same thing.

    In essence, I think it is a bad idea for Palms to be in the classroom because they just make more trouble than they are worth. Sure, there are a couple of specific applications where they are usable, but for the most part the tried and true traditional methods of teaching with a blackboard (or dry erase...that is a darned good invention), some books, and personal notebooks is still the best teaching method in town.

  • 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...
  • Still, what is a good memory worth if you can't think properly?

    It works both ways: what use is being able to think, if you have nothing to think about?
    I suspect there's a kind of continual process where thought becomes knowlege anyway - I know that's roughly how I work, in that once I've thought my way through a few steps to a conclusion, I remember that jump as a more fundamentally "viable" thing. YMMV of course ;)
  • Heck, I'd almost buy my kid a palm just to keep track of when homework is due. If every teacher put the assignment and the due date in a format
    which could be beamed to the palm, it would provide a way to coordinate that information with parents, who would like to help their kids become more responsible.

    My daughter is in the second grade, and although she's very bright, what she thinks she is assigned isn't always exactly what the teacher intended. E.g. the other week she came home from school and told us that she couldn't get into the gifted & talented problem because she didn't have a problem - only students with problems could do gifted and talented work. I figured that this was a program for disadvantaged/ challenged/ kids.

    I called the G&T teacher, who explained that if students wanted to get into G&T, they had to choose a research problem; any research problem, and they'd be helped to do research on it, and suggest a solution. Big difference. Had I had the text of the briefing, I'd have understood that and encouraged her to select a research problem.

    I'd also like to see feedback from her assignments on a palm. A way for students, teachers and parents to share information that would help students to learn.
  • 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.

    ***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 /. community... it seems we are one of the last bastions of truly free speech left anywhere.

    Russ
  • 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.

    From what I remember of when I was taught to read through phonics, I don't recall doing a lot of rote memorization. I got the basics down and worked from there without memorizing. Granted, not learning at that age how to memorize something in that fashion was a detriment to my learning capabilities later in life, because my memorization skills to this day are quite poor.

    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.
    The only rote memorization I remember from mathematics was my times tables, and I only learned them through rote up to the ten times tables...from there I learned how to abstract the tables on the fly and not actually learn them (although the sixteen times tables are in my head forever now, simply through constant use...)

    I think one of the things that I am against is the classic form of rote memorization. Kids shouldn't be subjected to repeating the same thing over and over again until they have it down to some sort of chant. They should be taught interactively (with the teacher, not a computer) these things and shown how they can be used in life. I know, this sounds like we should be teaching kids at an early age how to do things in preparation for some sort of trade school, and abandon the pure sciences. This is not so. I just feel that even people that are working in the pure sciences should have an idea of what their studies can do for the real world...

  • As an absolutely maniacal user of my hp48g(I wish I'd had the cash for the gx and the pspice card) in college, I certainly understand the incredible potential of just a calculator. If you put all of the hp48g functionality as a module into a palm-pilot, and then added in specific scientific instruments(software, and some manner of hardware link) then you've got one hell of a scientific tool.

    However, that's in college(and I did play/write my fair share of games for the hp). In High School, I had a TI-81 and TI-85(the 81 died a horrible death). I didn't use it for jack except to cheat on tests and to play games in class.

    If you look at the kinds of things professionals have done with hp48gx's(one of my all-time favorites is the survey crew kit that hooks the thing up to one of those sighting tools and takes measurements), imagine what you could do with more ram, and a standard hardware interface a la Visor.

    As such, I think that computers have their place in classrooms: for labs and special projects inside of other courses. Computers are an incredible tool for that. There is jack added to a class by using a [lap,palm]top in a history class(outside of class for papers and research, it's a great tool, and should be available in a maintained and watched lab), and with the exception of really high-level math classes(dif-eq comes to mind as being one that gains a lot from computers) and advanced science courses(electromagnetics, chemistry theory), no reason to have them on a daily basis.

    So, I can see a school buying a bunch of palms/visors/laptops for a lab, and then using them much like you would use a microscope: occasionally, and for very specific functionality. The exception to this might be AP courses. If you are in an AP course, then you're probably not one of the millions of future employees destined to have a name-patch on their shirt, and you're probably responsible enough to take care of and make use of a school-sponsored palm or laptop. That means a couple of things: the best students get rewarded for being the best, and the students who are the most likely not to abuse them are the ones who get them. Inside of a lab setting, then a palm should be dealt with just like you deal with an expensive electronic scale or microscope.

    Basically, the issue of locking them out for a class should never come up. If you're in a high school math class, then you don't need anything beyond an abacus. I was personally taught how to effectively use an abacus, and I think that it's a crime that they aren't used in schools anymore except as a toy in 3rd grade classes.
  • I won't enter a discussion of which one is better than the other, and I agree that the Newton was truly revolutionary. I only have one comment: I can't fit a Newton in my pocket, and I already carry enough geek-junk around. Sometimes I feel like Batman with a utility belt. My Palm Vx does a lot of things that I need it for, and it fits nicely in my shirt or pants pocket.
  • 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.

    Every 'gotchi by themselves? No, if you want to emulate
    real genetics make tham recombine by infrared!

  • Palms have several advantages over laptops in this respect.

    As you mentioned, nobody would want to look at 4 color gray porn on a 3(?) inch screen. But that doesn't stop them from reading naughty texts...

    Seriously though, a Palm is no worse gaming wise than a TI calculator. I've got Yahzte loaded up on my Calc and nobody cares. The worse you can do with a Palm is SimCity. The real functionality of the palm is the ability to scrawl notes quickly. Sure you can do that with a spiral, but the Palm has other functions, such as custom programs.

    The big thing though is teaching the students to become more tech aware. This is what we should be aiming for in the future: a clued populace.
  • 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.
  • I have to agree. Don't get me wrong though.. I love computers and all but where do they really need a palm for school? as well as if they are getting computers and palms and spending time playing on them, they are loosing the other interactions of school as sports and just playing around as a kid.
  • 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 [handspring.com]. 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.
  • WRT your last point, if the interface is well designed and very transparent, it shouldn't pose much of a problem. The Palm is actually very easy and intuitive to use. It's far easier with a stylus/pen than inputting all the data by hand on a computer (maps better to a notepad metaphor?)

    Anyway, I personally feel that there is too much focus on getting technology into schools these days. They should be spending more of their budgets on books, literature, and more traditional methods of teaching, perhaps enhancing/supplementing them with technology but not replacing it.
  • Speaking as a high school student with a palm pilot, I can say that I've tried a few of these things over the past two years (never cheated with it :).

    Seriously, although all students can either purchase or borrow at TI calculator for their math classes, most of them can't or won't shell out $200-400 dollars for a PDA. Sure, they're cheaper than laptops, but I think the current affordability threshold for classroom tools is about $100. Until PDAs get cheaper, students won't go out and buy them en masse, and schools won't be able to afford to get one for every student, and, of course, "If everyone can't use them, then no one can."

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