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November 15, 2002
Top 10 Smart Technologies for Schools (cont'd)
3. Hybrid Computing
Toys that think, probes that process, books that talk out loud-hybrid technologies challenge our notions of what it means to be a computer.
By Charles Parham
Is it a computer or isn't it? The shrinking size and price of microprocessors has encouraged the development of a number of fascinating hybrid computer products. Some take the form of interactive toys and books. Others blend data-gathering peripherals with handheld devices. What they all have in common, however, is the way they extend computing beyond the beige box, blurring the lines between hardware and software more than ever before.
Robots have been around since the birth of educational computing, but until recently, the actual building and manipulating of mechanical devices largely remained in university laboratories. All this is changing rapidly. Pitsco/LEGO Dacta has developed a computerized LEGO brick that functions as the "brains" of robotic devices that do everything from playing soccer and taking digital photos to tracking the activity of a guinea pig in its cage. More finely engineered preassembled robots from companies such as Educational Robot Company and ActivMedia Robotics can send in attendance slips, run a vacuum, or stealthily take a camera to the science room down the hall.
Despite what science fiction movies might lead us to believe, robotics systems are not plug-and-play devices. Teachers and students need to develop relatively complex problem solving and programming skills to bring them to life.
Another hybrid computing trend is the pairing of electronic sensors, or probes, with handheld devices for scientific data collection. Although probes have been around for some time, the increasing ubiquity of inexpensive USB-connected handheld devices is spurring their widespread adoption in schools. It's now easy for teachers to take students out with a set of pH and temperature probes to monitor water quality in streams and ponds, to set up motion detectors, and most importantly, to work with real data, as opposed to that which has been "cleaned up" for math and science textbooks. Information can be fed into spreadsheets and either reviewed on-site or taken back to a classroom computer for further work.
While robots and scientific probes have been part of the university curriculum for a number of years, and are increasingly finding a home in the K-12 classroom, "smart pads" are relative newcomers to schools. These interactive pads, descendants of the electronic matching machines of the 1950s, usually include a stylus and voice synthesizer that allow users to touch a specific area of the pad-such as a single sentence or a picture-and receive feedback. For example, students using LeapFrog SchoolHouse's LeapPad can point at a word in a storybook (placed into a proprietary electronic platform) and hear it read back to them. Electronic pads provide instruction in a wide range of areas, from early reading to geography, and are proving very useful to educators as support for basic skills.
As computer chips continue to be integrated into familiar objects found in the classroom, and embedded in increasingly smaller and more powerful handheld devices and their peripherals, our metaphors for computing will change and so will the landscape of schools. Computers won't just exist in a lab or in the back of a classroom, but instead will be part of a variety of learning tools that seamlessly merge with the objects of everyday life.
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