School Reunions

August 17, 2009 | etbe

I’ve never understood the point of school reunions. The past students association of a secondary school can potentially be of some use when you are looking for your first job, but once your career gets started it seems to be of minimal benefit. But apart from that there is no direct benefit.

I didn’t enjoy school and I feel sorry for anyone who regards high-school as one of the best parts of their life – the rest of their life must be sucking quite badly.

Of the people I knew from school, I am still in contact with the ones I want to know, there are a bunch of others that I feel fairly indifferent about, and many who I would only want to see in an obituary.

For the ones I feel indifferent about, if I was to meet them then I would probably find that I have even less in common with them than I did 19 years ago (for high school) or 25 years ago (for primary school). I could easily attend a Meetup.com meeting that is related to something which interests me and be in a room full of people with whom I have something in common. I have been much easier to find via Google (and previously Alta-Vista or Yahoo) than most people I went to school with, so I presume that everyone who I have not been in contact with has not been interested in finding me for 19 or 25 years.

But I’m not trying to discourage anyone from making contact with me. Anyone who I used to know (from school, university, work, or elsewhere) who reads my blog and thinks that they have significant things in common with me is welcome to send me an email and suggest a meeting. I occasionally receive email from random people who read my blog or my posts to various mailing lists and want to meet me, I sometimes meet such people at LUG meetings etc.

Christmas Toys for Children

December 13, 2008 | etbe

It’s almost Christmas and time to buy scientific toys for children. Here are some random ideas, of course it’s probably too late for the online stores to deliver – but there’s always next year.

The MikroKopter is a kit helicopter based on four propellors (two rotating in each direction) and is capable of semi-autonomous flight while carrying a decent payload (such as a digital camera) [1]. The parts cost over E700 and the skill involved in assembling it is significant, but it would be an excellent present for anyone who is 14+. Of course the type of helicopter described in my previous post [2] is a much more affordable present and can be used by a young child.

The scitoys.com site has a good range of scientific toys for sale [3], they are assembled into kits.

The United Nuclear site has a huge range of chemical supplies and related things [4] that can be used for making some great science experiments and toys. They also have really detailed information about the potential hazards of the things that they sell (not that I was planning to buy Cesium or Uranium anyway). If buying exotic alloys elsewhere it’s probably a good idea to check the United Nuclear site for the hazard information (not all sites provide as much information as they should).

Professor Bunsen is an Australian site selling similar produces to SciToys [5]. The range is slightly different, and if you are in Australia then it’s safer to buy locally – there is a significant amount of stuff on the United Nuclear site that would be unlikely to pass Australian customs.

The Spirograph is a good way to introduce mathematical concepts to children [6], it would probably be a good present for children who’s parents are not interested in maths and science.

Lego [7] is always good, but there are also other similar products to consider. Meccano [8] is good for older children, but the ranges for younger children have some deficiencies (the 2+ stuff requires the finger strength of an adult to assemble all parts).

The Italian company Quercetti has some great products [9]. Unfortunately their web site is only in Italian and they have no links to sites in other countries/languages (they do have the names of some distributors who may have web sites). Their products includes a gears set (suitable for teaching children as young as 1yo) and a model car with an engine that has pistons moving inside a clear plastic case, a two-speed gearbox, and a fully functional differential (designed for 2yo+).

For more hands-on tasks that require supervision (not something that can go under a tree) one good option for ages 3+ is to disassemble a variety of computers and computer parts. CD-ROM drives are good because you can connect a 9V battery to the head assembly motor or the tray eject motor to make it work. Hard disks have insanely strong magnets inside them – don’t give two such magnets to a child.

A multi-meter is a great educational toy that can be used for many great experiements (as well as for practical tasks such as determining which battery of a set is flat) [10]. The parts from a hard disk can be used to demonstrate how a generator works (the mechanism to move the heads provides you with strong magnets and a coil that fits them). Note that an analogue meter is needed for such experiments as the amount of electricity generated is small and AC – a digital meter will average it out to zero (at least for the more affordable meters that I have used). It’s probably best to own both a digital meter and an analogue one, the minimum age for owning such a meter is probably about 10, the minimum age for using one with supervision is about 3.

An oscilloscope is a great educational toy [11], unfortunately they are quite expensive (Ebay seems to have nothing below about $450). They can be used for all sort of fun tasks such as measuring the speed of sound. The wikipedia page notes that you can get PC based Oscilloscopes (PCO) which are cheaper. I wonder if they have Linux support for such things…

The OLPC is a great computer for kids in developing countries [12]. They are now available in Australia [13].

For most children in first-world countries a second-hand laptop of a more traditional design is probably a better option. There are a significant number of old laptops gathering dust which can easily have Linux installed with a variety of educational software. Buying an OLPC on the “give one get one” deal costs $400US plus tax and shipping, while a second-hand laptop can be purchased for significantly less than that. While giving an OLPC to some random needy child is a good thing, as the person who gives a laptop locally is probably going to provide support for it there are some benefits to giving a regular laptop.

Conferences often have bags of random junk to give out to delegates, and trade shows always have lots of little toys with company logos on them. Such things are usually of little use – but children like them. Also the trinkets that computer companies give away are often educational. If you have a cupboard filled with such things then unloading them on some children is a good idea – of course you have to make sure that anything you give to young children can’t be swallowed and has no sharp points.

[1] http://www.mikrokopter.de/ucwiki/en/MikroKopter
[2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/12/11/toy-helicopter/
[3] http://scitoys.com/
[4] http://unitednuclear.com/
[5] http://www.profbunsen.com.au/
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirograph
[7] http://www.lego.com/
[8] http://www.meccano.com/
[9] http://www.quercetti.com/
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimeter
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscilloscope
[12] http://laptop.org/
[13] http://www.olpc.org.au/

Keating College

November 18, 2008 | etbe

Some time ago I spoke to Craig Keating about his plans for a new secondary school in the center of Melbourne. His plan was to focus on the core academic areas and cater to academically gifted students. He had some interesting ideas for his business, one of which was to pay teachers rates that are typical for private schools (higher rates than government schools) but not have any sport programs in the evenings or weekends (private schools typically require teachers to work every Saturday and one evening every week in coaching a sport). This would therefore give an hourly pay rate that was significantly higher than most private schools offered and would thus allow recruiting some of the most skilled teachers.

One of his ideas was to intentionally keep the school small so that every teacher could know every student. One of the problems with most schools is that they take no feedback from the students. It seems that this serious deficiency would be largely addressed if the teachers knew the students and talked to them.

He pointed out that in the history of our school system (which largely derived from the UK system) the private schools had a lot of sporting activities as a way of filling time for boarding students, given that few schools accept boarders (and those that do have only a small portion of the students boarding) the sports are just a distraction from study. This is not to say that sports are inherently bad or should be avoided. He encouraged parents to take their children to sporting activities that suit the interests of the child and the beliefs of the parents instead of having the child be drafted into a school sport and the parents being forced to take an unwilling child to sporting activities that they detest (which I believe is a common school experience).

My own observation of school sport is that it is the epicentre of school bullying. There is an inherent risk of getting hurt when engaging in a sport. Some children get hurt every lesson, an intelligent person who ran a school with an intensive sports program might statistically analyse the injuries incurred and look for patterns. Children who are not good at sport are targeted for attack, for example when I was in year 7 (the first year of high school) one of my friends was assigned to the “cork bobbing” team in the swimming contest – this involved a contest to collect corks floating in the toddler pool for the students who were really bad at swimming. At that moment I knew that my friend would leave the school as the teachers had set him up for more intensive bullying than he could handle. Yet somehow the government still seems to believe that school sports are good!

This is not to say that physical activity is bad, the PE 4 Life program [1] (which is given a positive review in the movie Supersize Me [2]) seems useful. It has a focus on fitness for everyone rather than pointless competition for the most skilled.

I have just seen a sad announcement on the Keating College web site [3] that they will not be opening next year (and probably not opening at all). The Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VCRA) announced in November that the application to be registered as a school (which was submitted in March) was rejected.

The first reason for the rejection was the lack of facilities for teaching woodwork and metalwork. As the VCRA apparently has no problems registering girls’ schools that don’t teach hard maths (a teacher at one such school told me that not enough girls wanted to study maths) it seems unreasonable to deny registration to a school that doesn’t teach some crafts subjects and caters to students who aren’t interested in those areas.

The second reason was the lack of facilities for sport and PE. Given the number of gyms in the city area it seems most likely that if specific objections were provided eight months earlier then something could have been easily arranged to cover the health and fitness issues. When I spoke to Craig he had specific plans for using the city baths, gyms, and parks for sporting activities, I expect that most parents who aren’t sports fanatics would find that his plans for PE were quite acceptable.

The third reason is the claim that 600 square meters of office space is only enough to teach one class of 24 students. That would mean that 25 square meters is needed for each student! I wonder if students are expected to bring their own binoculars to see the teacher or whether the school is expected to provide them. :-#

The government has a list of schools that work with the Australian Institute of Sport [4]. These schools provide additional flexibility in studies for athletes and probably some other benefits that aren’t mentioned in the brief web page. I don’t object to such special facilities being made available for the small number of students who might end up representing Australia in the Olympics at some future time. But I think that a greater benefit could be provided to a greater number of students if there were a number of schools opened to focus on the needs of students who are academically gifted. This doesn’t require that the government spend any money (they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the AIS), merely that they not oppose schools that want to focus on teaching.

Currently the government is trying to force Internet censorship upon us with the claim that it will “protect children” [5]. It seems obvious to me that encouraging the establishment of schools such as Keating College will protect children from bullying (which is a very real threat and is the direct cause of some suicides). While so far no-one has shown any evidence that censoring the net will protect any child.

Programming and Games for Children

October 16, 2008 | etbe

The design of levels for computer games is a form of programming, particularly for games with deterministic NPCs. It seems to me that for a large portion of the modern computer user-base the design of games levels will be their first experience of programming computers, the people who don’t start programming by creating games levels would be writing spread-sheets. Probably a few people start programming by writing “batch files” and shell scripts, but I expect that they form a minute portion of the user-base.

I believe that learning some type of programming is becoming increasingly important, not just for it’s own sake (most people can get through their life quite well without doing any form of programming) but because of the sense of empowerment it gives. A computer is not a mysterious magic box that sometimes does things you want and sometimes doesn’t! It’s a complex machine that you can control. Knowing that you can control it gives you more options even if you don’t want to program it yourself, little things like knowing that you have an option of using a different choice of software or paying someone to write new software open significant possibilities to computer use in business environments.

Games which involve strategic or tactical thought seem to have some educational benefit (which may or may not outweigh the negative aspects of games). To empower children and take full advantage of the educational possibilities I think that there are some features that are needed in games.

Firstly levels that are created by the user need to be first class objects in the game. Having a game menu provide the option of playing predefined levels or user-defined levels clearly shows to the user that their work is somehow less important than that of the game designer. While the game designer’s work will tend to be of a higher quality (by objective measures), by the subjective opinion of the user their own work is usually the most important thing. So when starting a game the user should be given a choice of levels (and/or campaigns) to play with their levels being listed beside the levels of the game creator. Having the users levels displayed at the top of the list (before the levels from the game designer) is also a good thing. Games that support campaigns should allow the user to create their own campaigns.

The KDE game kgoldrunner [1] is the best example I’ve seen of this being implemented correctly (there may be better examples but I don’t recall seeing them).

In kgoldrunner when you start a game the game(s) that you created are at the bottom of the list. While I believe that it would be better to have my own games at the top of the list, having them in the same list is adequate.

When a user is playing the game they should be able to jump immediately from playing a level to editing it. For example in kgoldrunner you can use the Edit Any Level menu option at any time while playing and it will default to allowing you to edit the level you are playing (and give you a hint that you have to save it to your own level). This is a tremendous encouragement for editing levels, any time you play a level and find it too hard, too easy, or not aesthetically pleasing you can change it with a single menu selection!

When editing a level every option should have a description. There should be no guessing as to what an item does – it should not be assumed that the user has played the game enough to fully understand how each primary object works. Kgoldrunner provides hover text to describe the building blocks.

Operations that seem likely to be performed reasonably often should have menu options. While it is possible to move a level by loading it and saving it, having a Move Level menu option (as kgoldrunner does) is a really good feature. Kgoldrunner’s Edit Next Level menu option is also a good feature.

Finally a game should support sharing levels with friends. While kgoldrunner is great it falls down badly in this area. While it’s OK for a game to use multiple files for a campaign underneath the directory it uses for all it’s configuration, but it should be able to export a campaign to a single file for sharing. Being able to hook in to a MUA to enable sending a campaign as a file attached to an email as a single operation would also be a good feature. I have filed Debian bug #502372 [2] requesting this feature.

Awful Computers for Kids

July 7, 2008 | etbe

I have just observed demonstration units of the V-Smile system [1]. They have “educational games” aimed at ages 3-5, 4-7, and some similar ranges. The first thing I noticed was that children who were able to correctly play the games were a lot older than the designated ages. For example 10yo children were playing the Scooby-Doo addition game (supposedly teaching children to add single-digit numbers) and apparently finding the non-addition part of the game challenging (I tried it myself and found catching flying hamburgers while dodging birds to be challenging enough that it was difficult to find numbers). For children who were in the suggested age-range (and a suitable age for learning the basic lessons contained in the games) the only ones who actually managed to achieve the goals were the ones who were heavily directed by their father. So my observation is that the games will either be used by children who are too old for the basic lessons or be entirely directed by parents (I didn’t observe any mother giving the amount of assistance necessary for a 5yo to complete the games but assume that it happens sometimes).

I doubt that there are many children who have the coordination needed for a platform game who have not yet learned to recognise printed letters (as supposedly taught in the Winnie the Pooh game). The Thomas the Tank Engine spelling game had a UI that was strange to say the least (using a joystick not to indicate which direction to go but instead to move a cursor between possible tracks) and I doubt that it does any good at teaching letter recognition. There was also a game that involved using a stylus for tracing the outline of a letter, as I had great difficulty in doing this (due to the poor interface and the low resolution of the touch-pad) it seems very unlikely that a young child who is just learning to write letters would gain anything from it. Strangely there was a game that involved using the touch-pad to indicate matching colors. Recognising matching colors is even easier than recognising letters and I don’t think that a child who can’t recognise the colors would be able to manage the touch-pad.

The V-Smile system seems to primarily consist of a console designed for connection to a TV but also has hand-held units that take the same cartridges. The same company produces “laptops” which sell for $50 and have a very low resolution screen and only the most basic functionality (and presumably other useless games).

Sometimes the old-fashioned methods are best. It seems that crayons are among the best tools for teaching letter recognition and writing.

But if there is a desire to use a computer for teaching, then a regular PC or laptop should do. Letter recognition can be taught by reading the text menus needed to launch games. The variety of computer poker games can be used for recognising matching colors and numbers as can the Mahjong series of games. Counting can be taught through the patience games, and the GIMP can be used for teaching computer graphics and general control of the mouse and the GUI. NB I’m not advocating that all education be done on a computer, merely noting the fact that it can be done better with free software on an open platform than on the proprietary systems which are supposedly designed for education.

Finally with a PC children can take it apart! I believe that an important part of learning comes from disassembling and re-building toys. While it’s obvious that a PC is not going to compare with a Lego set, I think it’s good for children (and adults) to know that a computer is not a magic box, it’s a machine that they can understand (to a limited extent) and which is comprised of a number of parts that they could also understand if they wanted to learn the details. This idea is advocated by Gever Tulley advocates such disassembly of household items in his TED talk “5 dangerous things you should let your kids do” [2]. Gever runs The Tinkering School [3] which teaches young children how to make and break things.

Finally I just checked some auction sites and noticed that I can get reasonably new second-hand laptops for less than $300. A laptop for $250 running Linux should not be much more expensive than a proprietary laptop that starts at $50 once you include the price of all the extra games. For an older laptop (P3) the price is as low as $100 on an auction with an hour to go. Then of course for really cheap laptops you would buy from a company that is getting new machines for their staff. It’s not uncommon for companies to sell old laptops to employees for $50 each. At a recent LUG meeting I gave away a Thinkpad with a 233MHz Pentium-MMX CPU, 96M of RAM, and a 800*600 color display – by most objective criteria such a machine would be much more capable than one of those kids computers (either V-Smile or a competitor).

Of course the OLPC [4] is the ideal solution to such problems. It’s a pity that they are not generally available. I have previously written about the planned design for future OLPC machines [5] which makes it a desirable machine for my own personal use.

School Bag Weight

May 24, 2008 | etbe

Matt Bottrell has written about some issues related to the acceptable weight of laptops for school use [1].

Matt cites a reference from the Victorian government stating that a school bag should not be heavier than 10% of the body weight of the child who carries it [2]. So the next thing we need to do is to calculate what a student can carry without being at risk of spinal injuries.

Firstly we need to determine what children weigh, if we restrict this to the 14+ age range (the older children have more need of computers) then children are almost as heavy as they will be when they are 18 and can carry significantly heavier bags than those in the 10+ age range. Also it seems reasonable to consider the 25th percentile weight (the weight which is exceeded by 75% of children). Of course this means that 25% would be carrying overly heavy bags but it does give us a bit more weight allowance.

The 25th percentile weight for white girls in the US is 48Kg [3]. The 25th percentile weight for white boys in the US is also 48Kg [4]. When considering the Australian situation it seems that white children in the US will be most similar (in terms of genetics and diet).

The 25th percentile weights at age 18 are 53Kg for girls and 64Kg for boys.

So the acceptable bag weights would be 4.8Kg for 14yos, 5.3Kg for 18yo girls, and 6.4Kg for 18yo boys.

The next step is to determine the weight carried to school. The weight of one of my laptop bags is almost 1Kg, I think that a school-bag would have a similar weight.

When I was at school I recall that the worst days for carrying baggage were when I had PE (Physical Education – sports), the weight of PE gear was a significant portion of the overall weight I carried. I tried to estimate this by weighing a track-suit top, a t-shirt, and a pair of board-shorts (the only shorts I could find at short notice), and it was almost 1Kg. While the board-shorts might weigh more than PE uniform shorts I didn’t include the weight of track-suit pants. Assuming that a female PE uniform has the same weight as a male uniform is the least of my assumptions.

The weight of a good pair of sneakers (suitable for playing basketball and other school sports) that is in my size is just over 1Kg.

To get a rough estimate of the weight of lunch I put six slices of bread and a small apple in a lunch box and found that it weighed 500g. A real lunch would probably include four slices of bread but the other things would weigh at least as much as the extra two slices. If a drink was included then it could be more than 500g.

So the total is 3.5Kg for bare essentials (including PE gear) without including any books!

It seems that it would be impossible to stick to the government recommendations for school bag weight if a full set of PE gear is included. Probably the best thing that could be done would be to make a school uniform allow wearing sneakers which removes 1Kg from the overall bag weight.

So a bag with lunch and PE gear (minus sneakers) is about 2.5Kg, leaving 2.3Kg for books etc at age 14. As text books for 14yo children are considerably thinner than those for 18yo children, it seems that this might be achievable. Fitting a couple of text books and an EeePC into the 2.3Kg weight budget should be achievable. But fitting a full size laptop (which seems to start at about 1.8Kg) and some text books into a 2.3Kg budget will be a challenge – it might be possible to do that but wouldn’t leave any budget for the random junk that children tend to carry around.

For an 18yo girl, the weight budget (after the basics have been deducted) is 2.8Kg, it seems likely that on occasion the weight of year-12 text books will exceed that. Therefore it seems that the only way of avoiding spinal injuries in year-12 girls would be to have text books stored in digital form on a light laptop such as an EeePC. Rather than avoiding the use of laptops because of weight (as some people suggest), laptops with electronic text books should be used to replace traditional text books! An EeePC weighing less than 1Kg will give a significant amount of extra capacity for any other things that need to be carried. If there is little other stuff to be carried then 75% of 18yo girls should be able to carry a full size laptop plus PE gear without risk of back injuries. If digital text books are used then if in any journey two text books (which according to my previous measurements can be as much as 1.6Kg [5]) can be replaced with an EeePC then overall something like 600g is saved (depending on the configuration of the EeePC, if one battery was stored at home and another at school then it could save more than that).

It seems that a year 12 girl who has PE and three science subjects scheduled on the same day would be most likely to exceed the recommended weight in the current situation (even without having to carry a spare pair of shoes), and that carrying a laptop with digital text books would be the only way of avoiding back injury.

For an 18yo boy the weight budget is 3.9Kg after the basics have been deducted. So if they don’t carry other random stuff in their bag (I probably had 1Kg of random junk in my bag on occasion) then they could carry PE gear, a full sized laptop, AND a full set of text books.

It seems to me that there is no situation where children would be unable to have a laptop within the reasonable weight allowance if digital text books were used. The only way that the weight of a laptop could be a problem would be if it was carried in addition to all the text books.

One final point, it would be good if books from the Gutenberg project were used for studying English literature, that’s one easy way of reducing weight (and cost). Also it would be good if there was an option for a non-literature based English subject. Knowledge of English literature is of no value to most students. It would be better to teach students how to write while using topics that interest them. Maybe have blogging as an English project. ;)

EeePC for a Teenager

February 25, 2008 | etbe

I was asked for advice from a non-technical person about buying a laptop for their 15yo daughter. They were looking to spend $200 or $300.

I suggested that stretching their budget to $500 for a new EeePC would be a better option than the risks associated with a second-hand laptop (laptops are all different in their hardware).

I also suggested that waiting a few months to see what happens with the new EeePCs might be a good idea. There are rumours about the development of new EeePC models with bigger screens, this would be a benefit for those who can afford it, and for those who can’t the current model may drop in price. They took that suggestion very well and I suspect that they weren’t planning to purchase in the near future anyway.

I asked for advice on the LUV mailing list [1] for further suggestions that I could offer.

One suggestion was that larger laptops of a more traditional design have been driven down in price recently and might be worth considering. I will have to mention it, but suggesting that someone who wants to spend $200 should spend $500 seemed enough of a stretch, suggesting that they spend $700 or more might not be taken well. Of course there is the weight issue that Matt raised in a blog post [2]. The last thing I want to do is to convince people not to buy computers for their children!

A complaint was raised about the size of the keyboard in the EeePC (personally I wouldn’t want to use anything smaller than the T series Thinkpad I’m using now). In a quick google search the best information I could find about average finger sizes was the Danforth Diamond blog [3] which says that in the US women average a ring size of 6 while men average 10. According to the ring sizing page on the same site [4] that means ring finger diameter of 16.5 and 19.8mm respectively. So it seems likely that given the same level of typing skill an average woman could happily use a keyboard that’s 83% the size of the keyboard that an average man uses. Of course there’s a lot of variation between individuals, for example my fingers are thinner than average and I prefer a full-sized keyboard.

One thing I recommend when considering a keyboard (or a laptop) is to type your name a few times quickly. Typing something about a quick brown fox will take some thought, but typing your own name requires no thought so you can concentrate on the feel of the keyboard. Using this method it is very easy to go to a store and determine whether a laptop is likely to suit you.

The screen resolution and size is a significant issue, one EeePC owner described it as “too small to do anything useful“. Rumour has it that the next version will have a screen that’s a significant increase in size and resolution.

A final interesting comment was about the social aspect of owning a laptop. The suggestion was made that a teenager who owned the smallest (and possibly cheapest) laptop in class might have other kids tease them about it. I will be interested to see comments on this issue, it had never occurred to me that the laptop use in schools would be high enough for the ownership of any type of laptop to be a cause for harassment. Also I’m not sure which would be considered as being of lower status, an old second-hand laptop or a new low-end laptop. I’m pretty sure that owning either would be considered to have higher status than having no laptop.

A quick scan of the GraysOnline.com.au auction site suggests that a second-hand Pentium-M laptop (a few years old) could be purchased for about $550 and a Core 2 Duo based laptop might go for about $700. So it seems unlikely that for less than $500 you could buy something suitable for a novice user (something that will just work with recent software). I’m not planning on offering the full IT support package that I offer to my relatives so I can only recommend things that can be self-supported.

Of course as the people doing the buying seem to have no definite plans for the use of the computer then anything they buy will fail in some way to meet the requirements that they discover. :-#

Update: fixed a bad link.

Laptop vs Book Weight

February 18, 2008 | etbe

Matt Bottrell wrote an interesting and informative post about laptops for school kids [1]. His conclusion is that based on technical features the OLPC machine is best suited for primary school children and one of the ASUS EeePC, the Intel Classmate, and the Everex Cloudbook would be best suited for high-school students.

The Asus EeePC [2] is a good option, it runs a variant of Debian and the Debian Eeepc Team are active in getting full Debian support for it [3].

The Intel Classmate [4] has a choice of Windows XP, Mandriva, and Metasys Classmate. The web page says that it’s designed “for primary students (ages 5-14)“, so I think that Matt made a mistake in listing this as a possibility for high-schools, of course when running Mandriva it could have software installed for any age group but the hardware design may be better suited to younger children.

The Everex Cloudbook [5] runs the GOS Rocket [6] OS which seems to be an Ubuntu variant with an Enlightenment based GUI and a configuration aimed at using Google services (blogger, gmail, etc). Configuring Ubuntu to suit your needs is easy enough (it’s based on Debian). Note that Matt did not mention where one might purchase a Cloudbook in Australia and I don’t recall seeing one on any of my many window-shopping expeditions to Australian consumer electronics stores, while the EeePC is widely available (except when sold out). But I’m sure that if the government wanted to place an order for a couple of million units then Everex would ramp up production quickly enough.

Matt made one statement that I strongly disagree with, he wrote “A traditional notebook is far too heavy for high-school kids to lug around“.

To test this theory I searched for some high-school text books and a set of scales. A year 11 Maths A text book from ~1988 weighed 600g and the pair of year 12 Maths A and Maths B texts weighed 1.6Kg. When I was at high-school the day was divided into seven “periods”, some classes took two periods so four different classes which required text books (or other books) was typical. Carrying 3Kg of books to school would not be uncommon for year 12 students. The Lenovo T series (advertised as “premier performance” and the model I personally prefer) is listed as having a starting weight of 2.1Kg (which presumably doesn’t include the power pack). My Thinkpad T series (from about 2004) weighs about 2.4Kg according to my kitchen scales and has a battery weighing just over 400g.

My practice for a long time was to own a spare power pack for my Thinkpad so that I could leave it at work (saving 400g when travelling to and from work). I have also had the practice of buying a spare battery when I buy a Thinkpad (you need a spare battery for a long trip). So if I had really wanted to save weight I could have left a battery at work and reduced by travel weight by another 400g (with the cost being that I couldn’t use it when on a train or bus).

A spare power pack is not overly expensive. In the usual case students would only need a battery when at school (it’s a little known fact that Thinkpads work perfectly without a battery plugged in). So if a student had a power pack at home as well as one at school and if they left their battery at school and they owned one of the latest Thinkpad T series (listed with a starting weight of 2.1Kg) then their travel weight might be about 1.7Kg. If the majority of school texts could be stored on their laptop then the result of using a Thinkpad T series would be a significant weight reduction! If the students were using a Thinkpad X series (more expensive so maybe not a good option) then the list weight is 1.57Kg and the travel weight might be as low as 1.3Kg (at a rough estimate).

The EeePC offers significant benefits for school use, it is light, cheap (children tend to break or lose things more frequently than adults so you should budget for buying two of anything that they use), and having no hard drive (flash storage) it should cope well with being dropped. The screen on the EeePC is unreasonably small buy Asus could release a new model with a bigger screen (they may do this in the future anyway or a government contract could encourage them to do it sooner).

I agree that the EeePC or the Everex Cloudbook is probably the best option for high-school students, but I can’t agree with any claim about a traditional laptop being too heavy, the only reason for excluding a traditional laptop is that those new ultra-lights are better.

Another reason that might be cited for not using laptops is the cost. While prices of $1000 or more for a traditional laptop are rather expensive, the $500 for an EeePC is not that expensive – and the government could surely negotiate a better deal, I would be surprised if they couldn’t get the price down to $350 by some bargaining and by removing the middle-man. A careful child could use the same laptop for the entire duration of high-school and their parents would incur less expense than they currently would spend on text books.

As for the current lack of electronic text books. Currently when the education department selects a book it’s a license to print money for the author and publisher. All that the education department has to do is to declare that they will do a deal with the first company to release their books under a creative commons license. The idea would be that an author (or publishing company) would get paid a fixed sum of money for a CC release of a text book which would then be available for use by anyone anywhere in the world. World-wide free distribution would be no loss to the author (each country tends to have unique books anyway) but would be a good act of charity from our government to developing countries.

Once books were available under a creative commons license (without the “no modifications” clause) they could be freely improved by anyone. Improving text books for younger students could be a good school project.

Update:

Thanks to Steve Walsh for pointing out that the Classmate can run Linux. It’s a pity that he didn’t link to my post so that his readers could see what he was referring to. I take it as a good sign of the quality of my posts that such small errors get pointed out.

Cheap Laptops for Children

October 12, 2007 | etbe

I was recently browsing an electronics store and noticed some laptops designed for children advertised at $50AU. These machines were vastly different from what most of us think of when the term laptop is used, they had tiny screens, flimsy keyboards, no IO devices, and a small set of proprietary programs. It was more of a toy that pretends to be a laptop than a real laptop (although I’m sure that it had more compute power than a desktop machine from 1998).

After seeing that I started wondering what we can do to provide cheap serious laptops for children running free software. The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) [1] program aims at producing laptops for $100US to give to children in developing countries. It’s a great project, the hardware and software are innovative in every way and designed specifically for the needs of children. However they won’t have any serious production capacity for the near future, and even $100US is a little more expensive than desired.

Laptops have significant benefits for teaching children in that they can be used at any time and in any place – including long car journeys (inverters that can be used to power laptops from a car power socket are cheap).

A quick scan of a couple of auction sites suggests that laptops get cheap when they have less than 256M of RAM. A machine with 128M of RAM seems likely to cost just over $200 and a machine with less than 128M is likely to be really cheap if you can find someone selling it.

So I’m wondering, what can you do to set up a machine with 64M of RAM to run an educational environment for a child? KDE and GNOME are moderately user-friendly (nothing like the OLPC system, and even Windows 3.0 was easier in some ways) but too big to run on such a machine (particularly when GIMP is part of a computer education system). This should be a solvable problem, Windows 3.0 ran nicely in 4M of RAM, one of the lighter X window managers ran well in 8M of RAM for me in Linux 0.99 days, and the OS/2 2.0 Workplace Shell (which in many ways beats current KDE and GNOME systems) ran nicely in 12M). I think that a GUI that vaguely resembles Windows 3.0 should run well on a machine with 64M of RAM – is there such a GUI?

I have briefly scanned the Debian-Edu [2] site but the only reference to hardware requirements is for running LTSP.

[1] http://laptop.org/
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu

Ideas for a Home University

October 4, 2007 | etbe

There seems to be a recent trend towards home-schooling. The failures of the default school system in most countries are quite apparent and the violence alone is enough of a reason to keep children away from high-schools, even without the education (or lack therof).

I have previously written about University degrees and whether they are needed [1].

The university I attended (which I won’t name in this context) did an OK job of teaching students. The main thing that struck me was that you would learn as much as you wished at university. It was possible to get really good marks without learning much (I have seen that demonstrated many times) or learn lots of interesting things while getting marks that are OK (which is what I did). So I have been considering whether it’s possible to learn as much as you would learn at university without attending one, and if so how to go about it.

Here are the ways I learned useful things at university:

I spent a lot of time reading man pages and playing with the various Unix systems in the computer labs. It turned out that sys-admin work was one of my areas of interest (not really surprising given my history of running Fidonet BBS systems). It was unfortunate that my university (like almost all other universities) had no course on system-administration and therefore I was not able to get a sys-admin job until several years after graduating.
I read lots of good text books (university libraries are well stocked).
There were some good lectures that covered interesting material that I would not have otherwise learned (there were also some awful lectures that I could have missed – like the one which briefly covered computer security and mentioned NOTHING other than covert channels – probably the least useful thing that they could cover).
I used to hang out with the staff who were both intelligent and friendly (of which there were unfortunately a small number). If I noticed some students hanging out in the office of one of the staff in question I would join them. Then we would have group discussions about many topics (most of which were related to computers and some of which were related to the subjects that we were taking), this would continue until the staff member decided that he had some work to do and kicked us out. Hanging out with smart students was also good.
I did part-time work teaching at university. Teaching a class forces you to learn more about the subject than is needed to basically complete an assignment. This isn’t something that most people can do.

I expect that Children who don’t attend high-school will have more difficulty in getting admitted to a university (the entrance process is designed for the results of high-school). Also if you are going to avoid the public education system then it seems useful to try and avoid it for all education instead of just the worst part. Even for people who weren’t home-schooled I think that there are still potential benefits in some sort of home-university system.

Now a home-university system would not be anything like an Open University. One example of an Open University is Open Universities Australia [2], another is the UK Open University [3]. These are both merely correspondence systems for a regular university degree. So it gives a university degree without the benefit of hanging out with smart people. While they do give some good opportunities for people who can only study part-time, in general I don’t think that they are a good thing (although I have to note that there are some really good documentaries on BBC that came from Open University).

Now I am wondering how people could gain the same benefits without attending university. Here are my ideas of how the four main benefits that I believe are derived from university can be achieved without one (for a Computer Science degreee anyway):

Computers are cheap, every OS that you would ever want to use (Linux, BSD, HURD, OpenSolaris, Minix, etc) is free. It is quite easy to install a selection of OSs with full source code and manuals and learn as much about them as you desire.
University libraries tend not to require student ID to enter the building. While you can’t borrow books unless you are a student or staff member it is quite easy to walk in and read a book. It may be possible to arrange an inter-library loan of a book that interests you via your local library. Also if a friend is a university student then they can borrow books from the university library and lend them to you.
There are videos of many great lectures available on the net. A recent resource that has been added is Youtube lectures from the University of California Berkely [4] (I haven’t viewed any of the lectures yet but I expect them to be of better than average quality). Some other sources for video lectures are Talks At Google [5] and TED – Ideas Worth Spreading [6].
To provide the benefits of hanging out with smart people you would have to form your own group. Maybe a group of people from a LUG could meet regularly (EG twice a week or more) to discuss computers etc. Of course it would require that the members of such a group have a lot more drive and ambition than is typical of university students. Such a group could invite experts to give lectures for their members. I would be very interested in giving a talk about SE Linux (or anything else that I work on) to such a group of people who are in a convenient location.
The benefits of teaching others can be obtained by giving presentations at LUG meetings and other forums. Also if a group was formed as suggested in my previous point then at every meeting one or more members could give a presentation on something interesting that they had recently learned.

The end result of such a process should be learning more than you would typically learn at university while having more flexible hours (whatever you can convince a group of like-minded people to agree to for the meetings) that will interfere less with full-time employment (if you want to work while studying). In Australia university degrees don’t seem to be highly regarded so convincing a potential employer that your home-university learning is better than a degree should not be that difficult.

If you do this and it works out then please write a blog post about it and link to this post.

Update:
StraighterLine offers as much tuition as you can handle over the Internet for $99 per month [7]. That sounds really good, but it does miss the benefits of meeting other people to discuss the work. Maybe if a group of friends signed up to StraighterLine [8] at the same time it would give the best result.

etbe – Russell Coker

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Category Archives: School