Grant Robertson

Grant Robertson

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13 years ago @ Educational Technology... - Do Computers and Inter... · 0 replies · +2 points

These reports prove one thing: That simply having a computer does not educate a person any more than simply having a refrigerator will keep them from going hungry. As Christopher Segot explains better in the above comment: It's what the students do with the computer that counts. If they just use it to play more video games or do more social networking then it hasn't done much good.

I would add to Christopher's comments that students must be taught, convinced, conditioned, or just plain gotten interested enough to actually want to learn. William Glasser, in his 1998 book, Choice Theory, claims one of the primary reasons students don't learn is that teachers spend more time and energy disciplining them rather than trying to get along with them. It goes against the common intuition that seems to be prevalent in schools these days but it does make sense to me. If children don't like their teachers then they, by association, won't like what the teacher is trying to teach.

I have to disagree with Christopher in that I do not believe that simply monitoring results will improve learning. All that really does is generate more research data. Useful, yes, but not necessarily for the education of the students being monitored.

Finally, learning itself must be fun. Not necessarily all video games, but the material should be presented in a way that makes it much easier for students to actually succeed at learning while still being challenged. The problem with just dumping laptops into students, well, laps is that it is about the same as locking them into a library where all the books have had all their pages torn out and piled up in the center of the room. Sure there is a lot of information out there on the internet but the student has to go to a lot of work to find it with no guarantee that they will ever find something that interests them or that suits their education level or learning style.

I wrote an essay on the topic and posted it on my blog last year. If anyone is interested, you can find it at: http://demml.blogspot.com/2009/07/philosophy-stat...

13 years ago @ Educational Technology... - Let's Focus on Educati... · 0 replies · +1 points

GuruKasi,

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. My point was not primarily about the popularity of open source. My point was that Microsoft was able to draw lots of developers by making it as easy as possible for developers to, well, develop. Both in the sense of developing code and in the sense of getting started easily and growing from there.

While I agree that many young programmers are turning to open source and that many new start-ups must rely on open source languages and development environments due to budget constraints, I do not exactly consider Tim O'Reilly the most trustworthy source in this matter. Just as Steve Balmer and Steve Jobs claim to believe whatever they think will sell the most of their own software or computers, Tim O'Reilly, in my opinion, tends to say whatever he thinks will sell the most books or convention tickets. But that is another matter.

There are still many computer science programs which use Visual Studio. My own son - who is way smarter than I will ever be and works for a web development company, so I thought he would know better - is heavily tied to MS development tools simply because they made it the easiest for him to get started.

However, the focus of this discussion is on increasing the number of applications created for this $10 computer. I still believe the best way to do that is to make it as easy as possible for developers to get started. This is the same philosophy adopted by many open source projects. Code, documentation, and software development kits are posted on the web for all to access.

While Derek's web site is nice looking, it does not provide any information about actually obtaining, working with, or developing for these computers. That is a gigantic roadblock towards obtaining his stated goal of increasing the number of apps available.

Regards,
Grant S. Robertson

13 years ago @ Educational Technology... - Let's Focus on Educati... · 2 replies · 0 points

Derek,
I am glad to see you have been able to move forward with your plans for Playpower. I am writing with some thoughts as to how you could increase the amount of content available for those $10 computers.

Though Steve Balmer is definitely not my favorite person in the world, he is right about one thing: Developers, Developers, Developers. How does he attract developers? He makes it as easy as possible for developers to write code for his platform. Microsoft development environments are some of the easiest to use, even for beginning programmers. Many programmers write code almost exclusively for the Windows platform simply because the integrated development environment (IDE) of the Visual Studio products was so easy to learn when they first got started.

So, it seems to me, if you want to increase the number of apps for this $10 computer then you need to increase the number of developers by making it as easy as possible to get started. Do you have documentation, software libraries, and software development kits (SDKs) available? Or do developers have to start from scratch and dig out the information about developing for this platform on their own. Are there significant differences between this platform and other, previous, 6502 platforms? Will old books about programming for the Apple II or Commodore 64 suffice or will they just confuse people? If you want people to develop games then it might be a good idea to start by developing a basic library of code specifically for creating games. Creating a plug in for the Eclipse IDE would also go a long way toward getting more developers on board. You might think about creating an environment where even non-programmers can create a game just by importing graphics and configuring behaviors similar to a product called Power Game Factory (which is unfortunately only available for Macs, available at www.sawbladesoftware.com). I realize these would be a lot of work which is why I offer the next suggestion…

Get college students to do the work for you! Work with college and vo-tech teachers and convince them to offer classes in programming for this platform. Writing for this platform will force students to think carefully about the efficiency of their programs. It will give them experience working in a different environment, rather than just being yet another Windows programmer, which will be valuable experience when they get out in the real world and discover that most coding jobs are NOT for the Windows environment or even for 32-bit processors. The test environment is incredibly inexpensive (TEN BUCKS!!!) so even the poorest of students can afford it. You can prepare kits with documentation, software, and one of these computers for less than many students spend on beer in a weekend. You can promise them enduring fame and the opportunity to really help people all over the world. How many students get that? And without ever leaving home?
Finally, I would suggest making all this easily available directly from your web site. Many people may be hesitant to “join” your project if they don’t know what resources will be made available to them beforehand. Make the software libraries easily available, perhaps through Source-Forge, and allow people to order the computers for their own use and experimentation.

Good luck to you. As you know, I am working on a contribution of my own so I will not be able to contribute directly to your project any time soon. However, I hope to one day see DEMML software running on your $10 computer so everyone can learn anything they want.