BlogDale

Everyone I show my Asus to is really impressed. Teachers can see that it will fit into their daily flow, students all want one (not just to play Tux games). In a Year 9 sessions today we talked about how useful it would be to have one in lessons and how they could grab information from the web to support their learning. Again, this use raises the issue of “information literacy” in that they would need to be able to differentiate between good and bad information, and where they should be looking for information and how to acknowledge it. All of the class members thought that the outlay was justified.

After a night of no-sleep on Weds (working on a project for somebody) I was in no shape to try to get the Asus to talk to the WPA-TKIP network. Apparently it won’t do it with the native ndiswrapper package and it needs madwifi. I think I fell asleep trying to install it all, but anyway my patience wore thin (helped with the nagging conscience that I should be doing reports) and I left it for another day. But I’d scrambled the wireless settings for home… Not to worry, there’s an easy rollback to default settings on the Asus and I was home and dry again.

Getting software - once the Synaptic repository manager is set up, installing packages is a doddle as with any Linux distro these days. I installed Audacity for good measure (just to prove it could be done - Harvey had asked me recently if I could do it, and it was easy once I’d found how to install synaptic). My favourite so far is the advanced desktop tweak, which changes the look and feel to be a standard KDE desktop. I was intending to install Ubuntu on the machine instead of the factory default Xandros Linux, but I don’t think I’ll do it yet awhile considering that Ubuntu isn’t so hot on wifi at the best of times (so I understand - please tell me if I’m wrong, but it took a bit of fiddling to get ndiswrapper installed on the kids’ EdUbuntu machine at home so that I could move it out of the study.) The Xubuntu people are getting things solved daily though, so it’s only a matter of waiting.

As I said in a previous post - this little machine is really going to change things around here.

Steve just pointed me at this video.   Since I learned that ordinary citizens can build stuff in Second Life I’ve become more of a convert to its potential for worthwhile learning…and my graphics card has a fit and all of a sudden I can’t get logged onto Second Life due to a technical fault dammit.  I’m itching to get working on it.

Anyway, here’s the vid.  I think it’s an awesome rendition of just some of the creativeness that can be tapped.

Download link

Last week saw the start of the CARS project at school, designed to raise the achievement and motivation of young mathematicians. Unable to resist, I’m hijacking part of it for my own ICT purposes - it just seems an ideal opportunity for the young leraners to develop their ICT skills in creating graphics to get their pictures on their teams, but most of all it gives them a chance to develop their writing skils on their team blogs (which we’re in the process of setting up). The intention is that we’ll do pre-race podcasts for each team, and we’ll also podcast the commentary from the races.

So what’s this challenge then? Well, using the CARS modelling program, participants set up a racing car according to their own measurements and estimations of the speeds it is capable of on a particular track. (The car parameters are taken from an actual Formula One car to add to the realism!). All sorts of other parameters are factored in such as weather, pitstops, tyre life and (my favourite) ) driver attitude. All this goes onto a spreadsheet model and the race is run - things get exciting as jostling for position goes on, engines overheat and the weather changes. Those drivers who made the right choices reap the rewards, and they climb the leaderboard in the race series.

Teams have already made themselves known at the CARS blog - watch this space (and that one) for exciting developments as they update their teamBlogs with their progress and successes.

Alice is a free programming environment from Carnegie Melon that anyone can learn quickly. Using drag and drop characters are added into a world then events and attributes can be assigned to them to make them move and/or respond to other events. Hey presto, it is possible to quickly build a 3D world with interactive characters and you just started Object Oriented Programming. (You really didn’t want to know the name of the process did you? Ignore it. Like Algebra. It’s not hard to do, but anything with a weird name is easy to deny knowledge of).

NASA never showed this on the out-takes

Check out the podcast interview

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