Portable constructivism

One of my enthusiasms about ICT in education is the potential of connected systems for building genuinely constructivist activities within which learners can invent their own ad hoc subcommunities in mutual support of organised work. Which sounds very fine and impressive, and is in many ways real, but sometimes runs aground on the fact that those learners often have to leave their learning context to access the facilities for doing the constructivist thing. (I’m talking science here, but change the specific examples and everything applies just as much to arts and humanities.)

Real science.

The advantage of portable computing devices is that they encourage “real science” activities out in the world – look at X’s “Pushing up daisies” quadrat activity, for example. To have a spreadsheet available at the same time as fishing around in a ditch for tadpoles, or recording estimated speeds and accelerations of aircraft lifting from a runway, or exploring a lemonade bottling plant, brings the analysis of data vividly to life as part and parcel of the phenomena being observed. When it comes to sharing the excitement with others, though, these devices have their shortcomings.

Generally speaking, a pupil with hand held computer has to store field data in a spreadsheet or database, write notes in a word processor; return to school or home; upload both to a PC or Mac; and only then start to merge them or share them with peers.

With the trial set of Asus netbooks, I was able to take groups of students out and make the computing a seamless part of the fieldwork. There are several levels to this.

Most basic level: sneakernet.

This applies in most field contexts. Here, the pupil enters his or her own data and makes his or her own notes, as in the usual handheld setup. However, a single USB flash drive is circulated continually around the group, each pupil backing up their work to it as it reaches them and then copying a complete set of files back to their own machine. It’s necessary to name the files logically (Jesh_Kaur.doc, Jesh_Kaur.xls; John_Smith.doc, John_Smith.xls; and so on) and to avoid overwriting and keep individual work distinct, but once that habit is established it means that every member of the group has both multiple recent backups her or his own work (on both the USB drive and the computers of other members of the group) and also reference access to near current copies of everyone else’s.

The next level: WAN to go.

This was amazingly easy to set up and use, though not suitable for all settings. All that is required is a wireless router, a power supply, and a relatively small study area. When in a museum, that lemonade bottling plant, or many other visit sites, a temporary wifi zone can (with site permission) be set up in an area such as the café or visitor centre. No internet access is available, but work sharing becomes immediate. If a wifi hard disk is attached to the router, so much the better – all shared work is then available to anyone within the coverage area, regardless of whether its author is within reach. If an adaptor is carried for running the router and disk from a vehicle’s cigarette lighter, good use can also be made of time on the minibus home afterwards.

Continuity at school and at home.

If each pupil is made an author on a shared blog, with restricted readership (to avoid predation risks, but also to provide the group with privacy from nonparticipant peers) and the teacher as administrator, subsequent write ups and analysis can be pooled. By copying and pasting material from the word processor or spreadsheet such blog entries are quickly and easily generated, then can be edited and developed in place. The blog takes care of permissions – each member of a group can red everyone’s material but only change his/her own. A small portable computer continually in the same pupil’s hands, allowing work to be done when that pupil feels like it (at home or at school), able to access the blog whenever and wherever wifi access is accessible, a great incentive to participate.

Team science

All in all, my trial period with these “netbooks” has been the best opportunity yet to develop in pupils a genuine constructivist experience of working in a real community of team science. The pupils working on this pilot responded magnificently, simultaneously nourishing and feeding from each other, exchanging ideas and critiques, competing to be the best contributors to shared success.

All I have to do now is get funding to buy a full class set for long term use!

[contributed by KateQ]

Netbooks - initial hardware housekeeping issues

I have been using Psion and Palm pocket computers extensively for some years to place computer assistance in the hands of primary pupils “doing science” outside the classroom. Given a trial set of “Classmate” Asus EEE PC subnotebooks (or “netbooks”) for a month, my first concern was not their capability (obviously greater, and to be dealt with in another post) but how far they could replace their smaller equivalents in the same rôle. The two crucial issues, with small children, are portability and survivability.

Portability is a relative term. Many of the boys to whom I loan a palmtop machine simply put it in their trouser pocket. Girls, on the other hand, usually put it in a school bag along with their books and so on. These Asus machines are about twice the size of a Psion, four times that of a Palm device. That makes them unpocketable, but doesn’t much affect a school bag. For boys, then, a change in behaviour is often necessary for these machines to be considered “portable”, but not for most girls.

For that reason, I loaned all five machines out to boys on 24 hour tickets in the first week just to see what would happen. In most cases, they went into sports bags (and came bag muddy) or satchels (and came back covered in grey fluff). In a significant minority (15%) of cases they were carried around continually in the hand, which places them at considerably greater risk (but see below on survivability).

After the first week they were loaned as required, regardless of gender or time span; as expected, the girls treated them exactly as if they were palmtops.

Survivability was more worrying, and I asked how much risk was acceptable in field trialling. The answer back from the sponsor was that deliberate attempts to test a machine to destruction would be unacceptable, but that we shouldn’t let potential hazard stop us from doing things we would do with a palmtop. It happened that a joint maths/sport project was under way, so the trial subnotebooks were added to the stock of Psions and Palms and allowed to go out onto football and netball pitches.

A football pitch provided the severest test of survivability. A pupil took one of the netbooks down to a practice game to try out both real time analysis of game descriptors entered into a spreadsheet (OpenOffice Calc, saving in Excel file format) and video capture to disk using the built in camera. The computer’s novelty attracted a lot of attention and it wasn’t long before attempts were made to take it away from its guardian, who resisted. In the resulting mêlée the computer was dropped, trampled on by several sets of studded boots and rolled over by half a dozen tussling nine year old boys. When order had been restored, the referee had to dig it out of the mud. Cleaning the mud out of USB ports, Ethernet socket, VGA output connector, sound jacks and, worst of all, the keyboard, took a lot of time, patience and cocktail sticks but, miraculously, everything was still in perfect working order. After that, we sealed all orifices with electrical insulating tape unless they were needed for use; proper sealing plugs would be better still, but would probably get lost fairly quickly.

Fast forward: despite horror stories like this, and my gut feeling that these machines are not ultimately as robust as handhelds, none came to grief in the time we had them.

My summary judgement: these are a valuable addition to the portable computing options available for primary science. Since Psion type machines are no longer made, and can only be replaced second hand, their gradual replacement on failure by these small subnotebooks seems a good strategy. At the same time, it would be a mistake to withdraw a working handheld (especially of the palm type). For as long as possible, keep existing palmtop hardware in use but expand enthusiastically with subnotebooks.

[Contributed by Chandra]

Experiments with a one-per-student computer

Asus’ EEE PC, though useful in many other areas (see more extensive review here), is a computer designed specifically for education. A wireless platform cheap enough, light enough, robust enough, small enough and powerful enough to be seriously proposed as a go anywhere, work anywhere, one per child point of wireless entry into a networked school system. We don’t know whether this vision is about to become reality at this moment, but we don’t doubt that it will come about in time – and the EEE PC is certainly closer than anything else we have seen to the keystone which would make it possible.

Over the past few months we have been sharing a set of these machines, moving them around different groups for a week or two at time and comparing notes on the results.

The machine is small enough to just about go into a handbag, as some of our young female teenage students demonstrated, is big enough for adapted touch typing after some practice, has on board wireless or wired network connectivity, is provided with three USB ports plus microphone/headphone jacks and is remarkable resilient.

Prices start at £167 (about $300 or €230 at time of writing), although the the ones we used were those with two or four megabytes of storage at £220 or £250 respectively ($400/€300 or $450/€340). Each machine in our set was also provided with a one gigabyte SD/MMC card, on which the default documents folder was configured to reside.

Despite some remarkably rough treatment, the complete set survived and were returned to the supplier in full working order.

That’s it for now. We will follow up with individual posts on our separate experiences over the trial period.

[Contributed by Chandra on behalf of the whole trial group]

Muzak to math by (2): the mourning after the note before

In November, we said that we were about to try a series of “Music and Maths” sessions aimed at 16-19 year old students, to culminate in a public performance.

We were looking for a program which would “listen” to a note and report its frequency, and at the time didn’t find one - though we have, with many thanks to Steven Pon who wrote in response to the original post, since discovered WavePort, from PASCO Scientific.

We ran a pilot with individuals, audibly matching frequency generated from a PC to plucked strings and pressed electronic organ keys, and got surprisingly good results with very close approximations to the theoretical curves. Unfortunately, when we extended this to a class it was much less successful.

We split the class into two groups, one with a guitar and one with an electronic organ, and set them to matching frequency to note in the same way, discussing amongst themselves the best match and coming to a consensus on the value to be entered into a spreadsheet log. For some reason, the results did not even remotely resemble the pilot with individuals. Some results followed the theoretical curve; some were completely out (including, interestingly, some which were almost exactly one octave adrift) and others which perversely followed a sequence in the wrong direction!

We’ve dropped the idea for the time being, pending more thought and trialling. On the positive side, however, we learnt  a lot - and the students were very coöperative in trying to make the experiment work. We’ll be back to it in due course.

[contributed by Ivor McGillivray and Felix Grant]

After time of drought and famine…

For a wide variety of reasons (most of them educational!), the education pages have been quiet over the past few months.

Things are coming together again, however, and I hope that things will be busier  from April 21st (when most Spring breaks end) onward.

Testing equation editor responses - results

Having marked the physics assignments submitted during my mini experiment (see Testing equation editor responses), after some delay caused by the flu which is doing the rounds, I sat down to look at what they revealed. Questionnaires were given to the students after hand in, disguised to appear as enquiry into attitudes and responses to aspects of school itself rather than the equation editors, supplied some valuable information about students viewpoints and inclinations. Information form other staff, including assessments and reports, provided a third reference point.

Taking all of that together, the results broadly corresponded with Lakshmi’s perception.

Students whose favourite subjects include the visual and dramatic arts, and whose best marks are in those subjects, tended to handle Equations! with more confidence than MathType, and to produce better designed physics assignment pages when working on the machine on which it was installed. Interestingly, this was also true of those whose focus is physical activity (games, sports, physical education).

Students with a preference and bias towards English Language, literature, history, geography, and sociology showed the reverse inclination: they performed best, and felt greatest confidence, when using MathType.

Surprisingly, the split was also visible within the subgroup of students who prefer and perform best in the sciences. Students whose chemistry is stronger than their biology had a MathType leaning, while their peers who lean towards biology but have a weakness in chemistry preferred Equations!. Those whose strength is in physics and/or maths, however, were indifferent to which package they used, were equally competent and confident in either, but showed irritation at having to switch from one to another, in either direction, when resuming an assignment on a different machine.

One final split emerged. Formulator Express is freely available to all students on all other school computers apart from the two laptops which they were required to use for this assignment. In roughly equal numbers, some students preferred either of the trial packages to that established option while others reacted against the need to shift away from it. None of them placed preference for their usual tool above one of the trial packages but below the other - either they preferred it to both, or they didn’t.

[contributed by Ross]

Muzak to math by

We are in the throes of initial planning for a series of “Music and Maths” sessions aimed at 16-19 year old students, to culminate in a public performance. Using a mix of computing technologies and Blue Peter style building from scratch, the idea is to start from rediscovery of the twelve note scale and build up through construction of instruments.

The first problem we have encountered is an apparent dearth of devices or software which will listen to a note and read out its frequency. There are plenty of them (aimed at instrument tuning) which will do it the other way round, reading out a note name (C, F#, G, etc), but not a frequency. And although we did work out an alternative approach based on these guitar tuners, the interference from a building full of computing equipment, hearing aid loop generators, WiFi networks, several hundred cellphones etc, swamped them and made them useless.

A microphone attached to an oscilloscope is too unwieldy for our purpose: first introduce the oscilloscope, then explain the setting of time bases, learn to disregard noise … a one hour session would be over before anything useful had even stared. It will be useful and interesting further in, but not at the beginning.

Plan C involves auditory comparison of a tone generator signal to played keyboard and guitar string notes, by tweaking the frequency specified in the generator and deciding by consensus when a played note has been matched. This looks initially promising. We have started with NCH’s tone generator, which works well; the synthesiser at National Taiwan Normal University’s physics department also looks promising:

An alternative, offering sequential playing of different frequencies will be needed for subsequent work; a purpose made interface for preference, though it could be done using a mathematics package or even BASIC at a pinch. Ivor has written one as a Java Applet, but security measures in the browser environment where it will be used are raising barriers which have still to be resolved.

More as the idea progresses…

[contributed by Ivor McGillivray and Felix Grant]

Alignment in equation editors

[Regarding the discussions of Lakshmi and Ross:]

We do not have text alignment in Equations because when wanted to adhere to strict latex notation. Everything you do visually has a correspondence in the latex code and vice versa.

But latex has several shortcomings regarding text editing, for example by default you cannot use colour, we needed to dig an extension to allow that. This did not really bother us as anyway MS Word, Open Office, etc, have far better alignment and positioning options than the ones available in latex text formatting.

After all it was never our intention with Equations to build a fully featured word processor but only an equation editor to work with other word processors.

[contributed by Luis Dias]

Testing equation editor responses

Following Lakshmi’s post on use of three equation editors, and a conversation with AbsentCat about discussion with the author of Equations, I was curious about how differences in formatting assumptions are perceived by users.

Equations implicitly assumes that the host application (word processor, web editor, or whatever) will see to arrangement of completed equations in relation to its own design priorities. MathType, on the other hand, assumes that a given equation system will be arranged according to a chosen set of mathematical conventions, indepenent of the context within which it is to be placed.Both assumptions have arguments in their favour; but they are nevertheless distinct. I wonder whether there is a possible link between them and Lakshmi’s observation that MathType appealed to her verbal side, Equations to her visual sense.

Yesterday I started a small experiment. I am trying out both programs on a class of fifteen year olds typing up a short physics investigation. None of them has used an equation editor before, so they were all given a training session on both products. They have now been told to use one of two otherwise identical laptops, always available in the lab, to type up their work in booked sessions over the next two weeks. One machine has Equations and the other MathType, but neither reveals which until after log in, and I shall randomly switch their positions. I hope that subsequent questionnaires will show what (if any) differences emerge in their responses.

[contributed by Ross]

The joy of equations

Part of my summer holiday was spent in trying to learn something about stuff outside the textbook areas of maths I’ve been looking at. They are fascinating, but because I’m still an arts and humanities girl at heart I needed something more romantic to lighten them up a bit.

My history teacher showed me some examples of how models can be used to try out ideas and see whether they fit what really happened in the past - for instance, I’ve played with a set of equations for the expansion of the Mongol empire mentioned in Sunstorm, and the spread of the Black Death in fourteenth century CE Europe. He also introduced me to sociology, where equations describe the behaviour of large numbers of people.Anyway, to get back to scientific computing, I find the way equations are written very beautiful but the way they go into a lot of software programs is ugly (especially spreadsheets). I often need to write them out myself before I can relate to them. Mr Grant lent me a computer with several programs which just write equations, the way you would by hand but typing them on screen. I’ve also been given a school copy of a free one (supplied by the government education ministry) to use on my own computer. I’ve had a lot of fun with these programs, and they have made the final connection between the excitement I feel about physics models and the “aesthetic me” that loves poetry and drama and painting.

The free program is Formulator Express, and is part of a set of programs given to teachers. I am very glad to have it for my own, but I hope to get my own copy of either MathType or Equations! (both of them have to be bought, but my uncle is talking about getting me one for my birthday). They are both very good, and do more than the free program, but I think different people would buy them. MathType appeals to the part of me which likes to write words, and Equations! pleases the bit of me that likes pictures - equations are both descriptions and pictures of something I can’t see with my eyes, only in my head.

All of these programs come down to picking and combining symbols, then letting the computer take care of drawing, spacing, arrangement and so on. The result is wonderfully sensual, with all the curves of a proper font setting off the beauty of the equation itself. They give you all sorts of ways to control and fine tune the way the equation looks, but won’t let you break the rules which control how an equation is supposed to look. They are magic. They have all the best bits of hand writing equations but let you adjust everything until it’s just right.

Equations! and Mathtype both help you to do a techie language called LaTex as well. I don’t think Formulator does, or if it does then I haven’t found it. I’m only just starting to figure this out, but it’s a way to describe equations. I’ve sort of got my head round the basic idea, but I don’t think I’d ever have the patience to get good at it - so it’s a good thing that these equation editors do a lot of it for you. For myself I found Equations! best for this part, it seemed more like the way I think, although MathType does whole pages of stuff at once.

I said before the summer that I had started painting equations. The equation editors have encouraged me to develop that work, and I have several sketchpads filled with arrangements of equations and graphs combined on the same page. (Apart from being beautiful, this is also useful. I tried to make sense of Einstein’s relativity stuff from a book, and got closest to understanding it through my montaged watercolour sketches.)

Now my English teacher (who started me on this stuff in the first place) and the art teacher have suggested that I work up some of my sketches into background scenery for a German play called Die Physiker, about Newton and Einstein. I am worried about this, as I don’t want to get known as a geek, but the idea does make me feel excited. I have done some experiments in the drama studio after school this term, putting Equations! equations and Autograph curves from the computer onto large sheets of calico to see how the forms and dynamics work together on a large scale.

[contributed by Lakshmi]

• Autograph and Equations! were supplied by Chartwell Yorke (who also stock MathType).
• Formulator (from Hermitech Laboratory in the Ukraine) is licensed for educational use as part of a standards pack from the UK Department for Education and Skills. The free version used by Lakshmi, Formulator Express, can be downloaded, or a full version purchased.
• MathType was supplied by Design Science.