Netbooks on the road

My part of this “netbooks” trial involved much hair loss. Since the base for my work with disconnected teenagers is a cybercafé, there is no obvious rôle for a small, pocketable computer in the normal context of what I do. To make good use of the opportunity, I had to let these machines go out of my control, into an environment where small high value objects are regarded as currency. The sponsors said they were willing to take the risk of loss, provided that I took what I considered reasonable care to minimise it … what, exactly, constitutes reasonable care when handing expensive stuff over to teenagers who may not come back, have class A drug habits, and are due in court on Wednesday for handling stolen goods?

The other question was what exactly to do with these machines, to justify taking the risk. These two issues were linked; my clients had to feel that something worthwhile was going on, if they were to respect the tools involved.

One subject which interests all of them, regardless of gender, is cars. A month before the netbooks arrived, I started discussing with them the relationships between weight, power, speed and acceleration in a car. They have rather more practical understanding of these matters than can be easily explained by legal experience at their age so I concentrated on trying to relate this to theoretical engineering models, first visual and then symbolic.

With the netbooks on hand, I brought the talk around to how we might investigate the actual (rather than maximum or advertised) speed and acceleration values for real cars in daily use. They were very interested in this idea, and were keen to try their hand at using spreadsheets for the purpose. Then they realised that they would have to write down a lot of information and bring it back to the centre, then key it in, before they could do anything with it; at that point, disappointment and loss of interest threatened. Like a good conjuror, I then produced the netbooks.

Gathering data

The scheme they devised involved teams of six, each team stationed downstream from a Pedestrian Light Controlled crossing (this allowed two teams per crossing, getting double data for each red light, at three different crossings). The team leader (let’s call her or him “A”) would stand by the lights themselves, and would have the computer with an open spreadsheet. “B” through to “F” would be at measured distances downstream from the lights.

When the lights turned red (probably because “A” had pressed the button, but I didn’t enquire too closely), “A” would take up a position beside the frontmost car and enter details (make, model including engine size if possible, number of occupants) into the spreadsheet. When the lights went amber, “A” would raise his or her arm and the others would prepare to start stopwatches (mostly on mobile phones, though a few used the function on their wristwatches). When the lights turned green “A” would drop the raised arm and start walking up the line; the rest of the team would start the stopwatches running.

As the lead car passed each team member, the stopwatch at that position would be stopped. As “A” reached each, the time on their stop watch would be entered into the spreadsheet. In this way, a database of timings at fixed distances for different vehicles was built up. The results were also visible in a predefined scatter plot at the right of the same screen, with an interpolated trend line, so the model could be seen developing as they worked. When complete, the sets of data were merged into a single sheet on the desk top and then filtered to compare different data for similar subsets.

As for the risk, I handed over the complete trial set to the two alpha primes in the group (one male, one female) and left them to arrange distribution; and all came back.

Taking it further

This probably seems an underutilisation of the equipment. The same data collection could, after all, have been done with a pocket PC or similar (in fact, the idea was partly suggested by Chandra’s Big Freeze which used Psion clamshells. But the experience of taking “proper computers” out, and being trusted to do so, was worth its weight in gold and stimulated desire to learn. There were, in any case, two follow ups which would not have been possible with handhelds.

First, there was use of a pure mathematics package to compare the experimental data with a theoretical model. Chandra and AbsentCat had described their use of SysQuake LE for projectile modelling. SysQuake is available for both Windows (in the cybercafé) and Linux (on the netbooks) so I installed both. Having set up a basic acceleration equation (d=½at²) on the PC, we set the value of a by trial and error to give a line which matched the spreadsheet data. The young people found this very empowering, and probably learnt more algebraic confidence in half an hour of SysQuake than in all of their time with me to date. They also learned, to their surprise, that most acceleration is over within a very short time (with speed surprisingly low and surprisingly constant) on urban roads.

Second, AbsentCat scrounged us the loan of a set of plug in USB interfaces allowing various types of switch to start or stop timers on the netbooks. The students had a lot of fun with trying out various switching devices. We were loaned some pressure mats which could be placed on the road, though too often the passing vehicles avoided them. We experimented with home made trembler switches, but they were too sensitive, and hard to position usefully. Lengths of rubber tube, filled with water, were laid across the road with light pressure sensitive microswitches plugged into the ends – these were the most successful, and supplied 95% of our usable data.

Broader benefits

The tremblers were a complete failure in data collection terms but worth their weight in gold for the interest which they provoked. A drop of mercury is placed in the bottom of a glass tube; one electrode is immersed in it, and another arranged as a circular collar around the inside of the tube, fractionally above the meniscus; any motion which shakes the tube causes the mercury to make contact between the two electrodes, completing a circuit. Most of my clients have, at some time, been involved in vehicle theft, and immediately realised the relevance of tremblers to car alarms. We got a lot of chemistry, physics and engineering time out of the resulting investigations – even starting a new set of data collection exercises to investigate the link between tube size, collar spacing, and the trade off between sensitivity and discrimination.

This second (more accurate) phase gave us enough data to further investigate the mathematical model, and to extend it into areas such as mechanical work or power/weight ratios. It also allowed us to compare vehicles by type (small car, four wheel drive, bus, lorry, motorcycle, etc). Most valuably, in some ways, it led on naturally to discussing the range of road behaviours exhibited by different users of the same vehicle.

[Contributed by BobTheBumbler]

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 gigabytes 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]

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]

Stonehenge - mathematics and environmental education

This is a brief description of the Stonehenge trip mentioned on May 1st this year under the heading Sun, moon and stones.

A much fuller description is provided on the Articles and papers page.

The Field Visit

A-Level and pre-GCSE Mathematics students took part in a Field Visit to Stonehenge in 1^st May 2007, one day before Full Moon. The curriculum comprised practical project-based activities integrating content from mathematics, astronomy, climate science and history¹. The party was permitted full Stone Circle Access in the evening – and an opportunity to observe moonrise and sunset from the centre of the monument. These activities were documented on film, and students were encouraged to take part in its production. The Field Visit had two main aims:

• to improve mathematics motivation;

• to afford learners a powerful affective experience of the natural world.

The latter goal features prominently in certain understandings of environmental education.

Summary of findings

• The Field Visit was highly rated by student participants.

• There is some evidence that the Field Visit improved interest in mathematics within both pre-GCSE and A-Level cohorts. In the case of the pre-GCSE cohort, however, this effect seems to have been temporary, although situational interest was stimulated on the day. This cohort seemed to especially appreciate the opportunity of using mathematical tools. Some amongst the A-Level cohort expressed a preference for contextualising mathematics within integrated project-based curricula.

• Stone Circle Access afforded a majority of student participants a powerfully affective experience. Here are some of the words that students chose to describe their experience: inspiring, fabulous, stunning, intriguing, mystical, awesome, epic, great, fascinating, indescribable.

• The experience of some individuals might be characterised in terms of cosmological based identification. For example, one student reported
  …it was like in Physics when you talk about the Universe. Inside the circle she felt small. The builders of Stonehenge were probably smaller than her. But still managed to put up those big stones. She felt small in comparison to them.
  

[1] The objective of the A-Level mathematics activity was to calculate the azimuth (bearing East of True North) of the Summer Solstice sunrise in 2000 AD, 2000 BC, 3000 BC as seen from the centre of Stonehenge using a theodolite and trigonometry. The sunrise azimuth slowly varies over millennia due to oscillation of the tilt of the earth. This oscillation is one of the three Milankovitch cycles and it is thought to have been a causal factor in the alternation of glacial and inter-glacial periods between one and three million years ago.

Mathemagica - Mathematica Player completes the magic square

I have, in the past, seen the effective use by contributor AbsentCat of magic squares in a remarkable spread of contexts. From the moment they learn to add three single digit numbers together for a two digit answer (the row/column/diagonal sum of a 3×3 magic square is 15), children are fascinated. The intellectual appeal can still be triggered at any age above that - I have seen it enthuse a mixed truancy group with ages from 10-16, a hospital education group containing a very sick 18 year old cancer patient, and a pensioners’ Third Age study group. Only the management and presentation needs to change.

And the magic square is not just an entry point to mathematics: it has ramifications for almost every other curriculum (and wider) context.

Having seen this success I have, naturally, copied it in my own teaching and staff development work. But always on paper. For very small children, a paper sheet is the only approach that works (mark each correctly entered number with a brightly coloured counter or, if appropriate in the context, a sweet or piece of dried fruit). For older pupils, however, hands on ICT approaches offer tremendous potential - and Allmath.com’s interactive “sheet of paper equivalent” (see below) is wonderful. The missing element has, until now, been an instant, hands on generator and explorer of any n×n magic square or squares on demand.

For the teacher, Matlab and many compatible systems (including the free version of Sysquake and its Palm implementation Lyme) offer a very useful command to generate magic squares: “magic(n)” where n is the size of the square. (My thanks to AbsentCat, who pointed me to these resources.) For some older pupils, these are also useful.

There are a lot of useful materials on the web for building an ICT based “magic square portal” in the classroom. All that is needed is an interactive square calculator. For older secondary ages (Y8 for some pupils, Y13 or beyond for others), Sysquake Remote web implementation is a possibility, but not for the primary years. The Wolfram Demonstrations Project and free player, however, offer just the thing: a magic square generator with “dragable” column/row/locus cursor.

This Mathematica demonstration allows a magic square of any (odd number) size from 1 to 13 to be generated instantly using a slider at the top of the frame. A cursor can then be dragged around the square, highlighting the row and column containing a particular selected cell. Computation is left to the pupil, which is valuable arithmetic practice, but the cells involved are clearly isolated which minimises mistakes. A perfect fit for the missing piece in the ICT magic squares session.

Starting points for other material which has served me well are:

• Allan Adler’s Mathforum pages on magic squares
• Allmath.com’s interactive equivalent of a paper magic square sheet

[contributed by Chandra]

Seeker

McDevitt, Jack. Seeker. 2006, New York, Ace.

Chase Kolpath, the narrator of Jack McDevitt’s novel Seeker, is a grave robber. So is her boss, Alex Benedict. They’re good at it, too, but prefer to think of themselves as antiquities dealers.

Alex and Chase have made some significant finds during their careers, and have collected both friends and enemies along the way. Now they are on the trail of the biggest find of their careers and somebody wants to stop them, badly enough to kill them.

Their introduction to the case arrives with an old plastic cup with ancient lettering, brought to their office for appraisal by Amy Kolmer, a woman obviously ignorant of its true value but hoping for a quick sale. Analysis of the cup reveals it to be approximately 9,000 years old. The lettering is in an ancient language known as English, and their AI (artificial intelligence) gives an initial translation of Searcher or Explorer as the name of the ship it must have come from.

Alex Benedict is a very successful antiquities dealer. If there is one 9,000 year-old cup from a ship, there is a chance of more. All he has to do is find the ship.

Alex makes the decisions, but it seems Chase does all the legwork, and there is plenty of legwork involved. How did the cup come into Amy’s hands? What was the real name of the ship? Where did it sail from? Most important of all, where is it now?

An historian is able to tell them the ship’s name — the Seeker, one of two ships belonging to the ancient Margolians. Nine-thousand years before, the Seeker had left an America mired in religious and political oppression for a world where “not even God will be able to find us.” They were never heard from again. Their disappearance became one of the most enduring myths of human colonization, and one cup from that lost colony was sitting in Alex Benedict’s safe. He now had an even greater prize than just a ship full of treasure. He was on the trail of the Margolians, and he intended to be the one to finally answer the question of what had happened to the lost colony.

Eventually they find the ship, and another set of mysteries, and that’s where the science comes in.

Chase spends several chapters hunting down clues as to where the ship currently is. Searching through old ship logs and questioning owners of the cup over the previous 30 years may not seem like science, but it is. A large part of any scientific investigation is the gathering of evidence.

Among the bits and pieces Chase uncovers is evidence that the actual discoverers of the Seeker were killed in an earthquake and resulting avalanche 30 years previous. They had been with Survey, and had spent the twelve years following their retirement from Survey returning to the same location in space again and again, with no record of where they had gone beyond the incomplete memories of their daughter, a young girl at the time of the accident. Was it someplace they had found during their time with Survey? Finding the answer to that requires learning something about how to set up an efficient flight plan, then comparing that plan to possible variations that might account for a shift to study a G-class star at the end of its hydrogen burning cycle, a type that was of particular interest to them. The deviation tells Chase where to look for the Seeker.

The Seeker is found, full of dead colonists, mostly children. Eric theorizes that it appears they were trying to escape some sort of catastrophe. There are no live Margolians, and the only planet that once might have sustained human life now has an extreme orbit creating long winters where humans could not survive. Investigation of the Seeker reveals that many original parts had been replaced with those from its sister ship, the Bremerhaven. An empty space dock is also found, but the Bremerhaven is not. So a new question—what happened to the Bremerhaven?

What if a comet, or some other object, had hit the planet or passed nearby? Could it have caused the changes in the orbit of their suspected colony world? How big would it have to be? When would it have happened? Would the colonists have had enough notice to plan an escape? Could there have been two escape plans, one for the majority of the colonists, with another, less risky, plan to get their precious children back to Earth? If yes, where did they go with the Bremerhaven, when it no longer had star-flight capability? Where were they now? This time a friend, and her knowledge of astrophysics, provides the answers they need. How she does it, and what they find afterwards, you’ll need to read the book to learn. It’s a good read, and you’ll learn a bit about the movement of planetary bodies, too.

One more mystery they solve before the end — they also find out who’s trying to kill them, and why.

[Reviewed by Donna]

Virtual experiments from Kinetic Books

Supplier: Kinetic Books, http://www.kineticbooks.com.

One of the challenges in tackling the declining popularity of science subjects throughout education, or seeking to increase the scientific literacy of those who will not be scientists, is how to make experimental science concepts accessible, fun and relevant. Tapping into the skills and environments which young people already inhabit is one very good way to tackle that challenge.

Kinetic Books offer a system of online or CD based textbooks and virtual labs; I was particularly interested in the Virtual Labs, and concentrated mainly on those. The system is explicitly designed for learning across a range of physics topics, but the way they are presented makes it very easy to incorporate selections from the material into other courses too. Mathematics, of course, is an obvious beneficiary, but scientific thinking components can be introduced or strengthened within other areas from social studies through critical thinking and public understanding of science to art history.

There is a core of instructional material, with good use of hypertext sidebars offering expanded information plus frequent check and stimulus questions. There are also links to material elsewhere, and graphically simulated experiments. It could be used as a self study resource pure and simple; there will be contexts in which that is appropriate, but for me the strength lies in the ease with which bite sized parts can be used to enrich other approaches.

The levels of mathematics involved encourage this second view. Learners do not need calculus, but are expected to be comfortable and fluent in manipulation of inverse quadratics. The interactive simulations, on the other hand, could be used alone to develop intuitive understanding at any level from infant school upward. Selecting portions in this way, I’ve experimented successfully with learners aged from 8 to 34. There is also the question of national differences in curriculum; British teachers would find frequent discontinuities between US and UK content if they tried to work exactly to KB’s structure without adaption.

For me, the simulations are the real centre. Using graphics to good effect they provide the opportunity for hands on experiment with a range of models which are difficult or impossible to set up physically, and hard to observe reliably.

The motion of a simple projectile can be modelled easily enough using a bouncing ball, but monitoring the velocity and position of that ball with any precision requires either video recording or specialised equipment and lots of time. Getting access to a helicopter is usually both difficult and expensive. Orbital mechanics are entirely beyond any realistic classroom or lecture theatre environment. Using Kinetic Books’ virtual physics lab, all three become very quick and trivially easy to explore, with unlimited reruns allowing deep exploration in the time needed just to set up a ball bouncing experiment.

The simple projectile is modelled as a cannon ball (one dimensional motion having already been covered beforehand). First it rolls out of the muzzle and falls vertically to ground. Then, by adjusting the muzzle velocity, the learner attempts to drop it into a pile of sand some distance away - unsuccessful attempts remaining on the ground where they land, as markers, while trial and error brings subsequent shots closer and closer until the sand pile is scattered by a direct hit.

The cannon starts in a fairytale Arthurian style castle, then later appears on a globe as Newton’s Cannon for the first introduction to orbital and escape velocities. After that, it is replaced by the moon - which, in a game style setup, must be restored to orbital velocity before it falls and destroys the Earth. Further simulations involve docking of two spacecraft on different orbits, the twin moons of Mars, and so on. The orbits concerned are not simple geocentric circles, either - Deimos, for instance, changes its elliptical motion in relation to both Mars and Phobos, its velocity visibly changing between perigee and apogee.

I’ve concentrated on projectile motion because it is a key part of the freely available trial material, but there are plenty of other topics - waves, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, light and optics - at levels from the concept of measurement to special relativity and quantum or nuclear physics.

Pricing is realistic in comparison to other resources, and can be managed in various ways to suit different usages - even light use will justify the expenditure on perpetual licences, and individual private copies are affordable by any student who already buys course books. The experiments rely on Java, Quicktime and Flash, but those are free downloads. I hit an initial problem with some of them not displaying correctly, but response from Kinetic Books to my call for help was prompt and effective - the solution is a simple tick box in Quicktime’s setup.

Nothing in this world is ever perfect, and a review wouldn’t be complete without mentioning a couple of minor reservations, and the textbook entry on SI units illustrates both.

The importance of “powers of ten” is presented, and 1000 metres in a kilometre is given as an example (though this is an American text, so be prepared for US spellings of “meters” and “kilometers”). The principle of ten to the power three as a standard spacing, however, is not made clear without following further links.

Then there is the embedding within a wider, nonscience cultural context. This is one of the things I really like about Kinetic Books, and a reason why I would recommend them, but it has its tightropes and pitfalls. For instance, while I am very glad to see the origins of the SI set in the larger picture of revolutionary France, I might have preferred students to decide for themselves, rather than be told, that the “revolutionaries were a little extreme (as revolutionaries tend to be)”.

But, I repeat, these are minor details in a well designed and thought out whole which I recommend.

I’m very grateful to Donna (see contributors page) for pointing me towards these resources.

Supplier: Kinetic Books, http://www.kineticbooks.com.

[Contributed by AbsentCat]

Sunstorm

Arthur Clarke and Stephen Baxter. Sunstorm. 2005, London, Gollancz. ISBN 9780575078017

This isn’t a book about computing or computers, but computers and computing are behind everything that happens in it. It’s a really cool book, even though my English teacher lent it to me. In fact, it’s the second book in a series (the first one, Time’s Eye, is cool too, but doesn’t belong in this review).

The sun is going to flare out and destroy everything on the Earth - not just humans but all life, even bacteria. Mostly, the book is about how this happened and how people try to prevent it. You don’t have to know anything about the science or the computing to enjoy it, but you pick them up along the way without realising you’re learning them.

There’s this weird genius on the moon who uses computers to do a load of maths to let everyone know that the sun is going to flare. That’s one of the ways computing comes into it, because he builds something called a computer model which lets him visualise what’s going to happen to the sun. I didn’t know about computer models before, and you don’t have to know about them, but I got really interested and read about them. His model doesn’t only tell him what’s going to happen though - he runs it backwards, as well, and figures out why it’s going to happen. Then you get a different sort of computer model, and that shows how a huge planet like Jupiter was catapaulted across billions of kilometres of space using gravity wells (I didn’t know what gravity wells were either - that’s another cool idea I learned from this book and then looked up afterwards).

But there’s other sorts of computing, too, not just maths and stuff. The internet has sort of grown up, and become an artificial intelligence, and been recognised as a legal person called Aristotle after an ancient Greek bloke. Then there’s another internet on the moon, and that’s not so big or complicated but it’s intelligent too and it’s called Thales. And finally there’s the huge sunshade they build to protect the earth and it has to be run by a big intelligent computer as well, so that becomes a person called Athena.

I don’t think I’m ever going to be an astronomer, or a physicist, or an army officer or a weird genius, or a mathematician. But this book made me realise that you don’t have to be a scientist to learn science and find it exciting, and that maths isn’t just boring numbers it can be used to do and understand all sort of exciting stuff. I can be someone who understands what those people are talking about. For instance, I stopped ignoring my maths teacher, and started talking to him, and he explained several things in the book using a computer. I was able to watch the big planet being catapaulted across space, and I could change things to see how they affected where the planet went. And my physics teacher used a computer to show me what Lagrange points are. (The big intelligent sunshade had to be on a Lagrange Point, where there is no gravity - there are five Lagrange Points round every planet or moon, and they’re an amazing idea, you can hover on them with almost no fuel, and I understand three of them now even if I couldn’t do the maths myself yet). You can find out about Lagrange points at Wikipedia

Because of this book I’ve started paying attention in maths, physics and biology, and found that they are exciting if you listen to what they are about instead of just assuming that they are boring. And I’ve started learning about computers, and what they can do, and the science programs that help me to learn about how the universe works.

One of the things I like is that several of the important characters are women, not just men like most books: the American president, the European prime minister, the British Astronomer Royal. So if you’re a girl you can see a future in this sort of exciting science for yourself even if the world doesn’t end! One of the women, an army officer called Bisesa Dutt who is the main person in book one and then helps to save the world in book two, is also British Asian like me which is better still.

There’s one slightly gross bit, in the middle, giving too much information about how you have sex in orbit, but it’s only one page and you can skip over it without missing anything.

[Reviewed by Lakshmi]

Handheld computers in the classroom

Handheld computers don’t replace laptops but they do have several advantages for many classroom and fieldwork applications.

• They are less expensive. A modest model perfectly capable of hosting science software can be bought retail for around £60 or €90, at the time of writing; education and/or bulk discounts pull that down further. This means that more of them can be placed in student of pupil hands for the same investment - roughly ten handhelds for the price of one laptop.
• They are small and light which encourages instant, intuitive their use at the classroom desk, on the lab bench, during field trips, at home, and so on.
• With suitable software they can mimic a range of popular scientific calculators (graphing or otherwise, as preferred). The computer itself is similar in cost to such calculators, the software often free or inexpensive from sources such as PalmGear or Handango. Unlike the hardware calculator, the software is upgradable for little or no cost.
• They can make software such as database managers more manageable and user friendly.
• In some respects they resemble cellphones, which increases accessibility and appeal for young users. They also, for the same reason, encourage exploration of the serious, education relevant potential of newer “smart phones” which often run similar software.
• Some of them have Bluetooth communications which allow them to be instantly networked with each other and with the teacher’s or lecturer’s laptop (or own handheld) for distributed brainstorming and data sharing.

Handheld computers have passed through several development stages. First came the keyboard equipped clamshells such as the Psion or its rebadged Xemplar Pocketbook form. For some time now, though, the dominant format has been the “mini tablet” operated by a stylus and touch screen. Detachable keyboards (or separate wireless keyboards) are available for many models.These mini tablet machines are available in two main competing forms with incompatible operating systems - PalmOS or PocketPC. I personally consider the PalmOS machines to be superior, and to have a better range of software (and they start at lower prices too) but PocketPC has the advantage of resembling Microsoft Windows which helps to make them instantly usable by students used to a PC. Try, if possible, to borrow one of each and talk to users of both - and, of course, find out whether one system or the other is already in use amongst colleagues with whom you can exchange ideas and work.

There is a third option, Symbian, but this is primarily to be found in smart phones - including the popular Nokia models.

[Contributed by AbsentCat]