Turning the Supertanker

I was on the phone today to the guys at Novell, letting them know of our open source plans, they were very keen to hear more and we discussed options for “…getting the word on the streets.” We are pushing ahead. After I put the phone down I ordered 22 HP small form factor workstations. 5 of these will go into our new library and will represent the first of our true open source machines in school. Our library software AccessIT is based on an open source database and so the OPAC machines will be swapped over to the new system one at at a time and then the two issues machines will follow. The remaining machines are all destined for our ICT suite and will be dual booted in the first instance. However on the Windows partition I will load up all the open source windows variants that will be on the other Linux partition.

I am hoping to actually link Open Office Writer to the MS word icon and see if anyone notices the difference! I will simply package the new software as the latest update and see who squeals. I suspect that not many will. The biggest issue will be the actual swap from a Windows interface to the SUSE desktop environment and getting these Windows users to stop thinking like a Windows user to get things to work.

Today we got our first server built with SUSE server 10, early days yet and it has no function on the domain other than to be a Linux machine! We have also dual booted another couple of legacy laptops without any bother. We would have done one of the AP’s machines, but she was out on a course. She will be our first advocate in the field to run with our dual boot platforms.

Today has also been good for other reasons to. I have been hatching a plan to share our wonderful gully online for a while now. You can see it from Google Earth and in this video I made last year to let the students at Woodford know where we are in the world. It is my intention and has been for a long time to get a wireless gimbaled web cam set up at a bird feeding station somewhere in the gully so that we can share our wonderful resource online. I will stream live to the web and record the feed of Tuis feeding or whatever aspect we decide to record. The live stuff will be played via Mogulus and the recorded stuff will be played while we are offline and asleep, again via Mogulus so that the Northern hemisphere and other time zones can share in our bounty. Today I hope to have convinced one of the teachers on the supertanker to design a G+T course to create feed stations to attract the birds to the camera and in addition to investigate the potential to create a solar panel array to keep the camera charged all the times without the need for cables everywhere.

Finally today marked the start of this year’s robotics challenge. The students are excited and I am raring to go. This years challenge is designed to be a display at the art exhibition at the end of term three. The students have to build a standard NXT out of the box robot and then design an arm that can carry a whiteboard marker pen. The pen has to be able to be lifted and dropped so that they can control where the pen makes contact with the drawing surface. They will then have to write a program or programmes that create art, watch this space as I upload videos of their progress. Thursday afternoons have never been such fun, that is since the robotics programme on Friday mornings last year!

I have long advocated that every class should have a Lego robotics kit in it, be it the RCX blocks or the new NXT. I have used these robotics tools in my classes in England to great success and again last year in my G+T classes here in New Zealand. Some of the problems my students have solved have included designing a program to enable a robotic vehicle to negotiate a supermarket car park, get pairs of robots to dance in time with each other and the music they are grooving to, solve environmental issues such as collecting rubbish and sorting and opening and closing doors on command.

The ‘programmable bricks’ seem to me to be the perfect inquiry learning tool; students can postulate a question, research some potential outcomes, develop a theory, test the theory, evaluate the results, refine the initial theory, re-feed their evaluation into the cycle until a satisfactory answer falls out. And all this without an exercise book not only that the students are highly motivated to solve the problem of their own design.

Gary S. Stager has done some wonderful stuff with disaffected students, students at risk and youth offenders with this educational tool. His students have produced some truly amazing machines; the ones that come to mind are the fax machine and the log sorter. His site provides some excellent starter points, however, your students will find this tool so motivational you will not find it difficult to come up with ideas. On the contrary, often it is necessary to reign in the enthusiasm!

I think that not only is this tool a perfect inquiry tool that is an essential tool for every classroom, it also has the potential to create community links. Later this year I will be working with my students and the robotics kits again and this time they will be making a simple robot, no skills there, they can even follow the manual to do this. The variation will be that this time I will want them to create a program that will draw a sketch using three colours using board markers, what they draw and how they solve this is entirely up to them. I am intending to make this a collaborative project with other schools. Helen in Plymouth wants in and has just purchased her first NXT kit. Anyone else interested? We can mail our programmes to each other for evaluation and enhancement, we could even split the colour elements of the programmes up, now that really would be collaboration to ensure success! Of course we will be filming the robots creating the final art work and posting it to You Tube… Watch this space.

As you watch this video try to imagine if this had happened in your class, you can almost hear the questioning the probing of ideas, the set backs, the triumphs and most importantly the immense satisfaction of ownership on behalf of the students. Check out the video…