A very informative Frontline aired last night. You can still watch it online:
http://www.pbs.org/frontline/kidsonline
Frontline talks with children and families about online activities. If you have kids at home and they are online, you should watch this show.
NASA has released an RFI to develop a Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) game that creates interactions that foster the creative and problem solving skills of our youth. An MMO game is one where players interact with other players instead of computer controlled participants. Instead of five or ten players, there are hundreds or thousands. That’s the “massively” part.
This environment could permit students from all over the Internet to simulate a full scale NASA launch complete with separate launch and control centers, and even multiple spacecraft. In an MMO game, every person visible in the simulation is controlled by an actual person. This creates a much more dynamic environment because it is much less predictable.
Here is how the RFI describes the game.
A NASA-based MMO built on a game engine that includes powerful physics capabilities could support accurate in-game experimentation and research. It should simulate real NASA engineering and science missions in a medium that is comfortable and familiar to the majority of students in the United States today.
Exciting!
The Library of Congress has teamed up with Flickr to create The Commons. This is a new area in Flickr for public collections of photographs.
The LOC has added two sets (1930s-40s in Color & News in the 1910s) with a total of more than 3100 pictures. The idea behind The Commons is to let the public tag photos and add comments. Many of the photos do not have location information or the names of the people in the photos. The Flickr community can make these collections of public photos even better.
When I was a fifth grader, I had to memorize the capitals of all fifty states. It was something we all had to do and students probably still have to do it today. I don’t think my life has been better because I memorized all the capitals. I can recall a handful of times in the last thirty years when one of the capitals would come up in conversation.
Just last month, during the drive back to Ohio, we passed a car with Minnesota plates. For some reason I asked my wife the capital of Minnesota. I couldn’t remember it. Neither could she. Our guess was Minneapolis, but it was just a guess. We both scored 100% on that fifth grade test, and to my knowledge I haven’t been asked the capital of Minnesota since the 70’s.
When I got home, I looked it up. It took about five seconds to find. Not only did I find that Saint Paul is the capital, but also that it has a population of 287,151 according to the 2000 census. I found a map showing the city’s location in the state and it happens to be right next to Minneapolis. I read that the city is also known as “Pig’s Eye” because of a local tavern owned by a man who was blind in one eye.
That is more information than I have ever known about Minnesota’s capital. I will probably retain some of it because I was authentically interested in knowing about it. In a pinch I will just look it up again.
There are pieces of information that must be memorized. Elementary math facts are critical as students learn to do more complex mathematics. Every subject area has some items that must be memorized, but it seems like our students still focus on memorizing as the main skill.
The process of memorizing does get the brain working. I still play Brain Age and one of my favorite games is the 30 word memorization. I have found that I can generally function better when I play these games because my brain just works better.
Once my brain is working, I want to put it to better use than just memorizing trivia. I want to use it to solve problems.
For the last couple of weeks I have been looking for the ultimate start page for my iPod Touch. I use Google Mobile
but it leaves a lot to be desired. Yesterday at MacWorld, Google announced a much improved iPhone interface. The URL is
and it works great. It’s basically a nice RSS interface that is formatted to fit the iPhone format perfectly. The form factor for the iPhone and Touch interfaces are identical, so this benefits me too.