education

Suddenly, it seems like everyone's trying to get in on the affordable educational laptop game. Not so long ago, we took a look at the new Intel Convertible Classmate initiative, which didn't have a specific product so much as a global push for manufacturing durable kid-oriented tablet Netbooks. The Dell Latitude 2100 also explored this territory last year.

HP has now entered the game too with the HP Mini 100e, a thick, ruggedized variation on their existing Netbook series. Its price seems to be one of the chief advantages, coming in at $299. Other products such as the … Read more

Does the thought of geometry bring back stressful high-school math memories? Geometry Playground, a new exhibit opening Friday at San Francisco's Exploratorium, could help you rethink your associations with proofs, polygons, and acute angles by moving geometry from the textbook realm to, well, the playground realm.

The exhibit includes a series of experiential displays that let you do things like crawl inside giant 3D spaces; watch yourself in a big curved mirror as you try to play hopscotch; look into a tapered kaleidoscope to see a live video creating a 120-sided shape; and use a flashlight to "draw&… Read more

It's nice if a pilot has a background in flying. It's really quite special if a colonoscopist has a background in medicine. But does everyone who heads up a department at Google really need to have a background in engineering?

I should be lying in the sun rather than pondering this existential mind-twister, but I was moved past reluctance by a blog post written by Don Dodge, developer advocate at Google.

Dodge, who used to perform advocacy at Microsoft, wrote this post to celebrate surviving--I'm sorry, I mean enjoying--six months at Google.

In a section titled "… Read more

A new study finds that educational iPhone apps can increase a child's vocabulary acquisition by as much as 31 percent within two weeks. The study is part of a larger look at the relationship between technology and education, administered by PBS and funded by a grant from the Department of Education.

To glimpse the potential of mobile apps as a new educational medium, the study first tested the vocabulary level of a group 90 Title 1 school children, ages 3 to 7. Then, the children were each given two weeks with an iPod Touch loaded with the Martha Speaks … Read more

Google on Friday began giving students priority access to its Google Voice service, which has remained in a closed beta since its transition from GrandCentral in March of last year.

Typically, invites for the service can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to arrive after a user signs up. But the company is now promising those who have an e-mail address that ends with .edu access to the service within 24 hours. Google had done something similar for active members of the U.S. military back in August.

In a blog post on the new initiative, Google … Read more

I have barely come to terms with the idea that someone at a school thought it appropriate, wise, or even sane to spy on kids via Webcams on school-issued laptops. Has technology really taken over human thought processes quite so much?

So I temporarily lost the ability to spell my own name when I was confronted with the rather heartening news that a school principal has asked parents to get their kids away from Facebook and any other social-networking site.

I don't know whether the emission of a show called "Jersey Shore" has enlivened school principals to … Read more

Before the Netbook even existed, there was the Intel Classmate. A rugged, child-oriented notebook intended for worldwide educational use, the Classmate was and is Intel's global initiative paralleling what One Laptop Per Child and other programs have promised in terms of getting computers and the Internet into the hands of children.

The new Intel Convertible Classmate PC is a tablet Netbook with an Atom N450 processor, and it's also a touch-screen tablet, like its predecessor in 2009. Though the overall look is similar, the new Classmate adds a rubberized outer shell, spill-resistant keyboard and screen, a more impact-resistant body with shock-absorbing corners, and a shock-detecting hard drive.

Intel chose to introduce and demo the new Classmates at the Central Park Zoo in New York City, along with hardware peripherals and software from some of their multitude of partners (McGraw-Hill was just announced as yet another). Wisely, Intel has realized that the product itself is only half the story; good software for both students and school administrators is equally critical. We watched a few dozen children using them for math quizzes, to test weather conditions with an attached Pasco climate-detecting peripheral, and to take photos and sketch birds in the rain forest exhibit. Lego also has robot kits that work via USB, which looked like clever systems for teaching mechanical principles.

We received one of the new Convertible Classmate PCs from Intel to try for ourselves, in a plain white box with a simple instruction manual aimed at teachers and parents. We saw the Classmate used with various educational peripherals, but those weren't included. The Classmate is, however, preloaded with some useful software, at least on our test system. A label indicates it's made by Royaltek, but Intel is planning to manufacture these Classmates around the world with a variety of local OEMs.

The Convertible Classmate is, basically, a Netbook: an Atom N450 processor, 160GB hard drive, and a higher-res 1,366x768-pixel 10.1-inch screen are nothing new. Our Classmate also had VGA out, two USB ports, two headphone jacks, a microphone jack, and an SD card slot. An optional GPS input is blocked off in our unit.

Covered in gray silicone-type rubberized surfaces, the Classmate retains an institutional feel, but it's comfortable and easy to hold. A pull-out handle in the back is a welcoming touch. In tablet mode, the Classmate is comfortably grippable, too. The matte 10.1-inch screen uses a resistive touch interface that's meant to be used with the thick, penlike stylus tucked into the left side of the Classmate. We tried an included painting program and navigated Web pages, and found the touch to work pretty well. It's not gesture/multitouch enabled, but it works fine for basic functions. … Read more

Thousands of students from around the world converged on Dallas over the weekend with curious, siege engine-like robots they designed and built. Their mission wasn't to smash local architecture but to triumph in a game called Clean Sweep, part of the 2010 VEX Robotics Competition World Championship held at the Dallas Convention Center April 22-24.

The budding roboticists from middle schools, high schools, and colleges in 14 countries created their machines using the VEX Robotics Design System, an educational platform that can yield a wide range of autonomous and remote-controlled bots.

In Clean Sweep, alliances of robots have to … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Bill Gates didn't leave Harvard on Wednesday with a degree, but the Microsoft chairman said he did leave feeling that the top colleges are paying more attention to the needs of the developing world.

"Schools are really doing more," Gates told CNET in an interview, as he headed to the airport following his three-day college tour. "These leading institutions are out in front... Certainly versus when you go back all the way to when I was here, there were no poverty classes."

At MIT, for example, Gates met with students working on projects … Read more