Technology

SPACE DAY – Our 5th year of ‘slipping the surly bonds of earth’

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

In 2012, when I put together Mars Day at our school, I could tell there was a huge appetite for all things space-related. After all, the Mars rover ‘Curiosity’ had landed on the red planet a few months before.

space-dayThis year, our 5th year, we are broadening our lens, so to speak. We are calling it SPACE DAY. It is on Oct. 19th at Salt River Elementary.

I am so fortunate to have so many groups supporting me. From a NASA scientist, to Orbital ATK (formerly Orbital Science), and several groups from the School of Earth and Space at Arizona State University. Also a team who keeps bringing back StarLab, the inflatable planetarium. But wait, there’s more – a surprise guest from the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), the NASA group prepping for Mars.

There are several break-out sessions, some that will happen concurrently. We may even have a few real rocket launches outside! This year two of my colleagues will  conduct hands-on sessions that add art and design to the mix. My goal has always been to add more of the ‘A’ to the S.T.E.A.M programs.

Almost every week it’s hard to escape news of audacious new programs pertaining to vehicular designs, space colonies, cosmonauts, or discoveries about comets, asteroids, and planets –the ones we know, and those that are still to be named.

One day of the year just scratches the surface, don’t you think?

From ‘cardboard’ to fabric, wearable VR gets more affordable

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Ever since those ‘cardboard’ VR headsets came out, I’ve been waiting to see how augmented and virtual reality would be adopted. One big drawback was the cost of the competitive headsets, and of course the phone.

Now it looks like Google has fired back with Daydream, a low-cost ‘fabric’ headset that could put the technology within reach of the rest of us.

Conveniently, the Daydream headset (which works with the Google phone, ‘Pixel’) was designed to be ‘dumb’ – as in minus the electronics. The phone does the hard work, not the headset. I wonder what could follow cardboard and fabric?

 

As Rosetta mission ends, Osiris Rex soars

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As an asteroid and comet watcher, the Rosetta mission designed to swing around and land on a comet ’67P’ fascinated me. I also used in for a class on animation last year, so that 6th graders could learn about the mission while learning to animate the path of Rosetta. The European space agency lost contact with Rosetta at 11:19 a.m. GMT today when the craft’s probe ‘impacted’ the comet, having reached it two years ago, on August 2014.

67p-last-images

This year, my students focused on Osiris Rex, the NASA mission to study the asteroid Bennu. marsed_sept2016By some coincidence, this was one of the big themes of the Mars Education conference I attended at ASU last Saturday.)

Students have looked up facts about the mission and next week will begin animating the path of Osiris Rex.

Osiris Rex will reach Bennu sometime in 2018, and its probe will do something more daring, – use a probe to scoop up a bit of the asteroid’s material, while it is still moving! Fascinating to think of the planning and steps this involves.

Thank you to all the IT folk who make our lives simpler

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Tuesday was National IT Professionals Day. Yes, there is such as thing! A day set apart (the third Tuesday in Sept) for us to stop clicking and swiping, for a moment, and consider what makes some of these technologies work most of the time.

So thank you for all the IT teams who keeps our engines humming.

Behind the scenes of our busy workplaces are system administrators, database folk, IT security teams, those who pre-empt and fix outages in the network, web developers,and tech-support people we tend to vent about, as if they owned and designed the technologies we use. I’ve done my share of venting, and I realize that you folk, who are the first responders to my overblown crisis, have other fires to put out, too.

So on this day I like to thank all those un-named people who come to my rescue. Happy IT Pros Day!

In the age of Shodan, cars aren’t the only targets in the Internet of Things

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IOT of the Internet of Things may sound like an overblown idea. But it’s becoming a reality, despite the buzz phrase. Consider the millions of controllers in homes that are connected to common appliances such as baby monitors, security cameras, garage doors etc.

I brought this up in a class on Internet Safety, and it’s fun getting students to brainstorm what steps one could take to play it safe when you are connected to the Internet. It opens to door to discussions broader than not clicking on links and pop-ups, or using hard-to-crack passwords. There are software fixes, and there is common sense. Consider how FBI director, says he placed a piece of tape over his laptop camera, to prevent someone hacking into it.

Not many have heard about Shodan. It’s considered a search engine for connected devices – such ‘things’ devices connected to Linksys, Netgear, or Cisco boxes.

This true-life hack of a Jeep is a good way to discuss what ‘things’ might entail in the Internet of Things.

Should schools go completely digital?

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Odd question. Perhaps a few years too late, but…

Would you want your children to be in a school that’s all digital? Let me paint a few scenarios.

  • Should teachers stop using handouts and publish lessons to be read, watched or listed to on digital devices?
  • Should schools have a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy?

There is no shortage of  wonderful, free technologies that stimulate collaboration, and empathy. I have even used some of them in my classes! However, I also know that young people are perfectly capable of learning, creativity, discourse and group work without the help of a shiny object. We hear that ‘Digital Natives’ are wired for learning differently. But are they?

And then there’s the brain development side.

  • There are also the unintended consequences of too much screen time, warns Dr. Aric Sigman. He warns of “permanent damage to (children’s) still-developing brains”. Dr. Sigman is an associate fellow of the British Psychological Society. Read this piece published in April this year by Psychology Today. This Is What Screen Time Really Does to Kids’ Brains.

A new book about digital natives, Screenwise, calls for more mentoring not monitoring. But we tend to assume too much about digital natives. I like the point made by Jessica Laura (in a blog post at CommonSense.Org) that calls for ongoing, explicit training of digital literacy – and not just ‘screens.’ She says:

People say, “The child’s a digital native,” but that has nothing to do with whether or not they know how to use technology well; that just means they’ve grown up with it. Just because I grew up speaking English doesn’t know I mean everything about English; we still go to English class for 13 years of our lives. 

Digital Citizenship and digital literacy is a fast-updating field. What people in their forties and fifties ‘know’ about digital is probably ancient wisdom. It may not happen in the next school year, but here’s a question for parents and teachers: What would you do if your school goes digital?

My wife runs a school that will probably never go digital. For good reason – it is a Montessori school, a place where, happily, you can’t replace such tools as sandpaper letters, sound boxes and pink towers. But before we know it, toddlers may be needing to know a thing or too about what it means to be a digital citizen – when they get home to their parents’ smart devices!

Multi-tasking could reduce performance. But how to turn back the clock?

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

What would you say about findings that say multi-tasking affects ‘memory creation?’

After all, we email and text while writing reports or watching a movie, don’t we? I just read a 2016 report by Common Sense Media that looked at recent literature of Technology Addiction. here are some alarming findings. Some are red flags, needing more research.

Here are just a few:

  • Media Multi-tasking creates cognitive fatigue, and makes it more difficult for someone to create memories that can be accurately retrieved.
  • Heavy multi-taskers have a harder time filtering out irrelevant information (2009 study of college students)
  • Students who multi-tasked using a laptop during a lecture performed worse on a test, compared to students who were not using a laptop. (2013 study of college students)
  • US ‘Tweens’ (8- to 12-year-olds) spend 5:55 hours outside of school and homework using media. Teens spend 8:56 hours (2015 survey)

The reference to media in media multi-tasking, refers to both digital and non-digital media: TV, video games,social media, using the Internet, reading, and listening to music.

What do we do about these findings? Many parents do not need research to tell them that they (and their kids) must cut back. I have met parents who have taken steps such as not have more than one device in the home, and those who have a ‘digital curfew’ after, say 8:00 pm. There are even those who do not allow mobile devices and tablets in children’s bedrooms – similar to the earlier trend of not having a TV in bedroom.

I teach computers and technology, making it a curious place to discuss this. I often require students to use paper and pencil, even though they come to my Lab to learn about such things as audio recordings (on a cloud-based digital console), QR codes, and search strategies. I often get asked if listening to music while working is OK (they know the answer but think it’s worth a shot!).

Could we turn back the clock, and get back to mono-tasking?

Is ‘word-processing’ a misnomer? Or old-school?

/ Angelo Fernando / Leave a comment

Sometimes I wish we could delete update the term ‘word-processing’ from our vocabulary. It has been ingrained in taken up permanent residence in the cortex of our brains, and needs to be dispatched to the storage unit reserved for vintage-tech such as ‘typewriting’ and ‘facsimile.’

It’s not that we don’t ‘process‘ words anymore. It’s just that we use the software to more than highlight, punctuate, or cut-and-paste. Food processors continue to grind and chop things for us, but word processors? We can use them to embedded videos in docs, or create blog posts for heaven’s sake! As far as words go, we could use Word to translate content into, say Hungarian (‘Word processing’ turns out to be Szövegszerkesztés in Hungarian.)

In my computer class at Salt River Elementary, since keyboarding and document creation are often the starting blocks, I try to inject concepts that refer to creativity and publishing in addition to content creation, when dealing with Microsoft Word.

But what else to call it? Any suggestions? 

‘Word,’ which is still listed as ‘document and word processing software’ started out as ‘Multi-Tool Word’ in the same year that Flashdance, and Never Say Never Again was released – in 1983! Today there are many more choices – niche software such as Nitro Pro, and for authors, there’s Scrivener.

So is Word-processing just old-school?

Robotics 2016 challenge guessing game begins

/ Angelo Fernando / 1 Comment

Each year, as we wait for details of the FLL Robotics challenge, some teams begin speculating what the specific challenges might be on the tournament table.

FLL had announced the theme, ANIMAL ALLIES. If we were to look into the crystal ball, there could be ‘missions’ around animal rescues, conservation and human-animal bonding.

Previous themes have been: Conservation, Education, Health, Ageing populations, Food, and Catastrophic Events.

Animals will certainly fire up elementary school students, especially in the research project. As for the missions, here is how one team speculates what the table-top missions could be, with detailed builds!

AS the FLL puts it, ANIMAL ALLIES season will be all about young people collaborating to solve a real-world problems. That’s the part I like about the FLL. It creates a rich, evolving context for students who could see bots as part of society they inherit and –most importantly, will influence.