I work in an elementary school and I'm trying hard to think about how to possibly take advantage of this in my environment. The interaction model is really rich and perfect for the children, but I'm so far coming up empty on the sorts of things we could/should do with it.
how About a space game where you move cargo ships around and manufacture and trade goods. You could teach about coordinate systems and math. Players need to figure out optimum things to haul for their amount of available funds. Different players could have different capabilities and teams need to figure out how to work together to accomplish more together as a team than they could on their own. Game space shows what the cargo is and how far a ship can move with its current cargo.
It would be great if it could be connected to something like the MIT Media LAb inFORM table and/or some kind of under the table system of magnets. That way physical objects could be moved instead of just the projector displaying an image of the cargo ship. Right now the physical manipulation seems one way, from the physical world to the digital. It is “easy” for the the system to motion track an object as a student moves it, but the system doesn’t really have a way for it to move the object itself.
Imagine students exploring gravity by placing spheres on a “magic” table and then the table causes the spheres to orbit around eachother. Students can adjust mass or gravitational constant and see how that affects the system, or even come up with their own laws of gravity.
I wonder if something like this could be modified or extended in some manner for LOGO programming; graphical turtle on the floor (or wall) - no need for a physical robot turtle.
I'm just not sure how you would do the "coding" with the paper?
Maybe the paper could represent certain functions or subroutines, and somehow they could be "connected" together (kinda like a flow programming system)?
You talking elementary school: teach the kids how to do their match homework using Paper Programs - not doing the math like a calculator, but doing the math the same way kids do: adding/subtracting columns of numbers to arrive at the answer. Just implementing that as Paper Programs will inspire a host of related projects tied to a need to 'count things'.
Your comment made me think about our math curriculum, and a lot of the work that we do with the younger kids deals with just establishing some basic numeracy; for instance, having small blocks that represent a unit, and then having a different type of block that represents 10, etc. Having a camera recognize these as the children play with them could be absolutely perfect. Thanks for the inspiration.
Even at the high school level, I spend a lot of time trying to develop number sense with my students (especially with units). It would be great if I could somehow show students how numbers and units “flow” through a science problem.
