Classrooms of the future to have multitouch desks, probably a few Terminators
By Joseph L. Flatley 
posted Sep 18th 2008 11:25AM
posted Sep 18th 2008 11:25AM
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Engadget of the future to have realized their bad jokes, probably less punch-lines
Ok, now... this is too much. Children do not need a multi-touch to learn. They do need Terminators though.
On top of being a fun toy to play with the kids will want to learn. It could be good in a multitude of ways. You have to really think of all the tasks kids do and from geography to learning instruments or just playing around with everyday items. All could be simulated on the screen without making a huge mess in the classroom.
If this isn't good idea for the classroom then dammit all the hours I spent playing Oregon Trail and Number Munchers when I was a kid were lost in vain...
all oregon trail ever taught me was that death is inevitable and once the water is all gone, we are boned
There is only so much you can do to help kids learn. Tech is more and more supplementing the teacher's abilities and soon enough... our children will be taught by computers and being babysat by teachers with no degrees. Don't disconnect children from human interaction so early in life. Let them do that on their own when they're older.
you have to use your hands? that's like a baby's toy.
Terminators. Especially in the lunch room. No more food fights. That's what I'm talkin' about.
Now I get all the Terminator references....but really, the whole "Great Job!" thing is throwing me off.
What the hell does Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job! have to do with multi-touch computers being put into classrooms? Unless of course it's a reference to the episode where Eric gets on a similar computer at a bank and changes his wife's name and sends her the pizza boy porno.
/Great Job!
Or maybe don't over think it. Initially I thought "Great Job!" was a caption directed toward the kid who is obviously NOT doing such a great job with his numbers being all over the damn board.
if this is what my tax dollars are doing, i MIGHT redo highschool.
I'm 23, and I'm already preparing my cranky-old-parent speech. Draft one: "Bah! In my day, we used books! Heavy books! And our desks were made out of WOOD! ANALOG WOOD! And back in our day, segways were lame as shit! What's wrong with just single-touch?! CDs sound better! Where's my rocketpack?"
Big up the Durham massive. Engineering your socks off and then partying hard.
University College is best of course (cough) before any of those Hild Beders come on!
... are you all hopped up on angel dust or something?
This on a smaller scale was what I always envisioned Ender Wiggin using.
Now how long before you think we see kids hacking into the system and sending messages to each other from 'God'?
They need to develop a different touch besides click and drag if they want to do dominoes
Technology does not help them to read, write and do math any better than without it. How about we first cover the basics before we start getting them addicted to tech. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
It lowers the burden on teachers and gives them more time to come up with lessons and grade work. You make the lesson at a work station and it disseminates to the class. Currently they either will type up one copy or write one by hand, then photocopy it. Would you prefer teachers spend their time copying work sheets and tests, or would you rather they spent their time coming up with better lessons and spending more time with their students?
It also saves money on paper and ink costs, freeing up the budget some. Most kids like working with their hands, and this makes class time potentially more fun.
>> It lowers the burden on teachers and gives them more time to come up with lessons and grade work.
The system would grade the easy stuff for the teachers (ex: word and math problems)
>> Would you prefer teachers spend their time copying work sheets and tests
Learning to use this system would take for longer than the time they spend all year copying a worksheet, last I checked a copier can do like 30 pages a minute, or more.
>> It also saves money on paper and ink costs, freeing up the budget some
Since when did paper cost more than proprietary computers? 2 or 3 of these things would cover the cost of all paper, pencils & chalk used by all teachers all year.
>> would you rather they spent their time coming up with better lessons and spending more time with their students?
Putting a computer between a student and a teacher will lead to LESS face time and in the school's non stop need to cut corners, the next logical step is to hire non teachers because they are much cheaper since the lessons would already be created, why pay a teacher anymore?
You sir, are drunk on technology, adding tech to school doesn't automagically make school better. It might make it more fun, which might have a positive effect, but no un-biased study has ever shown technology actually makes education better. I think we can all agree that it might, but the cons far outweigh the pros.
Kids wreck normal desks, imagine the havoc they will wreak on these unsuspecting screens. Nice idea, I doubt it is practical except in special circumstances.
Yay! Now kids will have no handwriting skills whatsoever.
wow, forget sitting next to the smart kid in class during a test ... you could see that shit from the back row even if you were legally blind. No more changing seats for the test, giving away the fact that you MIGHT be cheating ... do it safely and efficiently from your bad ass back row seat!
Yeah, nobody would catch on to that one... Guess we can see why you need to copy from the smart kid's paper.
I learned it by watching you ... ok.
Golf-clap lines?
This would be a good first step to releasing people from the pointless drudgery of learning 'the basics', education needs to move on very badly indeed. Slowly and painfully teaching generations over and over again the stuff that computers can do for us about 10 million times better than we can will be looked back upon as a form of Ludditism.
Maths is pointless, computers have that so nailed we are just flapping around like a fish out of water.
Language, spell chock and thesarus make that pretty mute.
General knowledge...Google.
Physical Education, Wii Fit
OK , partly taking the piss, but we need to teach kids how to fully use the wonderful tools we have invented for them, not to explain how we did it over and over again.
Imagine if evolution stopped every generation to teach the next how it all happened..pointless, just climb up a notch and carry on.
i still think the best technology for doing math problems is paper and pencil.
Ahh, but you see, that kid is doing maths, not math.
This is an awful, terrible idea. How long do you think the multitouch table will work before some kid finds a way to pour juice into it? A week? Tech at schools is always in a state of disrepair, you're going to have dead pixels, unresponsive parts of the touch screen, and networking issues. Teachers dont want to spend all day trying to fix the multiplication application, they would rather just pass out loose leaf and pencils.
how to solve your problems:
First: watertight seal, fan on the underside of the desk protected by plastic "wings" hanging vertically in a box shape around the fan.
Second: Backup OS runs everything that the main application runs, and when the application is frozen the back-up seemlesly takes over while the main re-boots.
Third: thorough testing of every screen before they are shipped to schools.
Fourth: Tempered Glass+clear plastic cover
OR............ loose leaf and pencils!
But can they run Cry-
*is shot*
As long as the developers make an interface that makes learning MORE UNDERSTANDABLE and not just more engaging, then I think this is a great idea.
A multi-touch interface could allow for a virtual learning environment that doesn't only simulate a page with big, touchable numbers on it (pictured), but allowed for enabling the visualisation of real-world application of learning, for example, would be great. Right?
I completely agree. Its not the fact that its some fancy technology to dis-able the kids from the process of doing htings themselves, its that the tech has the possibility to help them UNDERSTAND the material much easier. Imagine actually seeing animated videos of your history lesson or the kids reading aloud from their digital text(books) and having each succeeding word highlighted and/or split into the phonographic pronounciation so they can keep up (we all remember the kid in class who took FOR-E-VER to read that ONE paragraph!!). It does open up to many possibilites to help the learning process. Plus we all see how quickly kids adopt to new technologies. Now the spilled juice is another problem..haha but with that said IMHO this is FREAKIN AWESOME!! (in my best Carl from AquaTeen voice)
We have classrooms for the future at school. At my school we each have MacBooks :]
Most classrooms also have smartboards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartboard
Also, Engadget thread starter, Joesph, the TAG is spelled wrong. You mean Durham University. (You have 2 R's)
So once these are destroyed in a week from pencil marks, crayons, erasers and gum, what kind of budget gets them replaced? This is a great idea. Do they have plasma TVs in the play room?
We have Classrooms For the Future at school.
Most English classrooms everyone is assigned a MacBook and also have a SmartBoard.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/smartboard
Also, Joesph , you spelled UNIVERSITY wrong in the TAGS part (you have an extra R)
Alright! Props to Tim and Eric!
I hope Dr. Steve Brule does a report on this.
Technology is a nice supplement, as Hellaphunt stated, however you need to take a look at how whether or not it really brings anything to classroom in terms of helping the student learn. Most public schools in large urban districts have a lot more issues then whether or not the students have touch screen desks. Case in point, Bradley Tech in Milwaukee, they spent a ton of money to make it one of the most technically advance public schools in the district, yet it's rife with violence, fights, drugs, non-qualified teachers, etc...(insert urban education problem here). You want to help students? Make sure they have a safe environment to go home to and make sure the parents are involved in the education of the student at home.
What's fun about dominoes that a computer sets up for you? Also, my cat can knock them over more successfully.
I like the nod to the "Tim and Eric Awesome Show" in that photo.
For your Health!
http://www.timanderic.com/
So the students of the future will be able to play with digital dominoes rather than real ones.
Wow, that kid sucks at maths. The table is clearly of no help to him. He's beyond help.
This will be after humans are long gone and robots have developed the perfect socialist society to be able to afford to so this, right?
In Mexico we've been using Interactive Boards in public and private schools since the period of former president Vicente Fox (PAN). They're not multitouch but they sure works wonders on Kids.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzygXLhfUcM
Cheers!
RayanMX
Thats the SmartBoard I was talking about. There really cool and do actually react to touching. If you have the certain program running on the laptop / desktop and touch things on the screen (ie. minimize) the current window will minimize. There really awesome for English and the like since we use considerably less paper.
Yeah the murder rate has really droppe....errrr...wait?
maybe it would be better if they gave that kid a math teacher...
Serenity! Those core planets always get the cool things.
wow u mean interacting with the subject is a way to learn? Who knew?
wow u mean interacting with the subject is a way to learn? Who knew?
thats my arm! and the screen i built from cheap bits and bobs!
If used the right way, this can be a valuable addition to a classroom. Sure, they need pencil and paper still, but for quizzes, tests - if it means that the teacher has less marking, and the students can get instant feedback, then all the better. See, as a former teacher that was the first thing I saw
I also agree with the comments that if used properly, it can make learning more interactive and value add to many subjects. So long as the teacher has hacked their own station so they can play endless rounds of 'Bejeweled', then it will be perfect.
I love the reference to Tim and Eric's Awesome Show on the picture. Keep up the great work Engadget.
This is fun, but I don't think it's appropriate for publicly-funded schools. Let's be honest: throwing even more expensive technology at education has much less ROI than we're told when they ask for funding. When parents don't know how to parent and kids don't want to learn, and when multiple languages bog down the learning process, this is not going to correct that.
And please don't flame me, I'm a designer and I love this kind of thing. We just need to implement innovation APPROPRIATELY.
now, you too can learn...on a big-ass table
props for the tim and eric reference... though I dont know why its there.
BOOKS!
As an occasional supply teacher in the UK I am utterly appalled by the literacy and reading skills of the pupils I've taught, most of them don't know what a book is, let alone how to read.
COMPUTERS
Guess what all the little brats are super proficient at though? Leave them alone in the IT suite and within 10 min they'll have circumvented the internet firewall and be causing havoc "learning" on the internet.
Say no to TOUCHSCREENS say YES to BOOKS!
I LIKE that board, and can easily see the students MORE interested in learning from it especially at an early age.
Once you get past the basics, I can only see it being used as a reader for higher levels, videos while good do have the problem of distracting everyone unless they are watched at the same time
take that apple
hahahaha
"Great Job!"
I
hahaha TIm and Eric!
It's all about Adult Swim.
what happened to writing stuff by hand??
I sell Interactive voting equipment and although in its infancy stages here in South Africa we have seen the following benefits: All the children in the classroom are ACTIVELY ENGAGED in NON_THREATENING environment- Instead of a select few who generally get most of the teachers attention, teachers have more time to "teach" as they don't have to mark.
* Encourage students' critical thought processes requiring synthesis of knowledge by providing them a way to answer questions.
* Improve student participation- take the fear out of getting an answer wrong and facing peer pressure. EVERY student can respond.
* Encourage student preparation prior to class (reading of class materials).
* Quickly determine whether homework or reading assignments have been completed before the class.
* Improve teacher understanding of students' comprehension of curriculum.
* Provide students with immediate feedback about the accuracy of their understanding of the curriculum.
* Provide teachers with instant feedback of students' understanding of concepts and content knowledge.
* Provide educators with the ability to customize instruction based on student responses.
* Use analysis of student responses as the basis for class discussion.
* Track student progress toward academic standards.
* Align curriculum to state standards and produces reports quickly and easily.
This is great for children who learn more with their hands and need visualizations to better understand. This would be a terrible idea for a work or even high school were one will work with large amounts of data (such as papers or calc). But for a middle schooler learning about the world being round? Or a kid learning what 2+2=? They learn better when they have giant numbers they can move or can spin the world at their fingertips and zoom in on their house. This would make them understand better and faster.