Kids’ Projects: A Wondrous Look at Future

While thousands of Macintosh users flocked to San Francisco’s two main convention centers for this spring’s MacWorld Expo last week, a much smaller group attended an Apple Computer-sponsored symposium called “Children: the Future of America.” The education conference, open by invitation only, drew about 100 superintendents and other senior-level officials from many of the nation’s urban school districts.

I spent two days shuttling between the two events and couldn’t help but be struck with the differences in their agendas. The MacWorld Expo was an emporium of high-tech wonders where the movers and shakers demonstrated large-screen color monitors, high-capacity optical disk drives, powerful graphic software and plenty of other state-of-the-art software and equipment.

For the most part, the Expo is aimed at businesses that are using high-tech to improve productivity. The issues under discussion are relatively transient. As important as they are to the computer industry and die-hard users, it’s hard for most people to relate to such concerns as Macintosh graphic interface versus Microsoft Windows, Apple’s soon-to-be-released Operating System 7.0 and the advantages and costs of 32-bit color.

Very different, but all too familiar, issues were discussed at the education conference. While the bulk of the discussion focused on technology, many of the underlying themes stressed the backdrop under which the nation educates its children. Words such as poverty, overcrowding, drugs and despair are rarely uttered at computer industry events.

Not even Apple’s most zealous advocates would claim that technology, by itself, can provide the answers, but just about everyone in attendance agreed that it can play a role in helping to educate and motivate young people. As does any tool, it works best when placed in the hands of skilled craftsmen--in this case, bright and caring teachers.

Although Apple did not use the conference to sell its products, the company’s interest in education goes far beyond humanitarian concerns. Apple has its roots in education and continues to enjoy strong sales in the kindergarten through 12th grade and higher education markets. Education represents about a third of the company’s domestic revenue, according to spokeswoman Sandra Bateman.

While the MacWorld Expo showcased hardware and software, the stars at the education conference were the people who are using the technology: students and teachers.

Paul Dye, a teacher at Sunnyside High School in Tucson, Ariz., bought his own Macintosh in the spring of 1988 and used it to help organize the Systems Thinking Club. The club, composed of 10 students, mostly Latino, is working with the Macintosh and a program called STELLA (Structural Thinking Experimental Learning Laboratory with Animation) to create behavioral models to test various theories in science and human behavior. Using a graphic display, the program shows the logical consequences of certain behaviors over time. Dye and a group of his students mesmerized conference attendees with a demonstration of their projects, including one model that shows the logical, and deadly, consequences of gang participation.

Dye also uses SimCity, a city simulation program from Maxis Software. The program, which runs on IBM PCs and compatibles and Macs, allows the students to design their own city, complete with roads, buildings, dump sites and all the inherent costs and problems. The program, according to Dye, is an excellent way to help students understand how systems are interrelated.

Paul Reese is doing impressive work at the Ralph Bunche School, an elementary school in New York’s Central Harlem. Reese brought a group of sixth graders to San Francisco to demonstrate a replica of Earth Lab, a school-wide network of Apple IIs and Macintoshes connected to a central AppleShare file server. The students use electronic mail to communicate with each other and with students from other schools. Using a modem connected to one of their Apple IIs, they download weather data to help predict storm patterns. The kids use a network version of Bank Street Writer word-processing software and write programs using LogoWriter for the Apple II.

The school has 13 Apple IIs and six Macs on its network. Reese starts third graders with keyboarding exercises. Fourth graders are doing word processing. The full services of the lab are available to his sixth-grade students. The younger children tend to prefer the color Apple IIs but the older kids always gravitate towards the Mac Pluses and SEs, according to Reese.

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s Model Technology School Project, housed at Bell High School, serves Bell along with a junior high and two elementary schools. The project, which operates under a $500,000 grant from the state of California along with $50,000 of local funding, furnishes computers, video equipment and other high-technology tools to the students. Technology centers at each of the two elementary schools feature 33 Tandy IBM compatibles and 13 Macintoshes along with a number of peripheral devices including flatbed scanners, video digitizers and interactive laser disc players that can be controlled by the computers.

The four schools in the project are large and more than 90% Latino. One elementary school has more than 2,000 students. All operate on a year-round basis.

Students, from kindergarten through the fifth grade, are creating and editing their own videotapes. They use Apple’s HyperCard language to develop their own software and use computers and laser printers to produce a variety of newsletters and other publications, according to project coordinator Ted Snyder.

“The kids have no trouble with the equipment,” said Snyder. “Our biggest challenge is to get the teachers to release their control so that they can empower the children.” Teachers, according to Snyder, “have got to tolerate a high level of chaos--the noise level is high but the kids are almost always on task.”

Students learn science principles from a set of video discs from Optical Data Corp. The materials, called Windows on Science, include discs covering earth, physical and life sciences. Each disc has soundtracks in both English and Spanish. The video discs can be controlled interactively from a Macintosh using software written under Apple’s HyperCard language. The computer makes it possible to jump to any portion of the disc depending on the child’s interest.

The Bell project is one of six Model Technology School Projects coordinated by the Office of Educational Technology, California State Department of Education. Other projects are in Alhambra, Cupertino/Fremont, Hueneme, Monterey and Sacramento.

After the education conference ended, I dragged myself back to Moscone Center to see a new database program, an upcoming version of WordPerfect Mac and a new modular keyboard from Datadesk International that will make it easier to enter data. I saw a lot of good products at the Expo, but it was hard to get excited. Energetic children are a hard act to follow.