Via ‘The Last Ditch ‘ a video from TED.
As we can see, if you watched of course, was a demonstration of a new way to interact with computers. Personally I see that being an excellent way of teaching kids basic skills. There are probably many more uses that the developers and the programmers have thought of that I can’t even think of.
As far as teaching tools are concerned I would advise that when they programme them that they do it without the aid of any of the UK’s teachers. That way they may be of aid to the UK’s children. Just a though after the recent revelation of our kids IQ’s.
Now these devices are far from simple and there is clearly a lot of electronics and programming in them. However their uses are limited by the fact they are cubes with limited interfaces and that is a good thing for some functions.
I have always said that no matter how small and fast they make computers the biggest issue is the MMI (Man/Machine Interface) or as it was called IO. We need to get our information in, I, the keyboard, and we need to get the answers out, O, the monitor. Until we can plug in directly we will always need some devices between us and the machine. This limits how small we can make them. After all what good is a computer 1 inch square that you take ten minutes to enter your name via a stylus.
However a computer that has a limited purpose can ignore this limitation. If it just has a few simple commands that may be entered by voice or by touch or something else then something like these cubes can be very useful and without complicated casings or peripherals then the cost will drop significantly.
I see us dropping sugar cube sized devices in the garden to watch for intruders and they use bluetooth or WiFi to call our phones to warn us. Put one in the frame of your bike and it will shout out if it goes missing. Get the kids to swallow one in the morning so you know where they are every minute of the day.
Keep the use simple and the IO minimal and then the hardware costs will drop and the work will just be in the programming. Which will allow these devices to be reprogrammed and reused as required. One breaks simply throw it away and reprogramme a replacement.
Human ingenuity. Thinking ‘outside the box’ to use a very accurate and overused phrase. It will solve all our problems if given a chance.