User:Bjordan/Ideas

User:Bjordan/Ideas/Teacher_involvement

Camera image processing: 1-3 laptop 3D Polygon Drawing

3D Wand for the laptop

Use Measure to measure distance btwn laptops?

Camera image processing: 4 laptop 3D imaging

Thinkquest and OLPC/the XO =

Thinkquest is a webdesign and educational content writing competition for students in middle and high schools. This sort of content would be ideal to have available on the XO laptops, and partnering with the hosting organization (Oracle) to have a year where the competition's goals match up with those of OLPC would provide an immediate outlet for the content generated by students and positive karma for both organizations.

Wikipedia: Simple English activity / School server/internet content delivery

• Bundles for different specializations (Mathematics, History of Science, Neuroscience, etc)

Kids' Circuit Blocks

Gates, 1's, 0's

Course Recording

Record audio using $180 Zoom H2, taking photos that have (exif) time data in them.

Write a script (ffmpeg? iMovie/automator? can slideshare do this?) that makes a video changing the board/slides as photos are taken.

Timing -- do you want photos to be changed at the time of the last photo?

Under Promise, Over Deliver

Always a good idea! (instead of promising, try gathering support and making a plan first)

Audio Diff

aplay 2 data files... one in each ear

UPDATE: whoa.. this is already possible using aplay. and it sounds freaky. and it's awesome.

aplay -c 2 -I physics.py physics2.py

UPDATE 2: The term for this is Sonification

Sonification fine-tuned for code structure would be brilliant. Listen to your code!

Teaching races

You and one other person are trying to teach your respective students (of comparable intelligence and ability) how to do something. Let's say... make a webpage with a table in it.

You teach them how to do it as fast as possible using whatever tools and tricks you would like.

Once you think they understand the concept enough to do it on their own, you say "BEGIN".

The student is given their task. It is very specific

You are no longer allowed to communicate with or even watch your student for the next three minutes as they try to do (build) the task from scratch. If the student finishes before the end of the three minutes, and before the other student, they win. If the three minutes is up, their work is destroyed, the teacher is let back in the room, and the process of communication begins again.

Subsequent "BEGIN" attempts are the same task. One strategy might be having the student

…

This would be a great TV show, and great for experimenting (playing) with innovating pedagogical methods.

Simple 2d physics-based game creation

Add a joystick button to Physics_(Activity) that allows for setting various controls on an object to be controlled using the gamepad buttons on the XO.

User:Bjordan is currently implementing this idea for Physics_(Activity). It's tons of fun and is quite possibly the simplest and most rewarding game creation method ever. The possibility space for games made in this fashion is very big. The hard part is balancing ease of creation with maximizing the possibility space. High-possibility-space activities (eToys, Scratch, Squeak, Pippy) are ideal for environments where there is a good chain of teaching Activity Developers/innovating educators --> education leaders --> teachers --> students. This can be a prohibitive thing when any link on this chain is weak or broken (as one might find in a country with a sparse education system -- e.g., Afghanistan (whose education system is consistently being threatened))

camp david style adult science-progress camp

For CS researchers, programmers, hell, general scientists to work on future-oriented research with a cheap operating cost.

• strong emphasis on creating open formats, codebases the entire world of computing can use (and the researchers can then build off of on their own in their own fields after camp is done)

Needs:

• internet connectivity
• food for attendees... cost can be kept down by doing this dining-hall style
• land... can be placed anywhere accessible by cheap transportation that has internet connectivity (or for some projects... doesn't need to)
• persons or voting process to choose a vision, goal or specific application to be worked towards during camp session
• persons (application readers) or voting process to choose the attendees... based on their interest or work in the field relating to that vision, goal or specific application being focused on at that event

zoom h2-like-field-recording for deployments

The zoom h2: http://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+h2

It records onto SD!

ghost ride the XO: video

Videos of SSH+screen+espeak on the XO freaking people out... apparently I accidentally scared quite a few when I did this while working from home yesterday

Set to the ghost ride the whip song, naturally.