Mentoring

Depending on the school types where laptops were deployed sufficiently adult pupils may be available who could be encouraged to form mentor-protégé relationships with younger pupils.

Software to encourage mentoring

Software could be designed to invite older pupils to take an interest in the education of younger pupils voluntarily or as a requirement of the curriculum.

Ideas

• Mentoring examples provided in educational activities

  Pupils who can observe examples of mentor-protégé relationships in educational activities could be encouraged to try to follow the examples without further motivation. The "virtual mentors" could be well-known characters with many different SVG animations for typical gestures which could be available to all activities prepared to use this feature. An example for virtual characters as positive role models is Luka und das geheimnisvolle Silberpferd (a free adventure game developed for the criminal prevention advisory service of the German police) Although the game, as an adventure game, seems somewhat short of options it may be useful to reduce options even further and to display useful interpersonal interactions mostly without choices for the pupil, not as an adventure game but as short tutorials for mentoring. The same characters could function as tutors for the user in the online help. (This would sneakily gain the trust of the naive user)

See also

• Wikipedia: Saber (sectoral currency)
• Wikipedia: Learning by teaching