I was wondering whether at some point in time the scratch team will be considering adding GPS longitude and latitude into mobile scratch. I must admit I'm really excited about location based media after recently having attended a conference at Hewlett Packard in Bristol, UK see www.mscapers.com . The way location based media works is that when you enter a specified GPS location this then triggers sound, images or video. The GPS location can either be anchored to a specific location or you can create games that can be played in any open space. I think it would be great if we could create a scratch game that could be played outside with different events triggered depending on your physical location.
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Sounds intersesting. I know that a GPS reciever is coming out for the psp and that games will be made specially for the use with the GPS reciever. How would you be able to go on scratch outside? It would be good but I don't think it would be very easy to set up and use.
Last edited by 04lukeb (2008-01-07 15:47:10)
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The next generation mobile phones will have GPS e.g. Nokia N95. I've played the Hewlett Packard location based mscape games on an HP Ipaq outdoors. You would need to be able to have a couple of scratch blocks for latitude and longitude in the same way there are scratch blocks for x and y co-ordinates and a way for the scratch application to interpret NMEA data from the GPS. The great thing about scratch is that it is platform independent whereas the HP mscape only works on mobile devices that have windows mobile installed. If anybody from the scratch team is reading this then I'd be pleased to find out whether this is on your radar?
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monicajg, that sounds like a rather specialized addition to scratch. I imagine it will be at least 10 years before GPS becomes standard on laptops and handhelds, so there will be very, very few children with access to a Scratch-capable GPS receiver for quite some time.
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Kevin, I am really surprised that you think it will take as long as that in the US! I am planning to do a GPS based project with my son's primary (elementary) school at some point in the next 12 months. There is an organisation called Futurelab who have won awards for some of the work they've done with kids using mobile devices see http://www.createascape.org.uk/
I am also trying to persuade the school to take an interest in making scratch projects with or without scratchboards. I am planning to go and give them a demonstration at some point in the next couple of weeks. They may well become more interested if we can link the projects to different areas within the national curriculum. I'll let you know what happens.
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Although most elementary schools in the US now have some computers, few have integrated them into the curriculum, few have laptops, and fewer have computers newer than 5 years old. I see no reason for that picture to change much in the next 10 years. Although there will be people experimenting with state-of-the-art toys, the bulk of the education community is definitely into trailing-edge technology. This is probably a good thing, as most of the "cool" stuff people play with in these experiments does not lead to much real learning.
Note: I'm not against such experimenting—there needs to be a lot of it in order for the few successes to be created. I think that Scratch is one of the successes (out of the many, many attempts to create kid-friendly first programming languages).
The US is generally slower to adopt many technologies than Europe or Japan, and our school establishment slower still. There are already problems with Scratch not supporting old 800x600 displays—I can't see much demand for GPS capability in scratch for at least 5 and probably 10 years.
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In my school we have Smart boards. they are electronic boards that you can write on with your fingers or a virtual pen. They are connected to a laptop, so you are using a 80 inch touch screen windows XP with a specially designed word proccessor that is compatible with the smart board. Do you have these at your school ? I think that the US might be a little bit behind on some areas of technology.
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I think Scratch is brilliant and I really hope lots of schools in the UK and in the US will take it onboard and start becoming productive.
Similarly my son's school had outdated hardware in their computer room so we tracked down the company who reconditions and recycles machines from public sector outsourcing contracts. They have just made a charitable donation of 25 Dell base units which had reached the end of their lease. This means the school stays on XP for a couple more years.
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I have heard of some schools using smartboards, but the technology has not shown enough advantages over a white board that costs a fraction the price to justify many schools purchasing them.
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I don't know that much about smartboards except that most UK schools seem to have them. I think the main advantage is that you can save whatever is written on the smartboards to a pdf file or similar and produce handouts.
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If most UK schools have smartboards, then some smartboard manufacturer must have friends in the government, as they are still rather expensive toys, and only available in the US at schools with more money than they know what to do with (which is to say, very few schools).
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I don't think that they are that expensive. And they do have disadvantages like the pen doesen't work very well. Most classrooms in our school have them, the others have white-boards.
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