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THESIS documentation 1

Mobile Platform for Classrooms

A mobile device, software and curriculum for teaching.

Description

A mobile device based curriculum that will facilitate the teaching process and enrich the classroom environment. 

An example class: Photography

Each student has this mobile device that will be used to take and submit pictures during class, receive the professor’s assignments, comments, and grades as well as share the pictures and comments amongst each other. 

The professor would have the “master” device that is capable of creating the assignments, sending them out, receive the pictures from the students, reply with voice recorded comments, and grade each student. This could potentially be done on a PC/Mac for convenience. 

The devices will communicate via a wireless peer to peer network ideally.

Process:

Students get their assignment on the device.

Students go out and take pictures. 

Each picture is automatically sent back to the teacher’s device. 

The pictures are tagged with ambient sound, music being played on iPod, and GPS location.

The teacher replies to the student with his voice recorded comments. 

Student takes more pictures or goes to the next assignment.

At the end of the class the teacher will give out each student’s grade based on their work.

The students can share the pictures and comments received between them after class.

Possibly develop into a platform with applications that facilitate and enrich the educational process in developing nations or in classrooms with no PCs or multimedia presentation tools.

Keywords

teaching, mobile, application, software, network,

External Project Link

http://lucaslongo.blogspot.com/search/label/thesis

Personal Statement

I have worked for a long time with mobile applications and believe that they still have not been explored to the maximum of its potential as a tool to facilitate new forms of interaction.

Background

Audience

Teachers and students in classrooms with no computers or any multimedia aid. 

Teachers can use it to present multimedia content in class, assign, collect and grade assignments, give tests and quizzes.

Students can do research, homework, exchange notes, plan study groups and have fun with the device.

User Scenario

Example classes:

– photography course

– math course

Implementation

Master/slave Network

– The teacher’s phone controls all of the student’s phone when they are in the classroom.

– Students can also create networks with friends

– Auto sync features.

Homework tool

– create content, due date, distribute to students, auto collect on due date, grade – send grades

Test tool 

– create test, distribute to students, auto-grade

Notes tool

– annotated during class, record audio/video, share notes, wiki

Study tool

– access quizzes, more reading material, class notes by teacher, student notes wiki, plan study groups, take fake tests with friends to see who gets it better. 

Search and download classes

– A repository of classes you can search and download

An open source platform for creating lessons, presentations and apps.

Conclusion

References

How People Learn – Donovan Bransford Pellgrino

Wireless Generation

OLPC – Squeakland.org

Bob Tinker – Concord Consortium

Terc

Exploratorium (C.I.L.T)

Low Residency Programs

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Digital Imaging Reset

This is another class I am taking this semester where we learn how digital cameras work at the chip/sensor level in order to take better quality pictures and not destroy them in the process.
The class is taught by Eric Rosenthal who has built cameras for NASA and DARPA!
The first assignment was to read the basics about digital photography and cameras and take some photos exploring what we had learned from the reading. 
The most informative part of the reading for me was on the histograms – I never really learned how to read them. Now I think I understand. I shot a high contrast scene and shot first what I thought would be the optimal exposure and then looked at the histogram to see if I needed any adjustment. Turned out that my estimate was pretty good. I used spot metering to check the scene and then exposed between the high and low light area’s “correct” exposure.
I also played with depth of field. On the third photo I “inverted” the speed and aperture to get more depth of field.
Finally I tested the white balance settings on a sky scene as well as the ISO settings. 

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Time Vibrator contd.

Decided to go with a AA battery instead of the button battery on this version. The vibrator drains the button batteries very quickly and I couldn’t find a store that carried holders for them.
So I attached the switch to the AA battery holder in order to have a morse-code like controller.

Telling Time:

Initially the device would only tell the only the hour but the Haptic Clock by Che-Wei Wang solves the problem by having the hours vibrations longer, and the minutes vibrations shorter. You also want to “compress” the minutes into chunks to facilitate the counting. So I decided to group the minutes by tenths like this:

xx:00 to xx:10 = 1 vibration
xx:10 to xx:20 = 2 vibrations
xx:20 to xx:30 = 3 vibrations
xx:30 to xx:40 = 4 vibrations
xx:40 to xx:50 = 5 vibrations

Also when delivering the times, adding a rhythm to each number would allow for a telling the time but feeling the rhythm of the number instead of having to count each single vibration.
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Time Vibrator

Here’s the first prototype of the Blind Man’s watch we have to design for “Designing for Constraints”.
Using a vibrating motor and a small battery I was able to enclose them into a pill shaped plastic enclosure that came with my ear-phones. The switch is to manually activate the vibrating motor – eventually this would be replaced by a time circuitry that would vibrate the motor according to the time of day it was.

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New Web Site!!

So my new site is up – probably still a lot of broken links and spelling errors – well – it’s a constant work in progress. Let me know what you think or if you find something “broken”. There are still some projects on the ITP section that I have to complete but for the most part it’s in place 🙂

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Thesis – first entry

Here are my ideas for my thesis so far:

Photography Class Platform


A mobile device, software and curriculum for teaching photography. 

Each student has this mobile device that will be used to take and submit pictures during class, receive the professor’s assignments, comments, and grades as well as share the pictures and comments amongst each other. 
The professor would have the “master” device that is capable of creating the assignments, sending them out, receive the pictures from the students, reply with voice recorded comments, and grade each student.  This could potentially be done on a PC/Mac for convenience. 
The devices will communicate via a wireless peer to peer network ideally.
Process:
  1. Students get their assignment on the device.
  2. Students go out and take pictures. 
  3. Each picture is automatically sent back to the teacher’s device. 
  4. The pictures are tagged with ambient sound, music being played on iPod, and GPS location.
  5. The teacher replies to the student with his voice recorded comments. 
  6. Student takes more pictures or goes to the next assignment.
  7. At the end of the class the teacher will give out each student’s grade based on their work.
  8.  The students can share the pictures and comments received between them after class.
Possibly develop into a platform with applications that facilitate and enrich the educational process in developing nations or in classrooms with no PCs or multimedia presentation tools.

SPiRT (Subconscious Picture Rating Tool)

Our private picture libraries are ever growing. Using eye tracking, I propose to rate your pictures by simply looking at them. The more your eye stays on one picture, the higher the rating it gets. 

I propose using a head mounted display with eye and head tracking to show the photos in a 3D world. The user would be standing at the center of a slowly rotating globe. The pictures are displayed on the walls of this globe. The user simply looks around at the pictures, which are changing with each rotation. 
The final result is a set of pictures that the user looked at the most. 
iRateMusic
A music rating tool. A random 10 seconds clip of two songs are played to the user in sequence. The user then selects which one they prefer. After a while of “playing” iRate – songs will be rated according to comparing the winners.

KaleidoSound

A kaleidoscope that generates sounds/music according to what the user is seeing. The “analogue” visuals will generate digital sounds.

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Designing For Contraints – first class

The idea of this class is to look at the constraints when designing a product, interface or device. Both external constraints such as time, users, costs, and complexity and internal constraints such as expertise, intention, and ability. 
For next week we have to create a working prototype of a clock or watch for blind people. If less than half of the class is not able to tell time (does not have to be the actual time) from your device, you must redo it. 
My initial idea, and the one I am going to develop, is a wristwatch that vibrates the time. I believe that by tapping the numbers in distinct rhythms, it shall be easy to tell what number it is outputting. 
Other ideas I had involved an ear piece or an adaptor for any headphone that would speak the time. 
Problem is that I think that most blind people do not walk around listening to their iPods 🙂 
Here are the sketches I made in class:

Detailed view of the one I decided to implement:

More drawings to come soon.
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Back in NY

So the holidays are over and I am back in NY. Great to be back and find everything in order and a not so cold weather! Sure – nothing compared to Miami but not bad at all!

In Miami I worked on my website (coming very soon) and went cycling but one of the high points was going out sailing with Kim & friends:
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New Year!

After a very quick but delightful visit to Brazil where I spent Christmas with my family, I came back to the US and went straight to Miami where I spent the new years with Raffa.

We then splurged and went to Las Vegas for 4 days! What a crazy place – exaggeration is an understatement. Everything is VERY expensive and luscious.
We did quite a few cool things:
– Indy-style race car drive – cool but slow compared to what the car can do – it a 600hp car that reaches up the 220 mph – we went up to 150 mph – but what really “frustrated” me was the fact that it was an oval track! Boring to drive but was worth it just to feel the power of the car.
– Cirque du Soleil – “O” – very cool show, an amazing water filled stage with moving platforms and the “standard” body twisting/equilibrium impossibilities of the actors/dancers.
– Helicopter ride over the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon – amazing last minute trip!
Some interesting facts about Vegas:
– Fastest growing city in the US
– One new school district created every month
– 3000 new inhabitants a month
Here are the pictures: