Netbooks in Education

I promised to write a series of pieces on The Use of Computers in Math Education. This is the beginning:

Netbooks.

PC World has an article on this section of the industry. I write here on the education part of it.

The OLPC initiative is a good place to start. Prof. Negroponte from MIT is behind this project to bring digital technology to all the children of the world.

Time has come, the visionary OLPC project already is bringing results. In Uruguay the project is on:

OLPC_Uruguay

In Mexico, and here in Chilpancingo we are ready to start in September. Initially I will use Sugar on a Stick. I already installed it and I am learning to use it.

I will also be joining the Cosmic Ray Project:

LAGO

I plan to work on Cosmic Rays Physics and Math Education. There is an open source expertise in this experiment and by integrating it to Math Education work, I expect to get synergy.

The Netbook sector of the computer industry is growing exponentially. Maybe a combination of factors produced this situation, the recession, the lower prices of processors and components, and the desire by consumers to own the latest gadgets. Be it as it may, this is the time to make Prof. Negroponte's dream a reality.

A netbook lives between programmable calculators and laptops, both in capabilities and price. Mathematics Education since very early in life can introduce our Digital Native children to unsuspecting heights,

Unfortunately there are many children in the world born after 1982 that have not had access to these tools. We in the Third World have our work cut out for us.

A few objectives are:

• Numeracy
• Arithmetic
• Algebra
• Programming

In the modern world, we cannot stop at arithmetic in children education, calculators make that obsolete already. To the naysayers of the world, I say, these children are learning in multitasking ways, we cannot limit them by our linear thinking processes. Yes, if we teach them, as we were taught, they won't learn how to program in a long time; but they don't have to go the way we went. They already use electronic equipment better than most grown-ups do, when these instruments are available to them, they can put even the government of Iran in a crisis state, using Twitter.

The new world has arrived. Let us help our children control it with powerful digital tools!

I personally prefer that they learn programming in an open source platform. You can read a comparison of Windows 7 vs. Linux here.