Volunteering at School

Being the computer geek that I am, I volunteer at my daughter’s elementary school once a week during computer time. The school has some pretty good technology, including a “smart board“, that projects the display onto a large screen. The kids can then just point to the screen to move the mouse around and click buttons. I want one!

Unfortunately all the computers in the lab are Dell desktops running Windows XP, but what can you do? I’m sure they got a good deal on them.

Anyway, a couple weeks ago the teacher had the kids do a project using Microsoft Excel to show what the favorite fruit was for all the kids in the class. The kids liked predicting the answers and lining up for their favorite fruit, but they certainly didn’t like using Excel. It was difficult for some of them to type the numbers in the right cells, they accidently erased formulas and generally spent more time fighting with Excel than learning. Others found the activity to be way too boring.

It got me thinking. I thought the activity was a good one because it dealt with guessing, counting, adding and other math-type stuff. It’s just that Excel was not the best tool for the job. I don’t blame the teacher because she really didn’t have anything else to work with, which is unfortunate.

So when my daughter got home from school we sat down and thought about how this activity might have been more fun. I then fired up REALbasic and created a simple solution (in about 45 minutes) that she absolutely loved. Rather than have them type values and fiddle with graphs, I created a simple interface where they could click “+” or “-” to increase or decrease fruit values (and it spoke the number). The graph updated immediately as these changes were made. And the amount of students left to include also changed dynamically. This is what it looked like:

I sent it off to the teacher and we tried it in this week’s class.

It was a huge hit. The kids were practically fighting to go up to the smart board to input the values. They loved clicking on the buttons and watching all the numbers change automatically. They loved hearing it speak and liked watching the graph grow. I think they learned a lot more from it.

And more importantly, they learned that computers should be fun.