When we were approached by the Oregon Research Institute to build a classroom survey for the State of Oregon using portable devices, we immediately thought of the iPhone. The slick interface and ease of use seemed like a natural way to encourage kids to interact with the device and get them to complete the surveys. The per unit cost for the iPhone was a bit too high - so we settled on the iPod Touch instead. The devices are functionally similar and both run Apple’s iPhone OS.
The notion of the iPod as a classroom tool is rapidly gaining traction. Unsurprisingly, Apple encourages educators to make use of their technology - and a number of prominent educators are actively discussing the pros and cons of classroom use. A recent issue of the “ezine” iLearn addressed many of these issues in some detail.
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Recently I attended the “Changing the Odds” conference put on by the Harlem Children’s Zone and PolicyLink.org. The HCZ has a storied history of helping youth with evidence-based harm reduction techniques. It has seen such success that it is currently being used as a model by the Obama Administration.
I was invited as a member of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium where I hold Concentric Sky’s seat on the steering board. The PNRC is an NIH funded consortium with a mandate to extend the mission of the HCZ to communities around the US. Concentric Sky is the PNRC’s primary technology partner.
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TechStart, a non-profit organization founded by the Software Association of Oregon, launched their new website recently. TechStart’s mission is:
To promote technology education to strengthen the teamwork, critical thinking, creativity, and problem solving skills of K-12 students and, in so doing, awaken a passion for technology among all Oregon students.
I had the pleasure of working with President Chris Brooks and his team to develop TechStart’s new website. Working with non-profit organizations is personally gratifying; my frequent non-profit projects are one of many reasons why I love working at Concentric Sky. I’m particularly happy to work with TechStart, and hope that the next generation of students will benefit from an early introduction to math and science as much as I have.
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I’ve always loved the Astronomy Picture Of The Day - so when the opportunity arose to collaborate with the APOD team, I jumped at it.
Bringing APOD to the iPhone had some challenges. Many APOD images are quite large, so we developed our own Objective C libraries to allow them to be quickly scaled up and down using only the iPhone’s limited processing power.
APOD frequently includes detailed descriptions along with its pictures, however our focus with the app was the beauty of the pictures themselves. This led us to create a relatively lightweight interface that gives the picture the most screen real estate possible. A user can explore the pictures - either in sequence or by jumping to the posting date. Pictures can be saved to the phone or shared with friends via email links. We also provided the ability to clear the image cache in case the user gets carried away.
We built APOD for the iPhone as a free app, supported by ads from Admob. Yes, we know ads take up valuable screen real estate. That’s a good point. But it’s a complex trade off: We want to build free apps, but we need to cover costs. We could charge for the app, but that would take unfair advantage of the many photographers that have allowed APOD to post their copyrighted pictures over the years.
The middle ground we’ve chosen is this - The app is free. Copyrighted images don’t display ads, but instead link back to the photographer’s credit on APOD. All other images display ads and 50% of the proceeds are donated back to the APOD project to support their awesome work. We feel pretty good about this arrangement and hope you will too. Enjoy the app!
If you’re an iPhone user, you can click this link to download the app: 
For everyone else, I invite you to visit our APOD Product page.
Chris Brooks, president of TechStart presented to the local SAO chapter today. We discussed a number of significant issues with educators who were present. There was a lot interest in the how-to’s of Open Source software implementation for schools with limited budgets. We discussed the need for easy to use CS curricula and the difficulties faced by technical educators. We also got a glimpse of the Oregon Virtual School District and its work with Moodle. A topic of particular interest was the Oregon Game Project Challenge - a program that encourages Oregon youth to develop technical skills by competing in a statewide programming competition. The next event is scheduled for May of 2009 and it sounds like there will be an interesting line up of submissions.
[Disclaimer: I am president of the local SAO chapter.]
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