We have to breathe, we have to eat, we have to hydrate, we have to sleep, we need exercise. We like to make love and to converse. We have certain financial and civic duties, like paying taxes and voting. By the time we have all that done, there isn't a great deal of room leftover for play.
For most children and students in late teens and very early twenties, school is the opposite of play. It is boring, a big trap to hold fun to a minimum while being asked to concentrate on the members of Lincoln's cabinet and the yearly wheat output of Argentina. But, along come computers! Powerful machines that can do all sorts of things at superhuman speed. A person can hardly be fully equipped for modern life without knowledge of what computers can do and how to get them to do it.
Some people say that kids today will be referred to at the "touchscreen generation". A recent cartoon in the New Yorker showed a 4 or 5 year old standing on her sofa and attempting to drag parts of the view out of a window to re-arrange the view. The mommy is saying to the daddy,"She thinks the window is a touchscreen." Schools that want to be considered modern and up-to-date naturally enough want to introduce students to computers and their more recent extensions, called collectively "tablets". The best known tablet is the iPad. The apps (short for "application", roughly the same as program but traditionally smaller files and less complex) do include the famous games like Angry Birds and the addictive Candy Crush.
Among the approximately 1 million iPad/iPhone apps, are quite a few for teachers and students. One of the hot topics in education these days is the "flipped classroom", where homework is basically instruction and in-class activities are basically application and developing dexterity and familiarity with a subject. So, creating a presentation or a test or a game that uses the material being learned is a natural activity, Making a slide presentation with its own sound track and narration or a timeline or a diagram or an animated cartoon can be done impressively.
Not just students and teachers, of course. A physician who regularly goes over the self care required when a patient develops diabetes, a mechanic who has to explain engine failure, a lawyer detailing an argument or series of events - all might find it valuable to make explanatory materials that quickly and effectively get information across to others.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
