Chromebooks for Education

I've been looking a bit more at Chromebooks for Education. Thinkamingo has been doing quite well building up a portfolio of educational mobile apps, but the rise of Chromebooks in schools is something that we can't ignore. So we'll continue to think what role we could take in an entirely web-based environment rather than a on-device tablet environment like iPads.

Chromebooks certainly make sense for a school, especially given the difficulty of managing iPads (or other devices) as a group. I really like the idea of schools being able to quickly swap out broken devices or even loan devices to students without needing to install or replicate anything.

One great point is that adopting an online-only environment, with or without Chromebooks, is really the best way to enable bring your own device (BYOD) because it opens up the environment to a wide range of devices. Right now, it's virtually impossible for an app-based curriculum to allow students to bring a mix of iPads, Kindle Fires, etc. because so many apps are only available on one platform. But as long as each device has a decent browser, all can use well-designed websites.

A couple Chromebook resources I've been looking at:

• A decent blog post about the different models of Chromebook available
• Google's own list of Chromebooks for Education
• This Google+ Hangout talking about a school's deployment of Chromebooks
• Some Google+ communities: Chromebook EDU, Google Apps for Education, and Google Apps in Education

I'll keep adding to this post if we go anywhere with Chromebooks. I played with booting ChromeOS in a VMWare instance but have had some problems. I'm really tempted to get one of the Samsung Chromebooks as a test device, but I think my desk and laptop bag are finally at their limit of devices.

Update: This isn't really for educators, but this is a good post on developing on the Chromebook.

DD-WRT Wireless Connections Failing

This morning my Asus RT-N16 router with DD-WRT stopped accepting wifi clients. Nothing could connect to the access point. I could see that it was still broadcasting, but it was acting as if the WPA password had changed. I powered off the router twice, waiting a few minutes, etc. Nothing. I connect a laptop via ethernet and looked over all the settings but everything looked fine. I was ready to reload the router completely when I found this old thread and tried the advice. It worked. I didn't add it to my startup script though. Hopefully it keeps working without me needing to do that again.

I case anyone else runs into this, the fix was: I ssh'ed into the router and ran:

ifconfig eth1 down
ifconfig eth1 up 

I'm still not quite sure what interface eth1 is since br0 looks like the LAN side and VLAN2 looks like the WAN side, but it did work.

Brick Buddies - State Champions!

This weekend 5018 Brick Buddies, my daughter's FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team that I help coach and mentor, won the Florida state championship!

Brick Buddies went into the state championship ranked as the #6 team in the state (out of 72) and finished qualifying matches with a 5-1 record and in third place behind two undefeated teams from nearby Middleton High School in Tampa: 3846 Maelstrom and 4997 Masquerade. Masquerade is last season's world champion and also won this season's Kentucky state championship last weekend.

After a lot of discussion and examination of possible alliance partner picks, the team decided to accept an alliance invitation from 3846 Maelstrom rather than remain the captain of the #3 alliance. That was a little controversial because that almost certainly meant giving up any chance of going to the world championship, but after a long season of competing against both Masquerade and Maelstrom with zero success, the chances of beating both of them twice with any of the available alliance partners looked very low. Either of them would be perfectly capable of winning this season's world championship and it's a real shame that both won't get that chance.

With a solid #1 seed alliance of 3846 Maelstrom, 5018 Brick Buddies, and 3839 NeXT, they moved on  to the elimination rounds. They won their first semifinal matches to advance to the finals. After losing the first match, they came back and won two matches in a row to take home the championship.

The drive team (which is the entire team of three kids) did very well, winning 5 of the 6 qualifying matches and all three elimination matches they competed in. They made the most of line bonuses whenever possible and mixed offense and defense very well. They also made great use of taking away ownership of pegs to eliminate line bonuses by opposing alliances.

The hard work on autonomous mode programming, especially by Sumukh, resulted in them scoring the 50-point bonus ring in 4 of 6 qualifying matches and in the crucial final elimination match. That was far better than any other team did in autonomous mode, where the robot drives itself based on timing and sensor inputs. One of my favorite moments was when an opposing robot hit them and knocked them off course. The robot still found it's way back to the floor markings and followed them to end up in an almost perfect position to score the ring.

They did great in judging as well, winning the PTC Design Award and being finalists for the Rockwell Collins Innovate and Connect awards. They were the second runner-up for the top judged award, the Inspire Award.

My goals for the team all season were to make it to the state championship, get to play in the elimination rounds, and get mentioned as a finalist for the Inspire Award. They achieved all three, blowing away the first two.

All of this even more amazing considering that they are the smallest team in the state. Most teams are made up of about 10 high school students, often from engineering magnet schools. Ours was one high school sophomore and two eighth graders and runs out of the coach's driveway / living room. The kids aren't as short as they were last season, but they still get "that's the whole team?" comments.

It was great to see all the hard work by the kids, coaches, and parents pay off.  If anyone is interested in mentoring or joining FIRST robotics at any level, feel free to contact me or Shelley Kappeler, the head coach for Brick Buddies.

1447 Movie Titles Without an "S"

This is all over Facebook this week, and probably will be for the next 12 years. So a minute with sed/grep and here are 1447 movie titles without an "S" in them:

10,000 BC
13 Going on 30
1408
17 Again
18000 Dead in Gordon Head
187
1941
2012
2046
24
25th Hour
3 O'Clock High
300

Where did January go?

So January blew right by without me blogging at all. I'd even pledged to myself to at least post a weekly recap of interesting links and news, but here's at least a monthly recap:

Thinkamingo

I've been busy at Thinkamingo, working on some new app projects that haven't been published yet. I also shipped Name Dice for Android and the Amazon / Nook versions shouldn't be too much longer. I shipped updates to our Sports Card apps to fix numerous bugs and expand the color choices for the included card template. Behind the scenes, I also consolidated the separate copy-n-paste XCode projects into one reasonably well-managed project with targets for each app. That should hopefully scale when we add additional sports. Finally, I submitted ports of our Android apps (Lists for Writers, Story Dice, Name Dice) to the BlackBerry app store using their Android runtime. It took a few slight changes, mostly to handle different market links, but it was fairly quick and easy.

FIRST Tech Challenge

Team Brick Buddies has been busy getting ready for their league championship and the upcoming state championship. At the league championship, the robot ran fairly well except for a flakey NXT cable. Between strong driving, a solid robot, and a little luck, they finished qualifying rounds 4-2 and in 3rd place. They picked a good alliance partner in Team Duct Tape and went on to win in the semifinals. In the finals against Masquerade and Maelstrom, two very strong teams from Middleton High School, they  fought hard but lost. In judging they did well and were finalists in multiple categories but finished in second place behind Masquerade for the overall judging for the Inspire Award. They'll likely head into the state championship in 5th-7th place in the state (out of 72 teams). They clearly have some work to do if they want to really push the top teams and fight for a spot at the world championships.

Geek Calendar

I've been meaning to try to set up a "geek calendar" of some sort with upcoming techie-style local events for developers and parents. Here's my first set of events: Tampa Bay Geek Calendar.