Before school computer club

For many years I have opened one of the schools computer rooms from about 7:30. The idea of all that equipment lying idle seems wasteful. Most of the early morning crowd are boys and it is not unusual to get 25 – 30 boys in by 8:15. I have always believed in an unfocussed way that it was a good thing without objectifying the notion.

This morning I thought I would set out too see what was going on. This was the list in about 10 minutes.

Read more

The Turing test and personal Daemons

What started out as a 10-minute discussion in my year 10 class, developed into a one hour debate on artificial intelligence taking in AL.I.C.E. (the AI chat bot) the ‘prisoners dilemma’ and the film ‘Golden Compass’A report on the net tells of the emergence in Russia of a convincing chatbot on their equivalent of MSN. The chatbot is ‘female’ and convinces men to click on to a link to ‘her’ site to see interesting pictures. When they do a Trojan is passed to their machine, which looks for credit card information to send to its host. Read more

Excellent use of a VLE; Specialist Schools Trust

A national meeting for school heads of the ‘Maths and Computing’ specialist schools was told that my school – Frederick Gent  in Derbyshire – was an example of excellent work in the use of a VLE. We run Moodle and we have been approached by a number of schools to help and advise on the use and integration of Moodle. Read more