Laptops in science

Roger Frost reports from a school using laptops (for TES 2000)

Dave Roughley starts his science lesson by burning a spoonful of sulphur. For the pupils it’s a graphic introduction to how acid rain starts out – for a science teacher it’s the ritual to start off any lesson on the dangers of acid rain.  In similar lessons in all sorts of schools, the students go on to scour textbooks and library books for the facts they need and assemble them into a project. 

But here at Sawtry Community College, we’re not doing books today - instead we’re looking on the Internet for details from environmental agencies, pressure groups and scientists. To ease the class’ quest Dave Roughley has given them a set of web pages, a mini-web site on acid rain, what causes it, what does it do and so on. They will put the pieces together using Microsoft Powerpoint.

In a sense, the Powerpoint lesson is another kind of ritual here not far from Peterborough. At this school you will find several whole classes of pupils bearing laptops filled with the technology for surfing the ‘net, making slide presentations and more besides. Tiny radio antennae connect their machines to the Internet – such that each room in the science block, never mind the whole school, can beam into to that worldwide library. Unfettered access to resources has opened up ways of teaching that would break backs in many schools: classes using worksheets on screens, drawing graphs with an Excel spreadsheet, and of course making slide show projects. Today all sorts of everyday work happens on the computer.

The change from paper to screens began when the school piloted Microsoft’s Anytime, Anywhere Learning project and got a class of pupils a laptop each. Two years on, using technology is as transparent as each laptop’s radio connection to the Internet. Just now, Roughley’s class seem entirely unfazed by being asked to present some research findings. Nor is he fazed that several of them have turned up without their laptops – as those without find a partner and get on with it. What’s more these year 8 pupils have had their laptops for four months and there seems not much one can tell them about using Internet Explorer they don’t already know. The school trained them with some induction lessons where they learned to care for the machines. After that they took then away and things seemed to let rip: someone learns how to enable their infrared port, and everyone learns how to. And not one pupil has chosen to disable Internet access, printer access, or floppy drive access. That network nonsense isn’t evident here; lots of things default to ‘enable’.

Brave decisions were needed to pay for this. The school counselled?? the support?? of parents and asked them to fund their child’s machine at the rate of £1 a day. They sought funds widely so that those parents unable to pay had a machine provided. They topped this up with money that they could have spent building an empire of computer suites joined by network cable. Regardless of who pays, the school rents the machines and very few people know which pupils got the freebies.

With their plan to have 500 machines by September, this has clearly gone beyond a pilot scheme or a petty cash project. They want to set up a charitable foundation to make their money go further. The foundation might have corporate sponsors making ‘gift aid’ donations and parents making deeds of covenant instead of paying rent. If the plan, based on a framework by Microsoft and the Arthur Anderson consultancy, works out the new charity will gain a tax break where every four parents who contribute will buy a needy child a free laptop.

Is it worth it? Science teacher Andy Johnson would say so. It has unleashed more of that creativity we’ve been hearing about lately. For example, he now uses a spreadsheet to teach the relationship between force and mass. And he tells of the surprise when he gave his laptop class two columns of figures and the single pointer that they had to draw graphs to find the answer. “They looked at the relationship they had drawn as an Excel graph. They looked at the line of best fit and you’d hear them saying, ‘well look…this one goes up and the other one goes up, but hang on a minute, it's multiply by ten so this is the relationship’. What surprised me was that they were coming out with this on their own. The more able spotted a number pattern and found the formula that fitted exactly with the science. They seemed to teach themselves. What you would normally tell the children at the end of a lesson in a didactic way, they had worked out for themselves. It had me thinking that here was a fantastic tool”.

It’s finding successes like this, rather than meet barriers with data loggers, that’s encouraging progress. For instance, he has honed everyday office tools, like Word, to make worksheets that help children write word equations. They pick up his sheet over the radio network, and they do their equations by choosing best answers from drop-down menus on the page. It does the job well. Here, at Sawtry, they seem to have their use of computers sorted. Are they doing IT, using ICT or are they exploring learning technologies? We should pop back in a couple of years and see where next we ought to be headed.

Roger Frost

Contact for charitable foundations and laptops: www.microsoft.com/education/aal