=== Look to the Future CoWeb Home === Attachments ===

Our Five Questions

Global Transport Takes Off

by Amy Murphy, 2012
Students:
Teresa Cameron, 9th Grade, CA, USA
Derrel Fincher, 6th Grade, Tokyo, Japan
Barb Garnett, 10th Grade, TN, USA
Don Seymour, 1st Grade, CA, USA

Hi! Thanks for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me for a bit. I've been hearing a lot about Global Transport and would like to ask you a few questions.

1) Why don't we start by you giving me some background about your project and your responsibilities.

Don

Don is a 1st grader attending Berkeley Hall School in Los Angeles. He can see and hear the interviewer on his big screen. His mom is explaining some of the big words to him. He talks to the computer which translates his answers into text.

My birthday is next week and I'm having a big party at Chucky Cheese. I'm going to be six. I go to school at Berkeley Hall near my house. My teacher is really nice. Oh, we have friends that we talk to on the big screen in our room. One boy, Derrel, lives in Japan. Derrel’s my friend. He has a dog at his house.

Our friends tell us about all the cool new cars and scooters they have over there. We can see them when they go to their school in their transporters. Our friends are big kids. They don’t have to go to school everyday. Sometimes they just stay home and talk to us on the screen. We count the different cars and scooters our friends have. Derrel’s transporter is the fastest. He said I can drive it. I have a dog too. Terressa has 3 scooters and 2 transporters and a hydroplaner.

Barb

I’m Barb and I live in a small town in western Tennessee. I’m sixteen years old, and while I’m technically am in the tenth grade, we don’t really go by separated grade levels for much anymore. Most of our schoolwork is done in multi-aged groupings, sometimes even multi-generational groupings when we are lucky enough to find experts or other interested people who would like to participate with us.

This project is one with several ages represented. I’m the oldest in the group and sometimes have to act older than I feel to get things done! The project is an exploration of the kinds of transportation where we live. One of the newest kinds of transportation that we would like to investigate is a type of virtual reality, where we can put on special glasses and meet with the others in the group in a special area. This is just becoming available this year and is not very common yet, but we’re hoping that Derrel, who lives in Japan and is part of our group, will be able to get us the hardware that we need to try it out. He has contacts in Japan! We will be able to design what we look like in the room, and when others come into the room they will see and hear what everyone in there says.

Derrel

I’m Derrel and I live in Tokyo, Japan. I go to the American Alternative School and I’m eleven years old. A couple of years ago, that means I would have been in the sixth grade but, like Barb, we work together with different ages and grades here.

Our Global Transport project is one where I worked with Barb, Teresa, and Donny. I studied the different types of transportation in Japan while they studied theirs. We then compared them.

For my project, I used my keicon [Edpro Autonote: Keicon is a contraction of the Japanese words keitai (cellular telephone) and pasocon (personal computer). The keicon, while about the size of a keitai, has a 24/7 high speed data connection to Internet2 and its introduction lead to obsolescence of the keitai in Japan. Even though it is most frequently used as a telephone, many also use the voice recognition features to create continuous diaries of their lives and use the built-in vidcam to record interesting scenes. It may also be used as a computer using either voice input or a wireless keyboard that many carry. If the processing needs are greater than the built-in capacity, it seamlessly passes the request to other computers, or to the user’s home computer. The built-in vidcam has enough resolution that retinal imaging may be used for security if users want it to use more than just voiceprint.] to record scenes of transportation in Japan. They really found it interesting when I took it on the inbound rush-hour train and I held it above my head so that they could see the crush of people. I also showed them the “bug people”. These are the people who are shoved so hard against the doors that they look like bug splats on the windshield. Tokyo is supposed to be getting less crowded but it sure doesn’t feel like it! And you would think that with all of these great electronics, people would work from home and avoid the train. But this is Japan and tradition is very strong.

And they also found it interesting when a mother went by on her bicycle with a kid in the handle bar seat and a kid on the rear seat. She was talking on her keicon. The boy in back was talking on his keicon, and the girl in front was playing a game on a kawaicon. [EA: A kawaicon is essentially a smaller version of a keicon. It has fewer features and it is targeted at children six and under.]

The new glasses that are almost like 3D are here in Japan right now, but they are really expensive! Our school may get a donation of a few pairs. Barb suggested that we could think of that virtual reality as a kind of transportation, so we want to try that.

Teresa

As a 9th grader you are to begin independent study projects but still attend classes 3 days per week. With the help of my college preparatory counselor, my math teacher and my social studies teachers we were able to create a plan for my freshman year that would both fulfill requirements and meet my interest in transportation engineering.

2) A major project like this takes a considerable amount of time. I find it interesting that some of you only meet at your Face2Face schools as little as one day per week. Talk to me about how you actually do the collaborating and communicating.

Don

Well, when we get to our room we turn on our screen and see if our friends are there. Then we watch them. Sometimes we take the camera and we can talk to them outside and show them our scooters and transporters. At my house I have a screen and I can talk to my friends too. I show them my turtle.

Barb

There are lots of things that we can do instead of meet together physically, which would be very hard since some of us live so far apart. Sometimes we do a type of video-conferencing, but our access is extremely fast. I use a laptop for access. I started to say “wireless laptop” but there’s not really any such thing as a “wired laptop” anymore! The access speed is fast enough that it is just like being in the room with the others in the group. I have a friend who uses his micro-computer for his projects like this. It’s small enough to carry in his pocket, and the video meetings are just as clear as mine.
We also meet sometimes in real-time virtual class spaces called ClassChat. There’s no video there, though, so it’s not really as much fun to meet in those. The teachers like them, though, because they used them back when they were in school.

Derrel

Going to one day a week a school was kind of nice, but it actually turns out to be more. Mom says it’s cheaper to send me to school instead of daycare. (I’m 11! I can take care of myself!) Anyway, I meet in a real class once a week. Two other days I week I go to school and work on projects there. They have big rooms where we can work with our portables and they have a lot of other nice equipment as well. Portables are much easier for long use than a keicon. These rooms also have good teleportics so I can have a meeting with a bunch of people even though only a few of us are in the room. These almost look like the people are right there, but you can still see they are just projected on a screen. The school is not very big, and the few days that everybody comes to school, we are really crowded! The school also rents space to English Language Schools and they have more people who come in on the days that we have fewer things happening.

Also we play a lot of games and do sports together then. I’ve become a lot better at soccer this year because we do PE on those days as well. The PE teacher is really cool. He did one game where we each took our keicons and slaved them together, then had to use the GPS system to make geometric shapes with the thirty of us. That was hard since we were in the big park behind the school and we could get no closer than 30 meters to another kid. We could see the shape form on our screens as we were trying to make them. It was kind of like a big connect-the-dots.

The other two days, I play at home or get together with other kids and visit places in Tokyo for our projects. That’s when I did most of the work for this Global Transport project.

We met in our vidconference sometimes, but I would have to stay up really late so that we could all get together at once. It took Donny a while to really understand that it was dark here even though he had just gotten up. I also didn’t want the girls to see me in my pajamas at first, but after we had been working a while, Teresa quit trying to make sure her makeup was on before we started. Since Barb was in Tennessee, she usually was the most awake of any of us.

When we didn’t meet, we would leave our observations, video, and notes in our group memory and then people would add as they needed to. Donny took lots of video but much of it was of his dog. Teresa, Barb, and I helped him figure out how to edit it and to get the stuff that we needed, like video of transportation. It was kind of funny once—he tied his sister’s doll to his dog and videoed it. He told us it was “dogportation.” Fortunately, our group memory has lots of storage or Donny would overflow the buffer!

Barb said her teachers liked to use a text-only thing called ClassChat, but it sounds boring—no moving pictures. How can you understand each other fast if all you have are words?

Teresa

As I was riding the train to school one morning there was an announcement that the train would not be running on weekends because of a new track. I was pretty bummed thinking about how I would see my friends on the weekend and why did this have to happen this year before any of us get our driver's licenses. Anyhow I sent a letter to the transportation commissioner who emailed me back the same day. She was interested in how many teenagers this would affect and how many more teens would use this new system and why. Since there wasn't much I could do about the already scheduled shut down, I started wondering how I could find out how many other kids would use a higher speed and more convenient train. This was on my mind when I had my interview scheduled for my independent project.

3) Because this project is a real-world issue and you have the responsiblity of creating real-world solutions, tell me how you see your project affecting the local community and even the global community.

Don

Because I can see my friends we can be friends. I can see their house. Some of our friends talk funny when you don’t know them. Then you know them and they’re your friends. They show you cool stuff that we don’t have here. We’re making a big transport road that we can all go on with our scooters and transports. We have to make sure that scooters don’t smash into each other and make a big mess. Some transporters go really fast and you have to watch out. My dog got hit by a transporter, but he’s ok.

Barb

We’re looking at as many kinds of transportation in the world today as we can, trying to see which ways are safest for the users, most cost effective for the consumers, and the most environment-friendly for our world. Then we’re going to rank them and make a presentation that will be shown to the Association of Unified Transportation Organization in Paris, France in 2013. No one will actually be there, of course, since everybody can attend right from their own homes in each country. Meetings like that are very interesting when they are conducted online, since you are able to control how many delegates you see and which ones they are. Everything is translated automatically by the conferencing software – all of the languages known in the world right now. We can watch the person speaking in Swahili, but the words come out in English or Spanish or whatever language you have said you want. All of it is done automatically in real-time. Don, who is in the first grade this year, is really looking forward to the presentation, since he wants his dog to be on the screen with him. I think he thinks that everyone will have their dogs with them, and he wants to see what foreign dogs look like.

Derrel

Well, you know, that was interesting. Here in Tokyo trains are still the most common form of transportation because they don’t have enough highways, but Barb’s pictures reminded me of rural Japan. Trains could be efficient there, but she did some checking and found it would cost, gee, millions of dollars to put in a train that would connect people in her area because it is rural. But they are pushing for more fuel-cell buses now. We still have to do a lot of work to get ready for our big presentation in Paris. I’m kind of scared about that but Barb knows what she is doing. Donny is excited—somehow he plans to work his dog into the program.

Since the conference is virtual, we are still figuring out how we will be awake for it. It will be during the day in Paris, but early evening in Japan and about the middle of the night in California! Boy, I hope Donny can stay awake!

Teresa

My math teacher was interested because Mr. Pat loves statistics. How would I gather the information from other kids? How reliable would it be? My social studies teacher was interested because of the community of kids riding the train could be cool. Also she was interested in how the train stops and effected the local economics of where the train stopped. If a high speed train were added with fewer stops would the local communities feel much of an impact? How had the building of this train in the past affect the stops.

As far as the global community I've learned that other kids my age and younger on relying on public transporation more and more. It was really surprising to me that the Japanese kids have been doing this much longer than I have. There cost seem high for new transportation but we require even higher wages here in the US for laying down these new tracks. It seems we do pay less for materials though.

4) After having spent such a considerable amount of time on this project, I imagine that it's difficult to not be affected personally. Tell me about your position throughout the project and any changes you have made personally and how you have been affected as a result of completing this project.

Don

I didn’t have that many friends before. Now I have more friends that I can see and play with sometimes. They said I can come to their house. My dog has to stay home.

Barb

We take turns leading the group, but like I said sometimes it’s not fun being the oldest. Everyone shares the work, though, and that makes it much more fun. I used to put things off until the last minute, but working with groups when you have specific times that you have to meet and have things finished and they are counting on you and they can SEE you sitting there sweating if you didn’t do your part…. That has made me do much better about doing things early.

Derrel

The big thing about the project is that it helped me to see the world how Barb, and Teresa, and Donny see it. You know, maybe it wasn’t about transportation after all—maybe it was about us. I may forget about the trains, but I think I will always remember Barb, Teresa, and Donny. My teacher was telling us when she went to school everybody the same age was in the same class. How boring! Teresa and Barb helped me learn a lot, and I know I helped Donny. And Donny helped me to think about little kids as being people, too.

(Optional 4a) What might you have done differently or will change on your next project?

Don

It would be good on our next work if we got even more friends. I let my dog see my friends at home on the screen. He saw another dog on the screen once. They started barking. It was funny.

Barb

I would like to work in a larger group next time, with maybe everyone from different countries. The translation software makes it easy to understand everyone, and I like learning about what makes places where others live special.

Derrel

I enjoyed working with them but we are all, you know, American. It would be fun to work with kids from other countries. I know it would be frustrating because their customs are different, but I think we could learn a lot! That’s one reason I’m excited about our presentation—I get to meet more people.

It would be fun to work with a person my age locally and others internationally. It was a lot to think about without having a partner to work with on projects. I would definitely like to work with more international folks as well and have some follow-up with these people later.

5) While every reporter covers the topics he or she needs to record.. there are always interesting bits that come from the people directly involved, that are not always apparent to the outside... What else would you like to share with the world about your project and the process by which it was accomplished?

Don

Well, the fastest scooter is the Dyno 6000. But a transporter can go 5 times faster than a scooter. If I had a transporter I would get the Areowing because it has a built in screen so you can see your friends when you’re in it. With the transporter your dog can go but its really hard to fit your dog on a scooter even though the scooters are good too. If you have a lot of people you should have the Maxiwing because then all your friends can go. If you have to go over the water I like the hydroplaners because you can go over waves and you don’t get wet very much. Do you have a dog at your house?

Barb

It’s pretty exciting working with different people all over the world on projects like this one. I like being able to see them and talk with them in real-time, but I also like the VirtualWorld access where we can change what people see in the groups. Sometimes that makes it easier to work together – when we aren’t so caught up in what the others look like. I’ve learned a lot about people and their cultures by working with them in projects like this, and because the hardware and software is so inexpensive now, over 80% of the world population is connected. Things have gotten much smaller, faster, and cheaper since I started to school back in 2002. Back then, many classrooms did not have computers and many that did have them did not really use them for projects like we do now. We met every day in classrooms back then, too, but when I was in sixth grade we began connecting online for 50% of our classes. In ninth grade, we started meeting physically only once a week. That time is usually spent working out project problems, doing research with others in the class, and networking for future projects and assignments.

Derrel

Barb and Teresa helped me a lot. They showed my how to get the Edpro Editor to automatically explain Japanese words. And, you know, Donny talks a lot and he hasn’t figured out how to make it shorter, but Teresa had neat program that is pretty good at throwing away a lot of junk that didn’t make sense that Donny said, and that helped a lot. I helped Donny learn to do a few things, like how to make sure he was recording and how to turn it off when he didn’t want to record. He once wore it into the bathroom and had left the video on! Gross!

Working together really helped. Barb and Teresa helped me with some of the math we were having to do for our analysis. Donny helped me because trying to explain to him was hard, and then I really had to think about something when explaining, and I found out sometimes that I didn’t know as much as I thought I would know.

Teresa

I was really annoyed with the 1st grader at first. He was always bringing up unimportant garbage, but I talked to my counselor about this and we discussed how this was more of mentor relationship. That groups often had people from other backgrounds and we needed to use other communication strategies with such a youngite. I don't think about the tech stuff much because I it just makes sense to me to use these tools to help generate statistics. But it did really push me to learn how to teach other people and how other features might be important to people in other situtations.

Last maintained 11/19/2007