It's a neat project though. I wasn't aware Soldered existed so this is a nice find.
Some kids have zero interaction with pen and paper for at least some homeworks, where they'll receive the assignment in a class group, do it on the tablet, send it back there as a PDF, and get back an annotated PDF with the corrections.
Not all schools are doing all of that. Some schools are though, and most seem to have implemented some subset.
While doing this, the kids are not necessarily taught the basics of what's going on on their devices. They tend to not know the difference between, say: a browser and a search engine; a window and a tab; a menu and a tool bar; an operating system and a desktop environment [1].
Source: students of mine, telling me about their schools and how things work.
[0] if there is a textbook. It could just be PDFs of lessons, which could be all from one source or various sources.
[1] until I keep pestering them until they start to see a bit clearer, even though we're not doing computer subjects :)
I didn't mean in the first message simply knowing the difference between tabs and windows and a few other GUI bits and bobs, those were meant to be an example of a larger point. The larger point being the notion that it's fun and possible to be a combative, pro-active, "liberated" computer user.
The empowerment of computer users is diametrically opposed however to the interests of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, Amazon, etc etc. The ideal computer user for them is one who knows nothing, except exactly what they need to know to keep clicking, commenting, sharing, liking, spewing out their personal details, and fishing out the credit and debit cards.
No need to understand where the data goes, where it is stored, who owns it, what they know about you and what is shared with third parties, what is costs to provide such a service (even though none of its users seem to pay anything), how it is monetized, how dark UI patterns nudge you, how algorithms manipulate you, why you can get addicted to them.
Just click on the friendly little coloured rectangle with the rounded corners. That's the app. That's all you need to know.
That’s the exact amount knowledge most users want.
Back when I was young I was completely astonished by that mindset... but now that I'm older, I kinda get it. When you gotta juggle 8 hours of work, 2 hours of commute, 1-2 hours of chores, and completely forget about kids or a sane sleep schedule... you don't have the time dealing with bullshit, you need something that works. And you got money to pay for that, too.
When i was getting a new computer to my father in law the main requirement was that it would be hard for him to do stupid stuff, like install a virus, so we went with a mac. It makes a lot of sense for him to use a very limited device because all he does is browse, watch youtube and listen to music, why does he have to understand all the details of how all of this works at all?
Systems evolve until they reach the maturity of elevators. Press the button, it goes to your floor. Some users might wish they could change the button LED color, make it blink to the elevator music's rhythm and swap the scheduling algorithm on the fly with their custom choice... I guess they are all here !
For most people computers are like cars, they couldn't care less about how they work, as long as they can use them to take them from place A to place B.
Different strokes for different folks, but never forget, knowledge is power.
In more practical terms, this extended to things like not understanding why an Acorn-formatted floppy disk, or Doom for Windows, couldn't be read by a Mac.
Naturally, another memory of those days was my dad complaining that "these days" people couldn't understand the electrical circuits because everything was getting replaced with ICs where the only thing you could do if it failed was throw the entire chip away and replace it.
Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance). It's hardly comparable.
As for this project, I'm not sure how wise it is to build something that relies on scraping some unknown third party website when it comes to school schedules. I'd risk it for my own schedule, but if your scraper makes a mistake you'll get your kid in trouble. Maybe the teacher will believe "it's because my parents made this scheduling contraption" as an excuse, but they'll only accept it once or twice if they do. If there's any app I'd completely unlock in parental controls, it's this one, because it only seems to do the bare minimum anyway.
> Your paper planner won't inform you that your first hour is in another building tomorrow or that the teacher is ill (and yes, the schedules would change less than 12 hours in advance).
That seems like a really odd way of handling it, and more confusing than it needs to be. For me the class was assigned to a specific room, not the teacher - so it never moved. If we had a substitute, they'd just be in the normal room instead of the usual teacher. If they couldn't get one in time, then either an administrator would bring us to study hall (highschool) or after 10 minutes we'd just leave assuming they couldn't make it (college).
"Solution": class X, Y, and Z all meet in Lunchroom W on Wednesday so one adult can supervise all of them.
Generally, a teacher not showing up was no real reason for skipping class (no matter how much urban myths said otherwise) but if the absence was known in advance we'd get a free hour. Most kids used those for some extra homework time or to just hang out, unless the free hour lined up with the start or the end of the day.
We didn't really have study hall, just the normal areas in school that you'd also hang out in during breaks (or holes in the schedule, as older kids with personal schedules occasionally had).
In university this rarely happened, most people would leave after about 30 minutes because a lot of them traveled half an hour or more to get there in the first place. People were a lot less willing to abandon classes once they were paying out of their own pocket for them.
Having a digital schedule almost gives the school the ability to be more relaxed with the schedule, as opposed to it being built around a schedule that can hardly move. There is an important part of school which is revolved around routine. I remember it only took a few weeks in the first term before I'd be walking to classed without needing to read the timetable at all.
It's inevitable that we end up moving down this route, but lets not forget the old solution worked just fine and meant you needed a pretty good reason to change the timetable.
Of course I will take full responsibility in case of bugs... So far it didn't happen.
While I'd be more conservative in the setup (I'd probably go with a device without inputs that turns on just to browse to a website directly, making any browsing mistakes or changed layouts less impactful), I do wish there were better alternatives for parents than "hand your kid a smartphone".
In an ideal world, schools would use some kind of one-way messaging devices to get the benefits of modern technology without the addiction smartphones bring, but I don't think we'll see that any time soon. Perhaps something like a (locked-down) Remarkable e-Ink tablet with a cellular network connection to receive school notifications and schedule updates as well as for doing homework in could prove quite useful, but that also sounds way too expensive for schools at the moment and you'd need to lock it down so that it's no more distracting than a piece of paper.
If you can't find enough substitutes, pay them more instead of spending money on apps to rearrange schedules.
I constantly would forget it at school. It would get lost at home. If the teacher wasn't reminding us about long running projects from weeks ago it would just be forgotten since I wasn't looking that far back.
Then I got to college and someone showed me that they put their assignments in their Google calendar and told me I could set up alerts in my email and later my phone. There were never any forgotten assignments ever again. Paper planners are provably worthless to me.
A sentiment I’ve heard a lot is “how will kids learn the value of money in a cashless society”. The answer, like with the paper planner is “unfortunately the world has changed”. Using a paper calendar or cash isn’t obsolete, but the real trick is learning to schedule/work with money. And in the modern day, you _must_ be able to do this digitally. All my biggest incomes and expenses are digital transactions - my salary, mortgage, insurance, energy bills. Learning to manage cash flow means understanding it in that context.
Scheduling is the same now. If you operate solely on a paper planner in thr modern world you’re going to miss out. My workplace is entirely digital, my golf course, gym, even my barber use digital calendars. I’m not saying a proprietary app is the right move, but a paper scheduler is unfortunately bordering on obsolete.
For what it's worth, I've been in the software field for decades - long enough that I prefer not to use it. My preferred barber loses my business because he only accepts appointments via his app. I'm not installing it, so I cut my hair somewhere else. He knows this, and he's busy enough that the loss of a single old customer isn't compelling enough to get him to waste his time scheduling appointments by phone.
Or was cash just a convenient low-risk mechanism because the pocket money parents give to their kids is in small enough units that they can afford for their kids to waste it or straight up lose it?
If the latter, I suspect even games with internal currencies would provide the same learning opportunities. And I don't mean micro-transactions here, I mean like the SimCity (2000 in particular) or Civilization games where your actions within the game are what makes or consumes the currency.
But it could also be, say, €$£5/week of vouchers for Steam or Amazon or whatever.
(I'm like you when it comes to having been in software too long, and therefore not wanting to install apps for everything).
But, that's how the world works. What major bills are you paying that you pay c cash for in the last decade? All the more reason to teach kids to operate in this way.
And I actually have been going back to cash more often, and I spend noticeably less when I do. And I’m an engineer who loves spreadsheets, so I’m guessing it causes most people bigger spending issues.
Learning to protect and not lose a wallet, or to count change… seems like exactly the kind of thing that no longer matters, as we move to more digital money everywhere. What change, what wallet?
Outside those points: multiplayer games with currencies in them simulate all of the rest, and even single player games simulate some of those things.
They’re good building blocks but they’re not enough.
Quite neat, indeed.
I was thinking this would make a good display for Home Assistant, and what do you know, someone has built a HA integration for it[1].
This lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole - it's using a "screensaver" set up for the Kindle[2], which also lead me into the info about jailbreaking Kindles.
This adds some projects for over the coming break.
[1] https://github.com/lanrat/homeplate [2] https://github.com/sibbl/hass-lovelace-kindle-screensaver
Fast forward a few years and my daughter has 2 different lessons per day, it's communicated with an app and she has to look at it at least twice a week after half a year to figure what day what was.
The best thing ever to only have two subjects per day so you can actually concentrate on the subjects and not try and fail at multitasking the whole time...
While in general I'm a fan of "learn how to do things by hand for didactic value" (e.g. learning how to do long division before using the calculator to do it), I don't think a paper planner provides any didactic value to learn before replacing it with an electronic calendaring tool.
I'm not sure that was much better than just telling the students in advance when you know a schedule will change and sending them to the library to study or etc.
If this is your blog please add "Show HN: " to the title here.
> you've made something that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. [1]
but afaik nothing in the guidelines [2] requires it.
I don't get it. Why is he checking his kids' school timetable in the morning? My parents never needed to know my precise timetable for the day. They just dropped me off at school and picked me up again in the morning.
Why is this complicated?
yeah, they’ve been for a while