The future of education

This post is the patent submission for my new idea and just one way to change the classroom. We have a bunch of handwritten numbers on the whiteboard. Today it was from a survey. In chem class it is often how students summarize their class data. What was your mass? percent yield? pH? 

Yes we could enter all of that info onto a group spreadsheet and check for averages, but then everyone is looking at their device when they don't need to. That is just substitution: taking one perfectly useful thing and adding computers CuZ tEcHnOlOgY!!!

What we need to augment this is an app that can recognize handwriting and translate it to numbers.

Right now we have pen to print and OCR. We have apps that can average if you punch in all of the numbers. What we need is an app that can take a picture of a bunch of handwritten whiteboard numbers and take the average. It would then allow you to check that all were selected properly and if needed exclude something. For example if you wrote "Step 1" you wouldn't want the number one averaged in your group.

This is absolutely doable with modern technology and instead high school teachers are asking their students to either use a phone calculator...

Or a TI-30 in class 

And it just takes LitERaLy FoREveR. Entering 12-some numbers in a row then making sure to divide by the right thing to get the average is not 100%. Someone gets an answer and then someone else has to double check.

It might be a valuable exercise in another math class to calculate averages. Now in my class, determining the average is not new knowledge, it is a chore.

If instead this phone app would just do the math we could save tons of time and maybe even modify or redefine our interactive lab experience. The mindset is simply looking at how we do things and continually trying to make things easier. So maybe I will head over to the project-based programming class and see if they can help me out.

Hang loose dudes see you in Hawaii.