Word: screens
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When the personal computer first entered the classroom three decades ago, prophets of the information age foretold a marvelous revolution. The world's storehouses of knowledge would become instantly available to young minds. Captivating digital landscapes would bring history, geography and science alive on a screen. Not since Gutenberg, they exulted, had there been such a powerful new tool for learning. Their bold predictions were not wrong, just premature. Computers are indeed everywhere in American schools, but they are generally used as little more than electronic workbooks for drill, or as places for kids to play games during ``free choice...
...excavation in the Middle East, so these students are working on Archaeotype, a computer simulation of a dig -- shoveling sounds and all -- created at Dalton and based on an actual site. Still, the excitement of the hunt is palpable. As they uncover spearheads and ivory pieces on the screen, these 11- year-olds speak of ``stratification'' and ``in situ artifacts'' with near professional fluency. This is a course in which kids learn by doing -- absorbing science and ancient history through acts of discovery. ``The material they find will admit of a variety of explanations,'' says Brown. ``There is not just...
...software: bigger word processors, faster spreadsheets, better-looking data bases! Then came the games -- simulation games, adventure games, games of skill and luck, games that made my wrists ache. Soon I found that my hardware was inadequate: my microprocessor was too slow; I kept running out of memory; my screen was too small...
...help, you can send me E-mail; I'm sure I won't be that far away from cyberspace. I still have to finish tuning up my brand-new Pentium 90 speedster with the 2-gigabyte SCSI drive, 32 megs of screaming RAM, a 17-in., 16.7 million color screen, 4x CD-ROM drive, V.34 superdata highway modem. But before taking it out for a spin...
...screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from behind a window, then draws it back. No, I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic -- this is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes with the box. I ignore it, make my escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the Metaverse where thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an ad for Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically engineered and grown in vats. Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like bunches of grapes...