Apple Technology Review, Fall 1997: Science with eMates

Learning Science by Doing Science, page 8

3. With tools teachers themselves could create curricular aids for the eMate.

If teachers had the ability to easily create their own curricular material for this Newton, Tucker suggested that the eMate would become very popular in schools. Newton Press books would complement his suggestion and could be very useful in providing collateral information during field trials. The Newton Press application from Apple allows one to take any text, pictures, or charts from a desktop computer and compile them into a "book" that can then be loaded into the eMate. One can compile such a book from a single file or from parts of many files. A teacher (or students themselves) might use this program to create a reference book of facts, formulas, pictures, or schematics to carry into the field to guide and support students in their research.

Another possibility would be to offer something like Apple Guide (currently only available on the Macintosh OS) for the Newton OS. Apple Guide, a unique tutorial system for the Macintosh, to date has mostly been used to teach users how to use an application. However, with such a guide, teachers could instead create curricular activities, tutorials, and problems or assignments based upon commercial eMate software. Such curricular tools could be added to an application's Tools palette, allowing them to guide students to further explore the concepts taught by the course.

4. Collaboration is enhanced by connectivity.

Collaboration is particularly important for these science students: the more data they can observe, the better will be their inferences. Students can collaborate in the field by beaming information to each other. They can also currently communicate field data from one or more eMates to a local laptop computer, acting as a server for all of the eMates in the field. In time perhaps one can communicate wirelessly to a nearby server in a school, and possibly even access it from the Web.

Students became field scientists

The eMate/eProbe allowed teams of students to learn science by becoming field scientists.

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