[Gllug] open source centric ICT in Schools from Sept 2012 ?

[John Hearns]

couldn;t agree more with Phil's comments on rabbits and Alain's
comments on curiosity. Forget PCs, Apple iPads in the classroom,
teaching Excel and Word.

What children (boys and girls) need is spools of wire, batteries, bell
pushes, bulbs, magnets. At that age you should be doing things with
your hands to learn.

Hells bells - I remember as a very wee laddie in Scotland learning
arithmetic using number rods - real cubes and bars of wood, about a
square centimetre in corss-section. You put them on your desk and
added up and subtracted lengths of differen t rods. Great fun.
Later I had a chemistry set at home, and scrounged bits of wire and
batteries etc. Helped that my dad was a lab technician, but I digress.
>From there when I was a teenager and allowed to go to Glasgow on my
own I discovered a wonderful emporium near St Enoch which sold
electrical bits like switches and resistors in basketson the counter -
a real alladin's cave. I went there by myself to spend pocket money on
circuit boards and components.

>From there - well I did quite well enough at maths at Uni, and got
myself a very good physics degree. Directly related to 'playing' with
electronics as a child.
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