Hmmm. Let's break down the syntax of preachers, preaching, and choirs. (Whit, feel free to join in!)
"Preaching to the choir" means trying to convince someone of something who already agrees with you. The sentiment is usually said because the effort is a wasted exercise.
Or maybe trooks is suggesting "the choir preaching to the preacher," but I don't see that here. Parallax is not typically of the holier-than-thou group, and seldom proselytizes except to win converts to their choice of microcontroller architectures. I say if they can convert me, an Atmel heathen, there's hope for everyone.
On to if or why Parallax has lost ground in education, I think most people would be surprised at how the BOE Bot is still a popular choice. However, I'm sure Parallax would like to see it more populier!
I've implied this before, and only gently because there are people here who don't believe in the C manta, but schools tend to teach what employers want to employ, and that's common skills in common languages. C is for Common. Spin is for ... you can make one up.
Schools aren't going to invest in a language virtually no employer is looking for. It's really as simple as that.
All this is academic anyway. Parallax has spent considerable resources developing C for the Propeller and a whole new IDE to support it. I'm sure Ken would have liked to spend that money on something else, like a desk for MattG, so he doesn't have to sit on the floor all day long.
Schools aren't going to invest in a language virtually no employer is looking for. It's really as simple as that.
Absolutely correct. It also is of NO benefit to anyone is there is not ultimately a way to make money. Check out my question in the
suggestions to Parallax, and advise. Thanks.
- Heater - It is an linux operating system that is for Parallax. Operating system, to be defined, as you run all your programs on your laptop on it.
Windows is an example of an operating system that I am referring to. If they let me do it, I can proceed.
It also is of NO benefit to anyone is there is not ultimately a way to make money
Bollucks. EFX-TEK clients (which include Disneyland and Legoland) don't care what language I use; they only care about results. In the end, it's about smiles on children's faces. Only once have I ever been questioned about the programming language I use with the Propeller, and this was from the owner of a large online gaming company. Instead of scoffing at Spin, he found it interesting (real programmers enjoy programming, period). Listen, I get it that C is the dominant programming language in the world, but to suggest time spent learning Spin is wasted is just silly. By that logic using flowcharts is a waste, too.
Bollucks. EFX-TEK clients (which include Disneyland and Legoland) don't care what language I use; they only care about results. In the end, it's about smiles on children's faces. Only once have I ever been questioned about the programming language I use with the Propeller, and this was from the owner of a large online gaming company. Instead of scoffing at Spin, he found it interesting (real programmers enjoy programming, period). Listen, I get it that C is the dominant programming language in the world, but to suggest time spent learning Spin is wasted is just silly. By that logic using flowcharts is a waste, too.
My view on the public perceptions of the Propeller chip are based on only scant anecdotal experiences so take what I'm saying here with a teeny weenie grain of salt.
What I've noticed is the following: when I tell industrial people that I'm using a Propeller chip, I get a response along the lines of "Sounds like some hobby-type thing."
But when I suggest a Propeller chip to "artistes" and other hobby-level users, their arms go up in the air and they start huffing and puffing about how dare I suggest they soil their hands with some mega-corporate, for-profit, non-open-sourcey non-Ardweenie product of global uber-capitalism, etc.
Paradoxically, I've also heard industrial people say they might seriously consider using an Arduino for a quick prototype simply because they can "hire a couple of college students to slap it together for cheap."
So, from my non-expert viewpoint, it appears the public might have a perceptual problem. Maybe because of its excellent educational history, Parallax looks like a hobby thing to industrialists. But to all the artsy-fartsies out there, all they can see is that it's not an Arduino so therefore it's part of some evil capitalistic plot to steal their nose rings and vaporize their Jonny Depp tattoos.
I'm not a marketing guy, so I don't have a clue how to overcome such perceptions. But one market Parallax might look into is trying to somehow piggyback onto programs like Vex. The Vex microprocessor and components are way too expensive for most kids to dabble with, but considering there are about 10,000 teams each year and maybe 4 kids on average per team, if you can market into programs like that with a message something like "Hey, you like to build robots but can't afford the Vex stuff on your own, here's a DIY thing you can afford." So far I haven't seen any attempts for people to market DIY things to the Vex community. Maybe Vex might consider it too much of a potential competitor, but to me it looks like an affordable spin off would help everyone involved. Very few kids would be able to spend $250 just to get the equivalent of a Propeller chip and some connectors but I think many kids and their parents in those types of robot programs are under that impression, and for that reason there's a stigma that anything robotic must be insanely expensive and not something you could do at home. Anyway, it's just a thought.
Absolutely correct. It also is of NO benefit to anyone is there is not ultimately a way to make money.
I'll join Jon and Bill and saying this is not only untrue, it's not relevant to the subject of the thread, which is about the education market. When it comes to creating turnkey *applications*, the language doesn't matter. Only the final result.
For getting jobs, schools need to address the most common denominator. For creating your own jobs, you can do whatever you like.
And therein lies a lot of the problem. Like any marketplace, it is a free-for-all of products and vendors that claim to be useful for education. But many are just transitory exploits that hope to capitalize on a current trend.
C may be the dominant language in education. But that too deals with another trend mentality. It doesn't get very far into how suitable a language is for a particular hardware scheme.
All this stuff is existing culture and tends to accumulate traditions that are accepted merely on face value.
Real education goes beyond the existing culture and traditional values to enhance the abilities of the students to do more with less. Just following what everyone says, does, and things is not going to get one into a genuinely creative role in the electronics industry. You have to have depth of knowledge, and the the flexibility to do new things with whatever you have available.
After looking at all the alternatives, I just still feel that the Propeller (as did the BasicStamp) offers a chance to have greater depth of knowledge and more flexibility than merely shopping the educational market and having that service your every whim.
Ask yourself if you are getting more creative, and what really is fueling your creativity. Hopefully, you aren't just buying yet another processor in hopes that this one will be easier to learn, while having a perfectly good device that you ignore.
+++++
Time and again, I have seen parents turn to the educational marketplace to buy more books for their kids to learn English. They have a large library of mediocre texts repeating the same fundamentals over and over... dreary tomes with lots of exercises. And the same parents complain bitterly to me that their kids haven't learned English well, even though a lot of money has been spent.
I repeat. The educational marketplace is NOT education.
Become aware of you shopping habits becoming counter-productive.
Doesn't this depend on what schools we are talking about?
Firstly we have "school". Those places people around the world attend from age 5 to 15 or so. A school education should absolutely should not revolve around what is useful to make money as a priority. A school education should be all about bootstrapping human beings. Making them aware of all that is out there to be known. Awakening their curiosity and motivation to pursue some part of that. Giving them the tools to communicate, find information, learn for themselves. A lot of what is taught in school is not about making money, art, Roman history, obscure literature. No, it's about rounding out a person and showing them options and opportunities and giving them the tools to progress on their own.
A school education based only on what a person needs to make a living would be very barren. Rather like my old school where most of the kids were children of miners from the local coal mine. They were taught pretty much nothing more than what was required for them to follow their fathers down the mine at age 14. That served them well when the mines were shut down.
Why we attach money making to things like the teaching of Maths, Science and Technology, and programming in schools is beyond me.
I would argue most of all this applies up through university studies as well if you go that way.
Then we have "trade schools". The technical colleges and places you go to in order to learn a money making skill. Perhaps brick laying, auto mechanics, electrical installation or perhaps computer programming. In these places current standard practice in the work place or obviously up and coming technologies are essential curricula material. It is here that Spin is a no no compared to the current and projected (guessed) immediate future of C, Java, Python, whatever. Spin is just not a generally useful skill. Besides, anyone who has learned C/C++ or pretty much any other language can pick up Spin in no time.
Schools should, but do they really do so? Asia has struggled with sorting these issues out.
There is no denying that once interested and motivated, schools can pretty provide a good education regardless of what the marketplace is doing.
But in that early stage, where gaining interest and motivation are all important, a lot of junk is positioned for high profit that tends to have the opposite effect. The child is put off and decides that they can't or won't learn more as it seems to offer endless druggery and excessive expectations from their parents and teachers.
And in Taiwan, it was quite common for the longest time for even the more reputable world-wide of English language learning publishers to pay under-the-table commission to principals and teachers that went with their publications... both in middle schools and university.
The situation has gotten better, but I have a rather dim view of nearly all the major ESL publishers. They have been very creative at making last year's perfectly good text book obsolete and adding in the necessity for CDs, workbooks, and additional reference along the way. And just to be sure that no one copies anything, all the page numbers, the index, and a significant amount of the text is in colors that don't come up an a copier machine.
Such is the nature of the 'educational marketplace'. And I gaze out on an elementry school across the street from me that's front gate has an arch over it with a big sign "A MicroSoft School of the Future".
There was a time when such positioning of advertizing and sponsorship was considered inappropriate in a school setting. But these days, anything goes.
"A MicroSoft School of the Future". The future is looking more and more bleak every day. Is there no moral fibre in those running educational systems now a days?
All of my rambling post above is probably summed up best by Albert Einstein:
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
Seems that the next generations are going to have to forget an awful lot after ten years of brainwashing in places like "Microsoft School".
The last university I taught at was private. It had a new building about 10 floors tall and the whole facade was a MicroSoft Windows logo.
Somewhere between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, things got very very crazy in the world.
++++++
I just hope that this thread can stay on real educational values rather than what is marketed as educational. It is all about quality. (I believe that was a theme in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".)
It seems to me by their educator's program tutorials and tool support, that they want to penetrate education levels from about 10 year olds up to one or two years of college level students. There is really no tutorial program available beyond data structures and algorithms. Attracting the 10,000 foot perspective educator and enabling deeper divers seem to be important goals.
I repeat. The educational marketplace is NOT education.
So what? You can't take a should-a to the bank and deposit it. It doesn't matter what education should be, but isn't, what products teachers should be buying, but aren't. Reality is what it is.
You can still introduce new and better products, but it helps immensely if you're already the leader in the field. You need to get to that point before you insist the rest of the world follow you.
So what? You can't take a should-a to the bank and deposit it. It doesn't matter what education should be, but isn't, what products teachers should be buying, but aren't. Reality is what it is.
You can still introduce new and better products, but it helps immensely if you're already the leader in the field. You need to get to that point before you insist the rest of the world follow you.
Back when I lived in the USA, I had a girl friend that worked for the nation's leading marketing research consultant. The most striking aspect of their work in reaching out for new markets was that they targeted younger and younger populations. It seems that it is easier to sell kids than adults. And just about any venue is fair game.
Have you noticed what supermarkets put on the bottom shelves next to their check out registers? Usually everything down there is what parent's don't want their kids to have. But it is there because it is hard for parents to say no when trying to get out the door and there are other customers waiting.
I suppose you are saying 'cash is king' and 'societies don't need ethics'. The reality is that it does indeed matter what education should be. Without some real goals in education, society suffers and the young are less prepared to do well in the world. Just look at the prison system in the USA. The vast majority of inmates never completed high school.
Money is not everything and it won't be much comfort if you have to sleep in a fortress.
From my own experience with9 years and 4 places of higher Ed .
They DEMAND X platform compatability . I have had 2 university's turn down the prop as it was not gonna run with OSX .
Students bring all kinds of computers In to the college and they can not force them to use a PC at home in there dorms, they Refuse rightly so force the kinds to only program in the college PC lab. There are not enough seats to have the MCU class all sit there for after class homework with out displaceing other kids with greater needs EG CAD and multiSim
Its better in there minds to have everyone install the arduino IDEs on there OS of choice and take that load off the shared computer labs ..
Look language aside . C or Spin . the lack of DIRECT NON 3rd party OSX support has been a huge issue. and I am In the trench with proffs . They Tell ME what they want . I was asked back at UNI in Iowa to help them get a new system to teach Micons and I gave them some prop demo boards..... they Loved it! . but then they asked about how the SW side is done and It was a deal breaker .
guess what ...... they went to PicAxe. college kids love macs more then the normal public . It is foolish to assume that 14% market share is true in a college market... I see 20 to 25 % at UNI and at Oregon tech . that loss is a too large to ignore .
NOW these days most boot camp. but 4-7 years ago folks were on some PPC and some older HW that was NOT gonna run windows ........ VMs were a dream back then . and" BACK then was" when the prop needed to get a good foot hold .
I am at frys every day and I am allwas in the components section. I see a person pick up a OSEEP brand arduino clone and I often times point them to the prop on the pegs next to it . the ONE selling point is the VGA and NTSC out ... its a tough sell .
You make a very good point about operating systems and which one is most commonly used by college students. In addition to just college, Apple devices are commonly used in high schools. At my high school, EVERYONE has to use a mac book; it isn't optional. I don't like that, but some people do. In a few other high schools in my area, they have Ipads. That doesn't make it easy on developers though, especially companies and people who have little time to work on these things( Parallax fits into that category ).
Bollucks. EFX-TEK clients (which include Disneyland and Legoland) don't care what language I use; they only care about results. In the end, it's about smiles on children's faces. Only once have I ever been questioned about the programming language I use with the Propeller, and this was from the owner of a large online gaming company. Instead of scoffing at Spin, he found it interesting (real programmers enjoy programming, period). Listen, I get it that C is the dominant programming language in the world, but to suggest time spent learning Spin is wasted is just silly. By that logic using flowcharts is a waste, too.
I agree but I don't think this addresses the real problem. It isn't that learning a language like Spin is useless. It's that the people who who hire programmers think Spin is useless and that knowing how to program in Spin doesn't mean you can quickly learn to program in any other language. It's a stupid attitude but it seems to be the prevailing attitude.
But when I suggest a Propeller chip to "artistes" and other hobby-level users, their arms go up in the air and they start huffing and puffing about how dare I suggest they soil their hands with some mega-corporate, for-profit, non-open-sourcey non-Ardweenie product of global uber-capitalism, etc.
Why not recommend the ASC+? That is an open-source (I think!) board that isn't owned by Parallax which of course is not a mega corporation anyway. Heck, I think most Parallax boards are open source as well for that matter.
In today's job market employers(as opposed to self-employed like JonnyMac) can afford to be picky. They don't want to do hand holding on a employee who doesn't know squat about C/C++ and pay him $$$ while he learns. They want a employee who after orientation can hit the ground running and doesn't need to buy "Learn C in 21 days" or ask what data structures and Make are.
In short you have to play by others rules.
Now there's nothing wrong with SPIN, it's just tied to the Prop and outside of the Prop community almost no one will know of it. It's certainly not resume material.
I suppose you are saying 'cash is king' and 'societies don't need ethics'. The reality is that it does indeed matter what education should be. Without some real goals in education, society suffers and the young are less prepared to do well in the world. Just look at the prison system in the USA. The vast majority of inmates never completed high school.
Money is not everything and it won't be much comfort if you have to sleep in a fortress.
Money is EVERYTHING when you have payroll to meet, taxes to pay, and inventory to manage. It's called staying in business.
Tilting at windmills is a quick way to go bankrupt. It's much better to figure out what the customer wants, deliver it, and improve the situation from within.
Since this thread began, Parallax has completely turned around the emphasis of the Propeller, for education and otherwise. New low-cost products, a far better IDE, and a programming platform that should meet any schools requirements. Yet few here are even acknowledging it, treating this subject like it's the same as it was four years ago. I find that sad.
Since this thread began, Parallax has completely turned around the emphasis of the Propeller, for education and otherwise. New low-cost products, a far better IDE, and a programming platform that should meet any schools requirements. Yet few here are even acknowledging it, treating this subject like it's the same as it was four years ago. I find that sad.
Thank you, Gordon. Sometimes I'm surprised at what I read in the forums. The general vibe on non-technical discussion can be very doubtful, concerning, and even incorrect on certain topics (like the relevance of Parallax in education). It may be that Parallax doesn't communicate clearly, too.
We've responded well to educational customers and they're showing us in their orders. At this moment we are very low on stock with over 250 back orders waiting to be filled [mostly schools]. I'm not boasting here, but trying to correct some of the doubt that I read.
...incorrect on certain topics (like the relevance of Parallax in education)
That might be because we don't actually get to hear much about Parallax in education on these forums. And that might be because all the educators are huddled away in their own private sub forum. Kind of reminds me of the staff room back in my old school where the teachers could hide out from the noise and hideous chaos of school life and no pupil was ever allowed to enter on pain of death (or so it seemed at the time). I was always curious what goes on in that secret forum.
I, for example, am only vaguely aware that Parallax does have a presence in schools and such. And that schools want to use iPads with their Propellers. Admittedly I stop listening in despair after hearing that.
The Educators have a sub forum here that we admit them to. The primary purpose of it is to obtain the Teacher's Guides for the tutorials we publish. As far as communication and being present on forums, they just don't have time for it nor can they make the time. There are some exceptions - like John Kauffman - who keep abreast of every little detail that's going on at Parallax and tries to fit them into his course, yet for the most part educators don't do much time on our forums.
Regarding the iPad bit, we've finally got seamless iPad to Propeller programming straight over XBee WiFi. And as frustrating as it is, you saw yet another iPad mention on these forums today by a student (ValeT). Apparently they hand out iPads at his school along with many others. It's usually at this point that the educators start asking us if our products can be programmed on them.
... And that might be because all the educators are huddled away in their own private sub forum. ...
IMO, that was a wise decision on Parallax's part. Educators need a quiet place to discuss their craft as it relates to Parallax products, without the distracting Sturm und Drang of the general forum.
I'm not really faulting the existence of the private educators forum or suggesting the riff raff be allowed in. I can see why one would want to have one.
I was just commenting that actually I have no idea what Parallax gets up to in education, apart from some occasional references to it here, and guessing as to why that might be. Seems my guess was off the mark though.
The up shot of all that is that I really have no idea about what could well be a huge part of the Parallax customer base.
Comments
"Preaching to the choir" means trying to convince someone of something who already agrees with you. The sentiment is usually said because the effort is a wasted exercise.
Or maybe trooks is suggesting "the choir preaching to the preacher," but I don't see that here. Parallax is not typically of the holier-than-thou group, and seldom proselytizes except to win converts to their choice of microcontroller architectures. I say if they can convert me, an Atmel heathen, there's hope for everyone.
I think I've tortured this analogy enough.
Still I have no idea what it is you want to create. How can any one help if they don't know what you are talking about?
I guess Parallax can not disallow you from writing whatever software you like.
I've implied this before, and only gently because there are people here who don't believe in the C manta, but schools tend to teach what employers want to employ, and that's common skills in common languages. C is for Common. Spin is for ... you can make one up.
Schools aren't going to invest in a language virtually no employer is looking for. It's really as simple as that.
All this is academic anyway. Parallax has spent considerable resources developing C for the Propeller and a whole new IDE to support it. I'm sure Ken would have liked to spend that money on something else, like a desk for MattG, so he doesn't have to sit on the floor all day long.
suggestions to Parallax, and advise. Thanks.
- Heater - It is an linux operating system that is for Parallax. Operating system, to be defined, as you run all your programs on your laptop on it.
Windows is an example of an operating system that I am referring to. If they let me do it, I can proceed.
Bollucks. EFX-TEK clients (which include Disneyland and Legoland) don't care what language I use; they only care about results. In the end, it's about smiles on children's faces. Only once have I ever been questioned about the programming language I use with the Propeller, and this was from the owner of a large online gaming company. Instead of scoffing at Spin, he found it interesting (real programmers enjoy programming, period). Listen, I get it that C is the dominant programming language in the world, but to suggest time spent learning Spin is wasted is just silly. By that logic using flowcharts is a waste, too.
What I've noticed is the following: when I tell industrial people that I'm using a Propeller chip, I get a response along the lines of "Sounds like some hobby-type thing."
But when I suggest a Propeller chip to "artistes" and other hobby-level users, their arms go up in the air and they start huffing and puffing about how dare I suggest they soil their hands with some mega-corporate, for-profit, non-open-sourcey non-Ardweenie product of global uber-capitalism, etc.
Paradoxically, I've also heard industrial people say they might seriously consider using an Arduino for a quick prototype simply because they can "hire a couple of college students to slap it together for cheap."
So, from my non-expert viewpoint, it appears the public might have a perceptual problem. Maybe because of its excellent educational history, Parallax looks like a hobby thing to industrialists. But to all the artsy-fartsies out there, all they can see is that it's not an Arduino so therefore it's part of some evil capitalistic plot to steal their nose rings and vaporize their Jonny Depp tattoos.
I'm not a marketing guy, so I don't have a clue how to overcome such perceptions. But one market Parallax might look into is trying to somehow piggyback onto programs like Vex. The Vex microprocessor and components are way too expensive for most kids to dabble with, but considering there are about 10,000 teams each year and maybe 4 kids on average per team, if you can market into programs like that with a message something like "Hey, you like to build robots but can't afford the Vex stuff on your own, here's a DIY thing you can afford." So far I haven't seen any attempts for people to market DIY things to the Vex community. Maybe Vex might consider it too much of a potential competitor, but to me it looks like an affordable spin off would help everyone involved. Very few kids would be able to spend $250 just to get the equivalent of a Propeller chip and some connectors but I think many kids and their parents in those types of robot programs are under that impression, and for that reason there's a stigma that anything robotic must be insanely expensive and not something you could do at home. Anyway, it's just a thought.
I'll join Jon and Bill and saying this is not only untrue, it's not relevant to the subject of the thread, which is about the education market. When it comes to creating turnkey *applications*, the language doesn't matter. Only the final result.
For getting jobs, schools need to address the most common denominator. For creating your own jobs, you can do whatever you like.
And therein lies a lot of the problem. Like any marketplace, it is a free-for-all of products and vendors that claim to be useful for education. But many are just transitory exploits that hope to capitalize on a current trend.
C may be the dominant language in education. But that too deals with another trend mentality. It doesn't get very far into how suitable a language is for a particular hardware scheme.
All this stuff is existing culture and tends to accumulate traditions that are accepted merely on face value.
Real education goes beyond the existing culture and traditional values to enhance the abilities of the students to do more with less. Just following what everyone says, does, and things is not going to get one into a genuinely creative role in the electronics industry. You have to have depth of knowledge, and the the flexibility to do new things with whatever you have available.
After looking at all the alternatives, I just still feel that the Propeller (as did the BasicStamp) offers a chance to have greater depth of knowledge and more flexibility than merely shopping the educational market and having that service your every whim.
Ask yourself if you are getting more creative, and what really is fueling your creativity. Hopefully, you aren't just buying yet another processor in hopes that this one will be easier to learn, while having a perfectly good device that you ignore.
+++++
Time and again, I have seen parents turn to the educational marketplace to buy more books for their kids to learn English. They have a large library of mediocre texts repeating the same fundamentals over and over... dreary tomes with lots of exercises. And the same parents complain bitterly to me that their kids haven't learned English well, even though a lot of money has been spent.
I repeat. The educational marketplace is NOT education.
Become aware of you shopping habits becoming counter-productive.
Doesn't this depend on what schools we are talking about?
Firstly we have "school". Those places people around the world attend from age 5 to 15 or so. A school education should absolutely should not revolve around what is useful to make money as a priority. A school education should be all about bootstrapping human beings. Making them aware of all that is out there to be known. Awakening their curiosity and motivation to pursue some part of that. Giving them the tools to communicate, find information, learn for themselves. A lot of what is taught in school is not about making money, art, Roman history, obscure literature. No, it's about rounding out a person and showing them options and opportunities and giving them the tools to progress on their own.
A school education based only on what a person needs to make a living would be very barren. Rather like my old school where most of the kids were children of miners from the local coal mine. They were taught pretty much nothing more than what was required for them to follow their fathers down the mine at age 14. That served them well when the mines were shut down.
Why we attach money making to things like the teaching of Maths, Science and Technology, and programming in schools is beyond me.
I would argue most of all this applies up through university studies as well if you go that way.
Then we have "trade schools". The technical colleges and places you go to in order to learn a money making skill. Perhaps brick laying, auto mechanics, electrical installation or perhaps computer programming. In these places current standard practice in the work place or obviously up and coming technologies are essential curricula material. It is here that Spin is a no no compared to the current and projected (guessed) immediate future of C, Java, Python, whatever. Spin is just not a generally useful skill. Besides, anyone who has learned C/C++ or pretty much any other language can pick up Spin in no time.
So which schools are you guys talking about?
Which schools does Parallax mainly deal with?
There is no denying that once interested and motivated, schools can pretty provide a good education regardless of what the marketplace is doing.
But in that early stage, where gaining interest and motivation are all important, a lot of junk is positioned for high profit that tends to have the opposite effect. The child is put off and decides that they can't or won't learn more as it seems to offer endless druggery and excessive expectations from their parents and teachers.
And in Taiwan, it was quite common for the longest time for even the more reputable world-wide of English language learning publishers to pay under-the-table commission to principals and teachers that went with their publications... both in middle schools and university.
The situation has gotten better, but I have a rather dim view of nearly all the major ESL publishers. They have been very creative at making last year's perfectly good text book obsolete and adding in the necessity for CDs, workbooks, and additional reference along the way. And just to be sure that no one copies anything, all the page numbers, the index, and a significant amount of the text is in colors that don't come up an a copier machine.
Such is the nature of the 'educational marketplace'. And I gaze out on an elementry school across the street from me that's front gate has an arch over it with a big sign "A MicroSoft School of the Future".
There was a time when such positioning of advertizing and sponsorship was considered inappropriate in a school setting. But these days, anything goes.
All of my rambling post above is probably summed up best by Albert Einstein:
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
Seems that the next generations are going to have to forget an awful lot after ten years of brainwashing in places like "Microsoft School".
Somewhere between the late 1990s and the early 2000s, things got very very crazy in the world.
++++++
I just hope that this thread can stay on real educational values rather than what is marketed as educational. It is all about quality. (I believe that was a theme in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".)
It seems to me by their educator's program tutorials and tool support, that they want to penetrate education levels from about 10 year olds up to one or two years of college level students. There is really no tutorial program available beyond data structures and algorithms. Attracting the 10,000 foot perspective educator and enabling deeper divers seem to be important goals.
So what? You can't take a should-a to the bank and deposit it. It doesn't matter what education should be, but isn't, what products teachers should be buying, but aren't. Reality is what it is.
You can still introduce new and better products, but it helps immensely if you're already the leader in the field. You need to get to that point before you insist the rest of the world follow you.
Back when I lived in the USA, I had a girl friend that worked for the nation's leading marketing research consultant. The most striking aspect of their work in reaching out for new markets was that they targeted younger and younger populations. It seems that it is easier to sell kids than adults. And just about any venue is fair game.
Have you noticed what supermarkets put on the bottom shelves next to their check out registers? Usually everything down there is what parent's don't want their kids to have. But it is there because it is hard for parents to say no when trying to get out the door and there are other customers waiting.
I suppose you are saying 'cash is king' and 'societies don't need ethics'. The reality is that it does indeed matter what education should be. Without some real goals in education, society suffers and the young are less prepared to do well in the world. Just look at the prison system in the USA. The vast majority of inmates never completed high school.
Money is not everything and it won't be much comfort if you have to sleep in a fortress.
They DEMAND X platform compatability . I have had 2 university's turn down the prop as it was not gonna run with OSX .
Students bring all kinds of computers In to the college and they can not force them to use a PC at home in there dorms, they Refuse rightly so force the kinds to only program in the college PC lab. There are not enough seats to have the MCU class all sit there for after class homework with out displaceing other kids with greater needs EG CAD and multiSim
Its better in there minds to have everyone install the arduino IDEs on there OS of choice and take that load off the shared computer labs ..
Look language aside . C or Spin . the lack of DIRECT NON 3rd party OSX support has been a huge issue. and I am In the trench with proffs . They Tell ME what they want . I was asked back at UNI in Iowa to help them get a new system to teach Micons and I gave them some prop demo boards..... they Loved it! . but then they asked about how the SW side is done and It was a deal breaker .
guess what ...... they went to PicAxe. college kids love macs more then the normal public . It is foolish to assume that 14% market share is true in a college market... I see 20 to 25 % at UNI and at Oregon tech . that loss is a too large to ignore .
NOW these days most boot camp. but 4-7 years ago folks were on some PPC and some older HW that was NOT gonna run windows ........ VMs were a dream back then . and" BACK then was" when the prop needed to get a good foot hold .
I am at frys every day and I am allwas in the components section. I see a person pick up a OSEEP brand arduino clone and I often times point them to the prop on the pegs next to it . the ONE selling point is the VGA and NTSC out ... its a tough sell .
You make a very good point about operating systems and which one is most commonly used by college students. In addition to just college, Apple devices are commonly used in high schools. At my high school, EVERYONE has to use a mac book; it isn't optional. I don't like that, but some people do. In a few other high schools in my area, they have Ipads. That doesn't make it easy on developers though, especially companies and people who have little time to work on these things( Parallax fits into that category ).
In today's job market employers(as opposed to self-employed like JonnyMac) can afford to be picky. They don't want to do hand holding on a employee who doesn't know squat about C/C++ and pay him $$$ while he learns. They want a employee who after orientation can hit the ground running and doesn't need to buy "Learn C in 21 days" or ask what data structures and Make are.
In short you have to play by others rules.
Now there's nothing wrong with SPIN, it's just tied to the Prop and outside of the Prop community almost no one will know of it. It's certainly not resume material.
Money is EVERYTHING when you have payroll to meet, taxes to pay, and inventory to manage. It's called staying in business.
Tilting at windmills is a quick way to go bankrupt. It's much better to figure out what the customer wants, deliver it, and improve the situation from within.
Since this thread began, Parallax has completely turned around the emphasis of the Propeller, for education and otherwise. New low-cost products, a far better IDE, and a programming platform that should meet any schools requirements. Yet few here are even acknowledging it, treating this subject like it's the same as it was four years ago. I find that sad.
Thank you, Gordon. Sometimes I'm surprised at what I read in the forums. The general vibe on non-technical discussion can be very doubtful, concerning, and even incorrect on certain topics (like the relevance of Parallax in education). It may be that Parallax doesn't communicate clearly, too.
We've responded well to educational customers and they're showing us in their orders. At this moment we are very low on stock with over 250 back orders waiting to be filled [mostly schools]. I'm not boasting here, but trying to correct some of the doubt that I read.
Ken Gracey
Please don't water-board me for that LOL ... everything is approximate and can use a little salt.
I know the results are really what counts, and your backorder report is very encouraging.
That might be because we don't actually get to hear much about Parallax in education on these forums. And that might be because all the educators are huddled away in their own private sub forum. Kind of reminds me of the staff room back in my old school where the teachers could hide out from the noise and hideous chaos of school life and no pupil was ever allowed to enter on pain of death (or so it seemed at the time). I was always curious what goes on in that secret forum.
I, for example, am only vaguely aware that Parallax does have a presence in schools and such. And that schools want to use iPads with their Propellers. Admittedly I stop listening in despair after hearing that.
The Educators have a sub forum here that we admit them to. The primary purpose of it is to obtain the Teacher's Guides for the tutorials we publish. As far as communication and being present on forums, they just don't have time for it nor can they make the time. There are some exceptions - like John Kauffman - who keep abreast of every little detail that's going on at Parallax and tries to fit them into his course, yet for the most part educators don't do much time on our forums.
Regarding the iPad bit, we've finally got seamless iPad to Propeller programming straight over XBee WiFi. And as frustrating as it is, you saw yet another iPad mention on these forums today by a student (ValeT). Apparently they hand out iPads at his school along with many others. It's usually at this point that the educators start asking us if our products can be programmed on them.
Ken Gracey
-Phil
I was just commenting that actually I have no idea what Parallax gets up to in education, apart from some occasional references to it here, and guessing as to why that might be. Seems my guess was off the mark though.
The up shot of all that is that I really have no idea about what could well be a huge part of the Parallax customer base.
I do love a good Sturm und Drang session. It's very tiring though.