[school-discuss] Way cool Linux Robotics web app

[Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

A Brandon teacher just asked me about helping her teach robotics as an 
enrichment activity.  Went to several commercial web sites and there are 
of course kits galore, but much to my chagrin, most of the CD ROM 
softare requires, you guessed it, Windows.

So I googled "Linux robots" and found lots of cool stuff, but this one 
has to be the best:

http://www.linuxrobots.org/wiki/michael_shiloh

You log on via ssh, and you can open, edit, and compile programs and 
then run them on the robot, and it includes a webcam to see it in 
action.  It's currently on exhibition and unavailable but should be back 
online in August.  The students get to play NASA engineers programming a 
rover on the other side of the country.

Now that I don't have to spend all my volunteer time fixing Windows 9x 
PCs, I can turn my efforts to more direct educational support 
activities...my C programming is old, but I'm sure I can show the 
teacher how to modify an existing program and recompile and run it.

Here's the other benefit of K12LTSP: it frees the parent technology 
volunteers from repair work to helping teachers develop new lessons and 
enrich students using technology that works.  William says it best: 
K12LTSP allows us to spend our time adding features and capabilities, 
not spending hours of it getting back to square one.

Regards,
Daniel


--
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation