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2015 TeachXpo - Second half of the Chessboard

Teaching in the second half of the chessboard - Tairāwhiti TechXpo 2014 in Gisborne, New Zealand - two days of world class calibre presentations and technology displays


 
Chess1-100
  Teaching in the second half of the chessboard
   As we consider the sweep of technology history, one     phenomenon that stands out is Moore’s law. Moore’s law is the   driving force behind a revolution so vast that the entire computer   revolution to date represents only a minor ripple of its ultimate   implications.
 Moore’s law states that computing speeds and densities double   every 18 months. In other words, every 18 months we can buy a   computer that is twice as fast and has twice as much memory for   the same cost. Remarkably, this law has held true for more than a   hundred years, from the mechanical card-based computing   technology of the 1890 census, to the relay-based computers of   the 1940s, to the vacuum tubebased computers of the 1950s, to   the transistor-based machines of the 1960s, to all of the   generations of integrated circuits since. If you put every calculator   and computer since 1890 on a logarithmic chart, it makes an   essentially straight line.
 
 



So what does this have to do with our teaching?
Quite simply, we live and work in a time of increasing change and the ways we have worked in the past are not all suitable for the future.
Personal devices will change the ways we and our students live, what we hope for, and how we relate to each other.

This is why we need to work together.

We must make best use of the opportunities

 




The implications of this geometric trend of increasing computing power can be understood by recalling the legend of the inventor of chess, and his patron, the emperor of China. The emperor had so fallen in love with his new game, that he offered the inventor a reward of anything he wanted in the kingdom.

“Just one grain of rice on the first square, your Majesty.”

“Just one grain of rice?”

“Yes, your majesty, just one grain of rice on the first square. And two grains of rice on the second square, four on the third square, and so on.”

Well, the emperor immediately granted the inventor’s seemingly humble request.

Check out: http://www.kurzweilai.net/turing-s-prophecy 

 

 




This is a Tairawhiti Technology Trust Project