Examples of technology at work in the networked, wired "Classroom of the Future" were on display in an exhibit here Monday at the SchoolTech Expo and Conference.
Many of the projects -- including a look at the way that weather systems work, developed by a group of Manhattan grammar school students -- were built with the newest, most sophisticated hardware and software.
At John F. Kennedy High School in Bronx, N.Y., a group of 12th-graders armed only with 15-year-old Tandy 1000 computers (which they painstakingly tweaked and customized to make Internet-compatible and capable of handling modern graphics programs) produced an interactive look at Leonardo da Vinci's classic painting "Mona Lisa" that is now on display in Los Angeles' Getty Museum.
Making the Mona Lisa smile
Using those same ancient machines, the students collaborated via the Web with a high school class in Borlange, Sweden, to produce their "Why is the Mona Lisa Smiling?" Web site, which includes a graphic illustrating da Vinci's face morphing into that of his famous creation, and clips of music written by the master artist.
The morphing graphic was developed by the students in order to test out a pervasive -- but unproven -- academic theory that da Vinci actually painted himself in the famous work, explained Steve Feld, a computer graphics teacher at JFK High School. (A look at the graphic shows the Mona Lisa's features lining up almost perfectly with those of da Vinci in a self-portrait.)
The site also offers extensive background on da Vinci's artistic achievements and a study guide to help youngsters find more information on da Vinci and Renaissance art. It's also fully accessible to handicapped users and can be accessed by even the oldest Web browsers, Feld said.
In the site's eight months of existence, its guestbook has been signed by thousands of people from around the world, and it gained the praise of Getty Museum officials, who included it in the museum's ongoing "Digital Experience" exhibit, he said.
Oldest school computer lab?
The JFK High School, with a population of 5,000 students, is the largest high school in the country but it "probably has the oldest computer lab in any school in the country," making the students' achievement all the more noteworthy, Feld said.
Elsewhere in the SchoolTech Expo's "Classroom of the Future," sixth and seventh graders from Manhattan's private School for the Physical City showed off a weather program they developed on new Macintosh computers and the HyperStudio graphics tool from Cendant Software. The audio and video program explained how lightning is formed and looked at the causes of tornadoes and hurricanes.
The three-day teachers' conference, concluding Tuesday, was sponsored by Technology & Learning, an 80,000-circulation magazine for K-12 teachers published by Miller Freeman Inc. Some 115 companies were on hand to demonstrate educational hardware, software, networking, Internet and distance learning products.
Harnessing the power of waves
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