Volume 6, No. 1, Winter 2002

Cover | Oslet | Perspective | Handhelds | Probeware | Monday's Lesson | Online Courses | e-Learning | Modeling

Monday's Lesson

The Handheld Computer as Field Guide

by Barbara Tinker, Carolyn Staudt and Dick Walton
Illustrations by Joan Bredin-Price

When a New Jersey student joined her class in a walk through the woods, she later told her teacher that she enjoyed her experience. Yet when the teacher asked, "What in particular did you notice?" the student answered, "Lots of details." She could not, however, remember any of those details. This student's experience was not unusual. Our finer-grained observations tend to slip away unless there is some way of focusing our attention more sharply and recording details immediately so that we can more easily revisit them.

Now imagine that same student on a field trip with her class, this time with new tools. The students are divided into teams of two, and each team is equipped with an inexpensive, lightweight handheld computer. The handhelds are all loaded with software that enables the teams to perform specialized tasks. For example, one team might have a checklist that encourages careful observation. Yet another might have a database that students constructed themselves. This can help them organize and analyze the information they collect. All groups use a sketching tool that allows them to capture their impressions while at the site. The computers all have an aerial map that helps students place their data precisely in the correct geographical context. When the students return to the classroom, they beam their data to a central database on a desktop computer where they consolidate their findings.

Handheld computers allow students to process more of their work in the field, closer to their immediate observations. Powerful software programs have recently become available that make these portable tools ideal companions for fieldwork. Although field guides have traditionally been used to study the natural world, they can easily be adapted to human-built neighborhoods, as the questions are not really very different: 'Who lives here?" "Where and how do they live?" "What behaviors can we observe?" "What changes do we see?" Assisted by these tools, students can assemble a rich set of data about life in their own back yard, becoming local area experts-in-the-making. Local field guides can even become a legacy from one classroom to the next. More important, projects such as this help students discover real-life connections for their study of mathematics and science.

The following describes some of the software that can be used for fieldwork. You can mix and match these applications to fit your needs and budget. Adapting these to your local geography and data collection needs takes some effort, but this can be assigned to students as part of the lesson.

Using Mapping Applications to Define Your Site

Maps can now be entered and annotated on a handheld computer and carried into the field for site analysis activities. (Watch for offerings from Mapquest, Terraserver, the MapTap Atlas and others.)

A GPS (Global Positioning System) unit would be necessary to define precise boundary points by latitude and longitude. While a school might want to invest in one GPS add-on, it is not necessary for creating a local field guide. There are lower cost handheld applications that you can use to draw coordinates on a grid overlay, which is superimposed on your map. As students enter data, they can correlate those data to these coordinates.

Identifying Characteristics with Checklists and Database Applications

Whether students are building a local field guide in an urban or rural setting, checklists or surveys, software such as SurveyMate, can help them focus on particular characteristics. For example, a checklist of indicators of cultural diversity in a city block can refine student observations of their local neighborhood. Can they hear different languages? How many and how often? Can they find signs written in another language? Students can build useful checklists, which can be then shared by beaming to one another.

For a nature study, a checklist of animal track characteristics is useful. This pushes an observer to go beyond recording the simple track pattern, and to further notice details such as gait, registration, and direction of tracks. A checklist of animal signs encourages students to look 360 degrees about them to scan for habitats, food droppings and unique signs that might not come to mind if they are simply ambling through a study site.

A good checklist can become the basis of records that are transferred to a larger database. This 'mother' database is kept on a classroom desktop computer. Subsets of this database can be transferred to a team's handheld for fieldwork. Individuals can follow their particular interest. Groups, such as classrooms and after school clubs, can pool their interests and observations to build a thorough description of their local area. This activity, in turn, can be placed in larger contexts such as calculating one's environmental footprint, or designing an environmental impact statement.

Databases for the handheld computer extend from little more than a fancy memo pad through mid-range databases. Examples of available products include MobileDB, which offers a reasonable set of fields and field types, and Filemaker MobileDB, which offers fewer field types at this writing but provides easy exchange with Filemaker, a commonly used desktop database application. One more professional application, thinkDB, offers a wide range of field types and includes a good drawing tool.

Tracking Change with Counting Applications

One of the easiest applications for handheld computers allows a student to count and time events. Available as shareware, the Count It tool is easy to use, and its data can be transferred into a database or spreadsheet. If students are studying regional plant density and diversity, they can rely on the counts they place on a map. Keeping track of counts over time can help students assess change. Are animal populations decreasing? How much open land is being lost to development? Students with the same program on different handheld computers can track related data. For example, one student could count compact cars, while another counts SUVs, and yet another the number of cars with only one passenger. By correlating related sets of data, students can engage in a more complex analysis of their object of study.

Recording Impressions with Drawing and Photography Tools

Drawing programs such as DrawIt and TealPaint have become flexible tools for the handheld computer. These applications let you vary color, texture, and even the size of brush. Sometimes these drawing tools are included in a database program. This means you can sketch images and save them in the database. A relatively inexpensive add-on digital or video camera can be clipped onto the handheld computer and used for taking, importing, and annotating digital pictures. BugMe! is a software application that that can be used for jotting down handwritten notes, and also for annotating pictures taken directly on the handheld computer.

Classifying Data with an Identification Key

To help them identify species, naturalists use keys that provide pictures of various features of a plant or animal. When trying to identify a species in the field, Web sites such as eNature are a good resource. It offers online field guides for specific areas (based on zip code).

It is preferable, nevertheless, to have students build their own identification key for their particular area. The free What-If Builder1 can be used for this purpose on desktop and handheld computers. This is a branching tree program that can include images. It can also be joined with other decision trees, published on the Web, and beamed between handhelds.

Keeping Up With Handhelds

The world of handheld computers is changing at a dizzying rate. New applications helpful for building a local field guide will certainly be available by the time this article is published. One way to stay current is to check the Web site, Palm Applications in Education. 2

Barbara Tinker (barbara@concord.org) is a project manager and consultant for the Concord Consortium. Carolyn Staudt (carolyn@concord.org) is a curriculum and professional development specialist and vice president of KidSolve. Dick Walton is a consultant in video technology.

Notes:

1. What-If Builder is a tool to create decision-tree models, also known as "Action Mazes," "tree literature," "plot branching" or "choose your own adventure."
   Handhelds | Desktops
2. Palm Applications in Education Web site contains reviews of applications for the Palm (a project funded by Palm, Inc.). The following sites also contain reviews:
   www.palmgear.com
   frewarepalm.net
   www.palmspot.com
   

The projects described in this newsletter are supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Noyce Foundation and others. All opinions, findings, and recommendations expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies. Mention of trade names, commercial products or organizations does not imply endorsement.

All Contents Copyright © 2002, Concord Consortium. All Rights Reserved.