07/05/2017 Click

games, websites and computer industry news.

This week, the coolest history lesson in history. The smallest car

race in the world. And we are with the Doctor as something goes bump in

the night. School, it has changed a lot since I

went through the mangle all those years ago. Many. Years ago. School

buildings may look the same but technology has been infusing

education for some time. We have smart whiteboards, increasing use of

instead of textbooks, but also there instead of textbooks, but also there

are some systems which mean the way kids learn and are taught is

changing completely. It seems many tech giants want to become part of

education. After all, an early introduction to their brands may one

day at up to a greater number of users. Microsoft this week launched

its education offering which includes a new version of Windows

called Windows S, a budget surplus pro in various colours and some

treats to its office applications. Apple's teaching tool Classroom had

a face-lift last month and now offers mortals the teachers, but

before both of these came Google classroom. Today I am finding out

more about it from the director of learning at training secondary

online system the past 18 months to online system the past 18 months to

teach and monitor the student' progress. Today I am learning about

the Galapagos Islands and the lesson Chris has constructed

looks more engaging than my old looks more engaging than my old

textbooks. But tech can do a lot more than provide media rich lesson

plans. We are able to personalise what we do more than before. We can

take them to different resources available on the system. Every

student's learning journey will be different. Taking teaching online

means teachers have more access to children's individual learning data

and even their thought processes. This browser extension lets the

teacher watch how an essay was written and refined. If I have a

student who in preparation for exams is not constructing paragraphs

correctly I can say let's look at how you constructed your particular

paragraph. What did you do? Where did you develop it? What can we do

differently? If it is maybe two or three paragraphs and they spend so

long on the first one, I can also say this is how long you spend on

the first one, half an hour, Yuri spent part five minutes on the

second and third. The kids also seem to like it. Lots of time we can

still work at home and teachers can still be there on our thing and see

how much we have done. If the teacher doesn't believe you have

spent the required amount of time on the home work, you can say I did,

look at the edit history. It is so much quicker, handing in work, you

can hand it in and within 20 minutes have it back. Using online tools and

data is one way to enhance learning in schools. But Lara Lewington has

been looking at other tech which promises to change how children

learn completely. VR, robots, holograms, it was not

like this in my day! At the Best Can extrication show, we saw some of the

most cutting edge ideas heading to the classroom soon. Over the last

few months I have seen quite a few devices that bring together the idea

of kids coding and toys, aiming to make it more fun, but good old Lego

have gone a step further. They are trying to recreate real life

situations where robots would be used so that children can find

problems and then find a solution. The mission we have here is for a

space robot which needs to move around the space base, collecting

these pieces together and taking them back to one place. Obviously,

the coding should do that bit. Using the Dragon drop box to create

sequences that carry out actions as part of the learning process, as

science is being taught at the same time. But brick so's vision of what

can be learned is quite different. This is a way to bring your existing

Lego set to life. It has some LED lights, a sense that, and these

locks conduct electricity! From there you can create what ever

spreading, moving, lighting functions create your fancy. But

this use of technology is not just about teaching ICT, this adaptive

learning is about employing new methods of teaching traditional

classes. The teacher guides the experience but the student... This

is Google Expedition. Jenny is going to play the part of a teacher, she

will talk through what we are looking at in the goggles. It

represents all of you... The pictures are amazing. Looking at the

difference between the healthy and smoker's lungs I think we'll stick

with them. The idea of an image in your mind is easier to maintain than

someone talking. My issue is actually with the idea of the

goggles. They are fine for a couple of minutes but then I feel the urge

to take them off, I can't imagine wearing them for a full lesson. Many

of these ideas will be picked up by individual schools, but although the

ideas and devices are out there the challenge comes in making them

available to the masses. That is something that one not-for-profit

Finland, a country considered to Finland, a country considered to

have one of the worlds best education systems, is to overcome. I

would say education is when of the few big industries that is still

waiting to be disrupted. One of the biggest challenges in the system is

that it is based on the ideas of the industrial world. It is teaching

everyone to be the same. In tomorrow's world it is crucial to be

individual. One idea turns things on its head. Focusing not simply on new

ways of teaching but firstly analysing how we learn. I am on my

way to maths class which should cause me some concern because I'm

not sure I remember that much from school. But with this class

everybody is having their own private lesson. The teacher does not

stand up and project their voice to start the session, the kids take

their places at computers where AI will take them through the lesson.

This artificial intelligence system aims to teach each pupil at their

own pace and in the way that suits them best. Constantly gets to know

them better and track in their process. The purpose of this machine

is to learn how your brain learns and then utilise that data, is

constantly adapts to provide them with a top tier education at every

moment. And then take that data and offer it to the teacher in reason

real-time. Here the student generates the data. It is provided

in real-time to teachers, they can intervene when necessary and they

can spend more time on human interaction with the student, the

pastoral care they need to provide. Teachers can share their content

around the world with other people using the system. Any given subject

could have numerous options machine can select from based on the

student's focus and learning levels. And if they choose to manually

switch it tracks and considers their preferences to. What you feel are

the chances? If you're not to share on question, it is easier to have a

human explain it to you. But the commute pewter makes it as easy as

possible. While I can see the benefits, there is one

on my mind. That is the amount of on my mind. That is the amount of

screen time. We have had plenty of teachers not just parents, saying do

we want them staring at the screen? The answer is not binary. That is

important. We don't think teachers should be replaced, we need more

teachers, but we think they should spend their time teaching inspiring,

imparting knowledge of a stubbed it they really understand. There is no

shortage of ideas yet naturally putting them to the test requires

people willing to take the chance on them. Clearly the idea of technology

giving an overhaul to how we educate our kids does not seem far away.

Welcome to the week in Tech. It was the week that Elon musk talked about

tunnels again. He has proposed underground network where your car

is shuttled from A to B on an electric skate that could go up to

130 mph. The name of it, the boring company. It was also the users of

what set were asked what is happening after the service went

down for several hours around the world. The bank accounts of O2

customers in Germany were drained after the S S seven mobile telecoms

system was hacked. We covered their vulnerability last year. In Sweden

and the world's fastest camera has been developed. It can capture 5

trillion images per second. Others, typically get 100,000. Instead of

captured an image is one it captures several at once and pieces them

together into video. It can be used to video things like brain activity

and chemical reactions. Finally, innovative help robots run better,

this ostrich like bot can sprint up to ten mph and can self balance

without the need for sensors or computer processing. A single motor

drives its legs forwards in an elliptical motion in jet and more

power when it feels resistance. It has a mind of its own! Everyone down

to the pub for a swift half, a game of bar billiards and a battle with

giant bugs. The perfect evening. There are a couple of things you

always find in a British pub. Number one, pints of beer. In some drinking

shops there are distractions like darts. And of course virtual reality

find your pint? The big problem for find your pint? The big problem for

most people with virtual reality is space. You don't have the space in a

normal sized living room to play the ER games properly. The headsets have

cables attached which you can trip over and then you have furniture and

walls to bang into. That is where pubs come in. Pubs are generally

bigger than the house you live in so there is no problem with space. And

they afford you the opportunity for truly social virtual reality

experience is because people can see what you are doing. So the wars in

here are green. That means the spectators watching me play can see

the environment I am in and if I back myself up to them I feel they

are soft. They are padded, so payers cannot injure themselves if they get

too energetic and throw themselves around. It is like a soft play area

for adults. The combination of public house and virtual reality is

the brainchild of these guys, they have used their backgrounds in

satellite technology, IT and engineering to create this setup.

What made you think that VR and pubs when together? We wanted to do a VR

arcade, but finding arcades have a stale and outdated image. So we were

looking for a good venue to do looking for a good venue to do

virtual reality in public. When you are involved with alcohol there is

always a degree of risk to the gear and the equipment. So we have had to

rig up our nurses so that if people fall over they do not damage

themselves, the harness also protect the headsets so they don't fall on

the ground. Enough talk. Time to try out the specially designed VR rake.

We have it plugged into this seat belt arrester system. It will catch

you if you fall. In order to make it safe, it is crucial that cables are

kept out of the way. I have a harness I have to put on. It goes on

there. And then we put this in at the back. And now, no matter how

much you turn around, the cable will not get caught. An ingenious

solution to the cable problem. Now I've played tonnes of games in VR

before, and as always I am immediately transported from the

space I was in into this sewer. Zombies coming from pretty much

every direction. Gunn shot reload, reload! You don't really notice the

cable you are wearing out the harness. I thought you would but I

don't notice it at all. So what have you discovered about the kind of

games that are best in this environment? Our rule of thumb is

any more than one button is to constipated. Most of the people

playing have never played VR before and it is enough of a surprise for

them to find themselves in the game, you don't want them to have to

remember six or seven button combinations as well. Double your

gun, double your fine! So this is where nice simple games can be

demonstrated. Wave shooter. Waves and waves of bad guys trying to

attack me. The aim is simple. Fight them off. How do people fare when

they have been in VR after a couple of drinks? It's a bit like playing

pool. You get progressively better and then lots worse suddenly. It's

really frantic. I don't think I could stand blogger than five

minutes because I am getting really hot! And I'm dead. Well, it is

turn to order at the bar. Now, does turn to order at the bar. Now, does

this look like a racetrack to you? Does this look like a car? Last

weekend six teams took to the track in Toulouse in France for the

world's first Nano car race. The Nano cars are specially designed

molecules which are invisible to the human eye. Nano things are very

small. One nanometre is 30,000 times thinner than human hair.

Six teams competed, representing France, Switzerland, Japan, Germany,

the USA and there was a joint US and Austrian team. The tiny race track

for most teams was maimed of gold. This is because it is so soft its

service can be made extremely flat, as in not even an atom out of place.

That takes some time to prepare. Once the Nano cars were in position

on the track, the teams used the tip of a scanning, tunnelling microscope

to propel the vehicles with tiny electric charges. They had 30 hours

to raise 100 nanometres and back. Six teams started with no guarantee

they would all finish. But there is historical precedent.

In the end, it took one team only 90 minutes to finish the race. But they

did use a different track. If we had used the gold it would have been

silver service which is actually silver service which is actually

slower, so we slowed it down, so we could control it better around the

pylon. We never revealed the structure of our car until race day.

There was no requirement to. We worked so hard to come up with these

design features we did not feel we wanted to reveal that to the world

until race day. Looking at their cars, we knew they were going to be

a little bit slower because, number one, they were very big. The higher

the molecular weights, the harder to move it. Number two, they had

aromatic wheels, we knew that would slow them down. Even though it was

then a 30 hour race, we knew we then a 30 hour race, we knew we

would finish much faster than that. The second team to finish raced on

the standard gold course and took over seven hours. The organisers

decided to declare both the Swiss team and the US Austrian team joint

winners as they raced in different circumstances. The tech used in the

race will help improve the imaging capabilities of the world's most

powerful microscopes and the car design process has pharmaceutical

applications for making designer molecules. As it was, in the world's

first banner race, every team will have plenty of thinking to take back

to their tiny drawing boards. Now, you may remember last year we

tickled your earbuds with something called binaural sound. This is a way

of recording audio so you listen back through headphones and the

sounds sound like they are coming from 3-D space. It turns out someone

was listening. Not just someone, but the Doctor. He invited Kate Russell

have a look. Why me? You're have a look. Why me?

physically the biggest. Maybe as the physically the biggest. Maybe as the

central heating. Oh, sorry. Did not mean to scare you. Unlike a new

episode of Doctor Who that uses binaural sound to get inside your

head. I have come to south Wales where the episode Not Knock was

filmed. In this spooky looking house the Doctor investigates some strange

noises. What is going on? Using binaural sound the show's produces

can ramp up the fright factor by placing sound effects all around the

listener so they feel like they are inside the room with the actors. If

you see a normal digital audio work station everything is layering

tracks. But we can see those tracks on the computer as objects, like you

are looking down on a Rome, so you can see these dots with a cross

showing where the axis is. When they are put through into the BBC

renderer, then you can see where those sounds are hanging in 3-D

space. To mix periods the binaural effect you must be using stereo

headphones. Even a top of the range 5.1 surround sound system won't

deliver the results because the microscopic time delays are vital to

creating the 360 degrees immersive effect. That was super scary and

spooky and atmospheric. Very subtle. You are expecting the kind of

sideshow act of jumping around sound that wows you, that is not what this

is about. This is a subtle experience of placing you in a

three-dimensional soundscape. The reason why this episode lends itself

so brilliantly to the binaural mix is because is it is playing with the

horror genre and the tropes of that. A lot of what makes things scary is

what you do not see. Building up the atmosphere to that moment of scare.

That Israeli what the audience are looking for. We were told 3-D TV

did not happen. So why should this did not happen. So why should this

binaural is taking off now is binaural is taking off now is

because we are in the age of the smartphone and tablets. People are

consuming their media with headphones. The headphones are

hugely popular. Even in my family, hugely popular. Even in my family,

my kids will sit down watching their own content with a pair of

headphones so as not to disturb each other. I think what will happen when

people experience binaural audio with TV content, radio content, then

they go back to stereo, they will feel a bit... It is quite

claustrophobic and you think I want that others sound, that binaural,

let me have more of that. I think that is where we will see it start

to take off. This spooky episode will be broadcast with regular sound

in the UK this weekend. Views from the rest of the world will have to

wait. For the binaural ex-do experience, watch it on I player. I

recommend a darkened room, some stereo headphones and binaural

sound. And remember if you hear things going bump in the night, it

is probably your pipes. Probably. Karl wait for that. That is it for

this week. Follow us on Twitter throughout the week. Thanks for

watching. We will see you soon. Maybe a bit of whether cliche but it

sums up the situation beautifully. West is best.