Children ask the damnedest questions. Try “where do the electrons go after they have been used by your fridge?”. Now they can put these nagging questions to real scientists, thanks to the Science-Net service.
An extension of the telephone Science Line, it allows students to send typed questions to a panel of duty scientists, using Campus 2000, BT’s electronic communication system for schools. More than 400 scientists are available for back-up, as well as a regularly-updated database of 240 questions and answers from Science Line.
The temptation to put a smart-ass question on Bell’s Paradox (a conundrum in quantum physics) was irresistible. It was politely referred to the wider panel.
The more reasonable school questions do get reasonable answers - and offer a chance for students to communicate directly with working scientists. It is refreshing to find a science education context in which it’s OK to answer “no-one knows” - and perhaps to plant the seed of a PhD project in a 13-year-old mind.
Campus 2000 will demonstrate Science-Net, funded mainly by the Wellcome Trust, at the BETT show. It will also offer the first view of BT’s public-access Internet service, which is expected to be launched nationally mid-year. The centre-piece will be a demonstration of the World-Wide Web service for schools.
For anyone who’s so far avoided the hype, the Web is “global hypertext”. You may have come across CD-Rom-based encyclopaedias, in which each “page” contains “links” to further pages and so on until you’re lost in hyperspace. In WWW, when you select a “link” from, say, a page on UK trade union history, to the Tolpuddle Martyrs, you could be fetching a doctoral thesis on the Australian penal colonies directly from a computer at the University of Adelaide in Australia.
Steve Sansom of Campus 2000 says the demonstration will provide a “safe area” of the Web “with the capability to search more widely if need be”. At the Science-Net launch last month, he was sitting next to a government minister and forced to stress the point about safety. A teacher present was refreshingly sanguine: “The Net is like life: it has good bits and the rest. Children must learn to use it selectively.”
The main thrust of the BT stand, however, will be the use schools can make of its Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). This provides fully-digital communication to in principle any computer communication service. You can send a (quarter-megabyte) novel over a normal phone line in about three minutes. The most basic ISDN service provides two “channels”, each of which could shift the same book in 40 seconds or less.
Schools in Wales have tested ISDN for night-time video surveillance. The output from video cameras is fed to a modified ISDN video-phone, which a security company can check periodically. Since pictures can be recorded at the security company’s remote site, thieves can’t destroy the evidence of their visit.
BT Educational Services - stand 211
