Do a lesson
Success of educational systems like PLATO have influenced the way that Shannon’s homeschooling works, although decades of technological improvement have expanded upon the interfaces. There are learning modules hosted on these public computers that align with the statewide curriculum, separated by grade and by subject, and then by unit.
Shannon goes to the 10th grade World History tab, sorting through by unit to look for the Cold War. Prior to 2020, these educational resources were more supplemental. Educational games and practice quizzes were available, but it was necessary for a student to read from a class textbook on their own or be taught the subject matter in class first before being able to get much use out of these resources. After the Covid-19 pandemic however, teachers across the state worked together to host video lectures of class topics on the platform, so that students could learn virtually from home. Even after the pandemic died down and students returned to in-person teaching, the videos remained up, allowing homeschooled students like Shannon to continue learning from them.
Shannon takes notes on a 30-minute video on the Berlin Wall and then completes a suggested accompanying minigame, where she must drag and drop information to either the east or the west side of the Berlin wall depending on which side of Germany the fact is applicable to. After a successful playthrough, she gets to watch an animation of the Berlin wall being knocked down.
It’s relevant that Shannon was learning about the Cold War, because Cold War threats further impacted the way that computers developed. Fear over communications being shut down caused government officials to prefer a distributed network where every node in the system could connect to several other nodes, rather than the centralized network of the timeshare computer where knocking the center out could easily interfere with communication. However, due to the push in marketing towards computers as public goods, computing via timeshare had reached a large number of people quickly and was already established in some prominent locations, including Washington DC.
A distributed network was developed, but timesharing remained as a public good, with private individual computers being used for more serious government work and research. Private computers could still connect to computers used for timeshare purposes, and as the work being done on community computers was seen as less urgent, there was not as much worry about communications being knocked down in an elementary school as there was about military communications being interfered with.
What should Shannon do?