Literature (they would have to read newspapers in the game, after all), geography, cultural awareness, even science for some students, all would be worked into the history lessons—through the Game. Of course, there was also political science, discussions they would have involving the social, economic, and governmental causes for historical events overshadowing those of the game.
Hayes had realized since the first hours of playing, that causes and effects were inextricably linked. One’s choices inevitably and irrevocably affected his or her avatar’s outcomes. Of course there was the difficulty of mastering the mouse ball and gloves for movement, which took Hayes himself a full two weeks to maneuver smoothly and naturally. He knew, however, that it would take most of his teens much less time to overcome the difficulties of the interface.
Spring 2022
By early May, Richard Hayes had introduced the game to his students. Student buy-in was slow, however, due to the insufficiently powerful processors running in most of the 12 computers. Lag made the game almost impossible to play on a few of his units. He knew he would need the most modern computers to run this game along with a much wider range of bandwidth for 24 students to play it simultaneously in a single classroom. It was a huge challenge to consider for next year, but not an impossibility.
In mid-May, Hayes applied for a last-minute State grant that might mean getting more powerful computers and faster Internet flowing into his classroom. Fortunately, he had come across an advertisement seeking grant applications for a grant open to every school in the South Texas region. His part would be to convince the readers of the grant’s applications that his plan for the new computers was more worthy than those of any that might apply from his particular school, which wouldn’t be difficult since most teachers and administrators were essentially intimidated by the new teaching technologies emerging in education, and the few that weren’t were years behind understanding its possibilities.
Hayes spend a week that May on the planning of an idea that would, he knew, sell to the grant providers like lottery tickets to eight-year-olds armed with third grade math. It would be a plan involving some off-the-shelf software that he would never use, at least not for very long. Any reasonable justification he could make for the purchase that combined increased student confidence and improved State test scores would surely be placed at the top of the list.
Fortunately, there was a new software suite on the market that was supposed to improve a student’s sense of self-worth and thereby open a cognitive gateway for a child to actually see the value of the education s/he was receiving. It was touted to somehow develop in students an intrinsic motivation to achieve better scores on the StatSat IV, the State test for low-performing seniors attempting to graduate. The software was the Aris MindMage Suite, and it required updated equipment and wide bandwidth. It “reasoned with” the student as s/he took multiple choice tests on one part of the screen, giving hints and acting as a kind of video buddy, a “partner for success.” His administrators signed off on it with barely a thought, as did the grant evaluating committee. By July the grant for improved bandwidth, a lab license for using the MindMage software, and 24 high-speed computers was his.
CHAPTER 3
Fall 2022
The computers bought with the grant money were installed in Richard’s classroom over the last few weeks of the summer. The computers themselves, which nearly covered the entire room, were embedded in special one-piece desks that looked like rows of low, heavy brown mail-drop boxes, the kind made with long necks so letters can be inserted into them from an open car window. One merely had to sit down and press the top of the angled L-shaped box to watch the screen slowly raise itself up from horizontal. A keyboard would then glide out of what looked like the mail slot and position itself under awaiting fingers. Interactive gloves and mouse-balls were stored in large cavities on either side. The Internet flowed in by means of a satellite dish which pushed connectivity into the room through cables like a busted water line, all mounted just outside the classroom’s small window.
There were twenty-four computer stations positioned in four columns of six. The walkway between the columns was covered in cables of various thicknesses and colors, eventually to be zip-tied together in bundles and placed out of the way along the edges of the units. There was also about a yard or so of walking space around the room’s perimeter.
Hayes’ next move was to put a box around each station. Each student would be completely enclosed in his and her personal, virtual space by refrigerator boxes. Interactive helmets, like the one he used at home, would have been ideal to achieve this private realm for each player, but the grant money had been maxed out by the units themselves—and by the ridiculous, overpriced software that he would only use per se. Instead, he came up with the idea of covering the units with refrigerator boxes. Within a few weeks, he had access to dozens of the largest size, discarded from various retailers across the Valley. His old Subaru truck would only carry a few at a time, but gradually all 24 units were covered.
Farash had dropped in during Preparation Week, the workweek before students returned, the time when mandatory in-services could be gotten out of the way, when teachers put up their class rules and decorated their doors and walls and bulletin boards with catchy slogans like “Launching off with LEARNING!” picture of rocket ship included, and a smiling moon, on which stood a little passe schoolhouse with the bell, a tiny teacher waving from its doorway. Farash wanted to prepare his own wall with a time-line that ran from one side of the door, starting with the Sumerians, all the way around the room to the other side of the door, ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall. He would create and post the pictures and the events himself.
When he walked into Mr. Hayes’ classroom, the middle-aged instructor was at the opposite end of the room near his desk, cleaning out the contents of several filing cabinets, tossing out stacks of manilla folders bulging with copies of assignments. Large refrigerator boxes, monoliths of unequal heights, stood in rows like a memorial he had once seen in Europe. Hayes saw him, smiled, kept working. “How goes it my Indian friend and fellow educator? Ready for a new year?”
“It goes well, thanks for asking, Richard. Just cleaning out a few things. I see you’ve been busy.”
“I got the computer grant.”
“Exceptional! Where are the computers?”
“In the boxes.”
“They’re very big.”
“The computers are embedded in their own desks.”
Hayes explained, as he would to others, that full implementation of the Aris MindMage software required total concentration on the part of the student. The more focused the student, the higher the StatSat scores would be. The boxes weren’t hermetically sealed, so there was no safety hazard. In fact, each one had a curtain of black felt that hung just inside the mouse hole-shaped entrance. The student would approach the box from the left side and easily sit before the “7”-shaped mail-drop module with room to spare on either side.
Still standing at the classroom door on the side of the room opposite Hayes, Farash was intrigued with the setup, so intrigued that he did not catch the part about students actually working inside the boxes. Rather, he simply thought the boxes were the containers in which the computers and desks arrived. He thought their sizes a bit large to justify their probable contents, but this wasn’t the first time he was confronted with the over-packaging of American products, always boxed to make the contents look like more than what they actually were.
It was a month into the school year before Farash made his first visit to Hayes’ classroom for a round of occupational therapy. It was mid-morning and some students had been sleeping through one of his lectures. He'd had enough. He looked through Hayes’ narrow window and saw . . . nothing. There was no light on in the room. Perhaps Hayes was absent. No, Farash had seen him earlier in the day, coming back from the faculty restroom on the upper floor, swinging his large, stained coffee mug.
Farash tapped on the window a
nd waited.
No response.
He tried the handle.
Locked.
Farash went back to his room, pretending that all was normal. At the bell, Farash rushed into the hall to see if Hayes would appear at his door. Hayes was at his open door and students were filing out. The fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling above the classroom were fully lit. He and his students had been there the whole time.
“Mr. Hayes if I could speak with you for a moment.”
“Sure.”
“These students have no respect for authority. Why do they sleep so much? Do they not sleep at home? Aren't they given curfews?”
“Hm.” Hayes stood at his door, non-committal. He smiled as the next group of students shuffled past him, some smiling back, others ignoring him completely.
Farash related more of the situation to Richard. Hayes, despite his best intentions, broke out into a grin, staring at the floor and shaking with suppressed laughter.
Farash now smiled broadly and sadly, showing bone-white teeth and dark gums above his bleached-white button-up long-sleeved shirt. “It is funny, do you not think so, sir? I have barely had them a month and they sleep in my class like zombies.” Hayes shook his head in condolement but said nothing. He was distracted by an idea and, in reality, barely heard the man. Farash sighed and walked back into his room, shutting the door with some force; it was now his conference period. Hayes felt a twinge of guilt, but experience had taught him that whatever advice he chose to give Farash, the man would never implement any changes in his teaching style. In the few years he had known Farash, giving both encouragement and detailed critiques were equally pointless.
Later that day, Farash returned. The room was dark again. This time, the room was unlocked. There was the barely audible sound of typing coming from some boxes, silence from others, as he entered. Muffled as it was, the typing sounded almost inaudible, like distant rain tapping on a flat pane of glass. Only specks of stars pierced the window that had apparently been painted over from the inside. Outside there was full daylight.
Hayes was sitting at his desk near the window on the far side of the room. He had a reading light attached to a hardcover book and seemed engrossed, not noticing the entry of the instructor.
“Where are your students?” Farash asked from the middle of the room. He had thought that Hayes was alone in the room. Hayes looked up. Perhaps Farash was upset about earlier this morning--Richard’s laughter and perhaps the fact that he hadn’t answered his frantic knock the period before that.
“In those boxes.” Hayes said and glanced back at the novel.
Farhat Farash’s eyes were starting to acclimate to the dim room. Some tiny hints of light peered from the base of some of the boxes in intervals, probably from the LEDs embedded in small, black boxes from which wires also trailed and snaked throughout the room along the sides of the walkways, leading ultimately to about a dozen newly-placed sockets along the walls. Some light from the students’ monitors might also be seen escaping from the other side of the boxes but not from this side of the room. From this side it was like being in a dark warehouse.
Farash turned to look at the boxes, sitting down on the desk next to Hayes, looking at him with the most apparent question mark that he could muster. Hayes said nothing. They sat quietly, both listening to the drone of the aircon and light tapping, which Farash could now hear.
After some moments, a cry could be heard. It was as if a student in one of the closer boxes was laughing or crying or perhaps both at the same time. The sound stopped and typing continued. Then another laugh—or cry.
Hayes left his desk and motioned for Farash to join him beside the box from whence the curious sound had come. He pushed the black felt to the side, exposing a female wearing a headset, completely immersed in what was happening on the screen though nothing really seemed to be happening. Actually, it was difficult to tell from this angle what the screen held. It wasn’t the Aris MindMage program. That was certain.
As Farash tried to figure out what the student was looking at, the student turned with a brief glance at Farash, a sort of sightless stare, making the teacher jump. Her gaze returned back to the screen as if she hadn’t seen the man. The student’s fingers were busily moving in the gloves, suspended in air at the sides of the monitor. The black gloves had no fingertips, allowing the student to type when necessary. The gloves were covered with tiny metal studs, apparently sensors of some kind that could be identified in their three-dimensional space by an unseen receiver. Occasionally, the girl would lift one hand or the other, waving fingers as if putting the screen into a trance, and then resume typing with both hands or manipulating the mouse ball.
“This is indeed a unique teaching method you have implemented Mr. Hayes,” Farash said encouragingly, as Hayes led him to the door of the room. Hayes knew the man would seek a further opinion from the campus principal regarding this “new teaching method.” Farash would indeed need to hear the principal’s opinion on such an odd practice before he could truly form one of his own.
Hayes shut the door behind Mr. Farash and smiled, flipping a pen through his fingers. With the many contradictory teaching theories and philosophies floating around, he could spin his ideas into any form he desired if faced with difficulties. He could argue traditional drill-and-kill and get just as many proponents on his side as a project-based or quasi-synaptic method. Point was, though, he knew this idea had serious potential and was unlike any of them, except perhaps the online simulations, but those were few and weak in their current state. The Game was the exception.
A moment later a bell rang, the lights came on, and students slowly and reluctantly began to emerge from their cardboard caves, taking up their backpacks from along the back wall and, saying nothing to Mr. Hayes, filed out of the room, some exchanging excited whispers. Others walked in morbid silence.
Currently, Richard was using the software the grant required during about 40% to 50% of the instruction time. When a student had completed a sub-unit, s/he would then open up Hayes’ seemingly textless browser--his own invention--which could be had with the press of alt+del+v, the browser that took the student to the Valkyrie’s reality, encapsulated in an historical, fact-based virtual world of the 1930’s and ‘40s, a reality that was somehow tailor-made for each student’s psycho-social and emotional needs, it seemed. After all, not a single student complained about his or her role in the game. Each avatar was different, each character was somehow tailored to a student’s own personality, at least as far as Hayes could gather from the questions he would occasionally ask them. Complex synaptic readers, ones he had read about in Computer Science Monthly, must be the cause. Algorithms gathered data from the gloves--data involving pulse, respiration, and movement. These things could predict much about one’s mental state, especially over time. He had no idea how the game placed students in their appropriate avatars so quickly at the onset, some only a few minutes after first opening the browser. Clearly, the program knew from information acquired through the gloves who was playing at any given moment. There was thus no need for logins and none were required. No student was ever mistaken for another student. Richard silently gave homage to the Valkyrie builders responsible, whoever they actually were.
Hayes still incorporated the Aris MindMage into his curriculum. He had to; it was part of the grant. He would have to submit reports, eventually. This meant that students would need to finish a certain number of sub-units each semester, according to the software literature. It had been Mr. Hayes' particular requirement, therefore, that a student must finish a sub-unit of the MindMage each period before joining the Game.
But it wasn't long before the 40-50% of class time devoted to the Aris MindMage soon dropped to 30%, then 25%, though he hadn’t decreased the workload. Students were scurrying through the Aris MindMage to get to the Game before losing valuable class time. Their scores on the MindMage, however, hadn't dropped, only the time it took them to finish lessons, which meant overall performance was i
mproving. Some students were even coming before and after school to get sub-units completed beforehand so that all their class time could be devoted to what actually mattered to them, the Game. One student even completed MindMage sub-units in a mind-blowing ten minutes, on a regular basis, in order to use the remaining “tutoring” time for the Game.
A few weeks had passed before Farash would approach Hayes’ classroom door again. Farash had again left his students in a huff, followed as he went, by giggles. This time, Farash knocked rather solidly on the oak-veneered door, left arm akimbo with a fist resting on his white chinos. It wasn’t long before Hayes opened it and Farash squeezed in gratefully, as if now shielded from what had followed him through the hall. Hayes’ classroom was fully lit up this time.
“Can I observe?” He smiled, pitifully.
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