There comes a time in every teacher�s life when he or she must make way for the student.
Plato and Aristotle. Freud and Jung. And now, Russ Gibb and Michael Sassak.
"I, the Wizard of Oz, am now in awe of Toto," said Russ Gibb, a rock-promoter-turned-teacher at Detroit's Dearborn High School.
The 67-year-old Gibb was referring to the moment when Sassak (a senior) and his classmates came to him and said, "For our next project, we want to build a wearable computer."
Gibb, always ready for a challenge, said, "Cool ... What�s that?"
Sassak and his buddies in the this video program at Dearborn High learned about the possibilities of wearable computers from the May 1998 issue of Wired Magazine. Although he'd always tinkered with computers, Sassak switched his freshman elective class from computers to video and began learning the ins and outs of video production. When looking for new uses for his video camera, Sassak hit upon the idea for a wearable PC.
Since the precocious high-schoolers had already mastered the art of setting up a Web cam, building a wearable PC seemed a natural next step. Their project was a combination wearable computer and video cam that they planned to test while roaming the school halls.
"We want to get over the hurdle of live broadcast from the classroom," said Sassak. "[The wearable PC] could be a new tool in real-time broadcast journalism."
The students then submitted a blueprint of the project to multimedia guru Nicholas Negroponte and his colleague, Steven Schwartz, at MIT Media and got a thumbs up from the experts.
"Their plan for the wearable computer was so outrageously on the mark that they needed almost no help," said Schwartz, a research scientist in conceptual computing at the MIT Media Lab. "I decided to sit back, keep quiet, and see what they came up with."
What they came up with turned out to be a variation on MIT�s wearable prototype called Lizzy, after the Model T Ford's nickname Tin Lizzy. The Model T came to be adapted by people to a variety of utilitarian tasks, from transportation to farming.
The students' device consists of Sony Glasstron display goggles connected to a computer. The computer is attached to a belt that's draped over the user's thigh. The small computer is 3 inches long, 8.5 inches wide, and 5 inches deep. The computer will have 120 MB of RAM and a Pentium 200-MHz processor, and will run both Linux and Windows 98. The mobile device will use a wireless LAN to transmit the video stream back to a desktop PC that can serve the images over the Web.
The folks at MIT hoped that wearable computers, like the Model T, would be adapted to take on new functions going beyond those imagined.
"The thing that's great about what they're doing is that they have a purpose," Schwartz said. "They've not just built the wearable, but they've thought about the puzzle, coming up with applications for it like electronic journalism, using it as a data collection device."
Sassak credits the project's success to the largesse of his mentor, Gibb, who disagrees: "It's due to something bigger. The people who used to have tight control over education – the bureaucrats – don't any longer. With the information age and the Internet, kids know more about certain things than adults. We just help them along by letting them take things apart and put them back together again."
