Games and Learning

The new tablets, powered by high-end Intel processors, were on display at the Amplify party in Austin Monday night. Photo by Joseph Wilson.

Amplify ended the first full day of the SXSWedu conference in Austin by unveiling its newest tablet, built with Intel, and a complete digital curriculum aimed for middle schools.

The move is an effort to re-energize one of the most ambitious 1-1 computer efforts in the country.

Last year in Austin, Amplify announced their tablet and educational tools to much fanfare.

The company soon had a major program underway that soon shorted out, literally.

Reports of a handful of bad chargers, combined with a number of damaged and cracked screens soon led one of the leading school systems implementing the tablet to suspend the program.

“My decision was made out of an abundance of caution, and I decided to err on the side of safety,” Guilford Country (N.C.) Superintendent Maurice “Mo” Green said at the time.

In January, Guilford announced they would not restart the program until next school year.

A new tablet for a new day

But Monday evening Amplify stressed those issues were behind them. They introduced a new tablet designed with a new technology partner, Intel, and added that the new product had been tested to meet rigorous different uses. They actually referred to the new tablet as “ruggedized.”

Although not explicit in the announcement, the company addressed many of the issues the Guilford problems had raised.

“We realized that, while we’d built the world’s best platform for mobile learning using anyone’s content, we needed to come up with a device that was ready for the physical demands of the school environment,” said Amplify CEO Joel Klein. “That’s exactly what we’ve done with this new tablet.”

The tablet is expected to carry the same price tag as the old one – $199 – and should be ready to roll out this summer for teacher training in Guilford and wider distribution to classrooms in the fall.

But Amplify will also face an increasingly crowded marketplace courting teachers and district purchasers. Apple continues to evolve its educational offerings, expanding its iTunes U effort and creating more teacher-facing parts of its App Store and Google’s Chromebooks has quietly gobbled up a sizable portion of the market by addressing key issues like creating more effective app curation and allowing teachers’ to purchase with Purchase Orders.

Beefing up the curriculum

The company, owned by News Corp., also announced a complete middle school curriculum that would fully utilize the new devices and work in both online and offline ways.

The curriciulum is a full sequence for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students and connects with the Common Core standards around English Language Arts and includes lessons around personal narrative, fiction, informational texts, poetry and foundational documents.

“This is not some old wine in a new bottle, like a digitized textbook with a few animations,” said Klein Monday night.

Part of the new Amplify strategy is to connect their tablet and curriculum even more clearly to the concept of personalized learning, expanding an effort that was part of Amplify’s initial effort.

During Monday’s announcement, Amplify Learning President Larry Berger made a point of walk the audience of developers, teachers and innovators through some examples of what the real powers of the tablet included. He explained that if a student used the vocabulary function to look up a word while reading “The Raven,” the Amplify system would take note of it.

“We’ll flag those words and track them to ensure that a student will encounter them seven to eight more times which is what research tells us they need to ensure the learn the meaning,” Berger said.

Also part of the effort is a new suite of games, some 30 in all, that are aimed at encouraging our-of-school learning.

Interestingly, the Amplify Education team stressed they do not see the games as an elements of the comprehensive curriculum for use in school, but rather a way “to help students better understand the relationship between effort and success, to persist in the face of difficulty and to embrace (rather than fear) failure as a part of the learning process across ELA, math and science,” the company said in a statement.

At Monday’s event, Berger was even more explicit, saying, “We wanted to keep the smell of school away from these games.”

The games mostly come from selected independent developers, like My Evil Twin Gaming’s “W.E.L.D.E.R.” and FAS Learning Technology’s “Immuno-Defense.” From the initial look of the list, it appears pretty much the same as Amplify’s list of 30 games for their tablet announced last summer.