How does online learning work?

A guide to the concept of virtual machines from Robotics & Beyond.

Hi! I’m journalist Caroline Delbert and this is The Toolkit from Robotics & Beyond 501(c)3. Our goal every week is to give you some videos, projects, and products that help kids (and parents) get inspired by science, technology, engineering, math, and creative design. 

This week in issue 10 we’re going to talk about online learning! People who work in STEM have made the technology that students and teachers are grappling with for their distance and virtual learning right now. What’s led us to this point, and what can interested STEM kids get up to from the comfort of their homes?

What does virtual mean?

Computer memory dates back to, depending on who you ask, the 1800s. That’s when Ada Lovelace first introduced the idea of a programmable command to Charles Babbage’s “difference engine,” which many consider to be the first mechanical computer. And for a long time, computers were extremely physical, made of mechanical parts that looked more like the insides of a pinball machine than a modern microchip computer. Later, electric computers were full of much tinier parts but still relied on their own physical components only.

With the arrival of computer networks and the internet, the idea of “virtual” space and parts really took hold. This is a huge idea but it’s also very simple: Suddenly, what you could do with your computer didn’t rely on what you had inside your own tower. In fact, many computer workstations in the early days of networks were “dummy terminals,” which is a functional unit without its own processor or any other decision-making capability. Instead, the software is piped in from a powerful central computer. Is this sounding familiar?

Bigger and bigger pipes

The internet itself is the ultimate expression of network dummy functionality, in a way. We think of it in terms of the extremely user-friendly interfaces we have in 2020, but everything that comes over the internet is still just beeps and boops all the way down. It’s part of a legacy that began with telegraphy, but just six years elapsed, from 1901 to 1907, before someone figured out how to “telegraph” a photograph. The size of our pipes has dramatically increased, to the point that we no longer see the seams where our content is assembled in real time.

Those giant pipes are what’s allowing many people to study via Zoom and other teleconference software during the pandemic. (Millions of American children and their families don’t have internet access at home, and their public access points, like schools and public libraries, are still shut down.) And if any of the parents in The Toolkit’s audience work IT, you already know how powerful “remoting in” to a user’s computer can be. Right now, it’s the difference between simply having IT or not for many companies that are working from home, but it was already coming into vogue in physical offices.

Virtual machines, virtually everywhere

Many workplace computers users are already interacting with some kind of virtual machine, whether that’s a partitioned server or a container that runs legacy software. In my own work and regular life, I’ve used them to play Rollercoaster Tycoon on my Mac, build virtual networks to build and test my knowledge of hardware and settings, and run a 30-year-old piece of enterprise software that OSX finally stopped supporting. You could, hypothetically, make a virtual machine that nests into another virtual machine.

So everything from screen-sharing on Zoom to “remoting in” to help students and cloud gaming like Google Stadia has its roots in the idea of the dummy terminal or virtual machine, because in 2020, our internet is so fast that we can easily share hardware by passing it back and forth in real-time online. We can even dedicate individual users’ “extra” capacity to tasks like Bitcoin mining, infamously, or a proposed Sega concept to share nighttime arcade bandwidth with users stuck at home. These applications are called cloud or fog computing.

Hands on, from home

For interested STEM kids, there are a lot of virtual summer camp experiences that will rely on Zoom, but something that caught my attention is ComEd Summer Camp, where kids in different age groups can learn about solar energy and do activities. Code.org has a ton of activities for all ages that use their existing infrastructure of coding apps and teaching help. Interested kids can make games using just HTML5 and JavaScript, perhaps starting with an entry-level tutorial at W3Schools, which is part of the standards organization for the internet itself. (Older kids or parents can play a cool game called Danger Crew that’s built entirely in HTML5 and JavaScript, where your character is a developer at a Google-like coding startup.)

For those with kids who want a little more to chew on, there’s virtual machine software like Virtual Box or VMWare. Microsoft offers versions of almost all their software for use by developers — one of the key uses for virtual machines is software testing! — and students might have access to these tools through their schools. And for those who are looking for something even bigger and more advanced, start with Cisco’s free online courses. Who knows? Your high schooler could go back to school in 2021 with a networks certification on their resume.

Wow that’s cool!

Check out this dry ice demonstration from the Arizona Science Center. Dry ice perfectly models how clouds are formed.