A couple of Friday’s ago I had the great pleasure of attending a career fair for students at Marysville High School.  My job was to answer questions about Ohio Hi-Point’s laptop program, and I brought along a couple of our new iPads for students to play with.

One of the apps we have on our iPads does virtual frog dissections.  It’s very realistic, minus the odor (which was a big plus for most of them).  Another app I demonstrated was called The Elements, which turns the periodic table of elements into a 3-D graphical learning environment.  Students saw elements in their natural forms in 3-D, were able to use their fingers to tap and manipulate the elements on the screen, and accessed as much information about the elements as they would find in a textbook.

The students really enjoyed the iPads. They kept coming back with different friends asking to “play” the frog dissection or element apps again!  I heard more than once, “Can I play that?”  The lines between playing and learning were completely blurred with the iPad.

I let the kids “play” all they wanted, and it was a great day.  I saw them learning about frog spleens and livers, how our system is different from a frog’s, and about elements such as gold, hydrogen, and mercury.  But to them, it was just playing.

Tracy Franck serves as an assistant technology coordinator for Ohio Hi-Point Career Center.