Stormfuhrer by E. R. Everett Read Free Book Online Page B

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