Forget pens and paper, a class of 13 year olds at St Patrick’s College in Maghera, Northern Ireland, have been issued with Apple Computer Inc Macintosh Powerbooks as part of a Belfast-based Queen’s University research project: a further eight schools in the area will be experimenting with Toshiba Corp and Research Machines Plc Nimbus notebooks; the UKP250,000 project, funded by the Norther Ireland Department of Education, aims to discover whether small personal computers or notebooks have a place in curriculum work; pupils will have possession of the notebooks for the school year for schoolwork and interim results of the project will be published next Easter and the final results in July 1992; the PowerBooks have been supplied by Northern Ireland-based CEM Computers Ltd, together with an integrated software package, ClarisWorks; Dr John Gardner, reader in education at Queen’s University, said that ClarisWorks satisfied the need for an integrated software package that could handle cross-curricular activities and added that the forthcoming Microsoft Works v.3.0 will be considered for use in the future.
