News From The Future-14

NEWS FROM THE FUTURE – Computer Chips Track Students

Grade-school students in a northeastern Brazilian city are using uniforms embedded with computer chips that alert parents if they are cutting classes, the city’s education secretary, Coriolano Moraes, said Thursday. Twenty-thousand students in 25 of Vitória da Conquista’s 213 public schools started using T-shirts with chips this week, Mr. Moraes said. By 2013, all of the city’s 43,000 public school students will be using them, he added. The chips send a text message to the cellphones of parents when their children enter the school or alert the parents if their children have not arrived 20 minutes after classes have begun. The city government invested $670,000 in the project, Mr. Moraes said.

This will motivate a lot of kids to learn about micro-controllers for sure. Thanks Daniel!

6 Responses to NEWS FROM THE FUTURE – Computer Chips Track Students

  1. I hate to be cynical here, but kids will probably just put the chips in the backpacks of their more scholarly friends and skip class anyway.

  2. yachris on said:

    I’m with cyrozap here — they’ll go into the bathroom, change shirts, and give their shirt to a friend and enjoy a day out. Tomorrow, they’ll carry their friends’ shirt through the scanners.

    But, you know, having “challenging” rules to get around breeds creativity, right? :-)

  3. Man, if that were my school I’d spend some time building an EM gun to start neutralizing shirts. What a phenomenal waste of money.

  4. “Or we could use that $670,000 to try and make school more interesting…?”
    “Nah, creepy citizen tracking it is!”

  5. I agree with cyrozap and yachris, if kids can find a way to get around the chip then they will. I’m not convinced that this will be deterrent.

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