Nothing could be further from the truth. We still seem to be forest-centric in a great deal of what we do. Take a look around your school and look at the reams of paper that are generated on a daily basis. Is there not a better way of doing things? 

Apparently not around our house. 

Before the March Break, I installed the Hewlett Packard MOPy goldfish screen saver on our home computer.  

Then along came science fair time. Fair enough that we would use a publishing program and collection of CD-ROM clipart for the various pages of the display representing different facets of the project. Brittany was doing her project on snakes and along comes the requests. "Dad, can you print me the section on snakes from our encyclopedia?" "Dad, can you go on the Internet and print me some pages on Ontario snakes?" 

My answer was, of course, no. Together we sat and read the information from the screen and made appropriate notes that got translated into wonderful pages of information. This really worked out well. It was hard on the ol' man because I've always been terribly scared of snakes and the movies from the Internet sites were very graphic.  

One night, however, I was late getting home and the older, more computer literate brother and sister team yielded to the printing demands. I never realized that anyone could be interested in that much information about snakes! 

Bottom line when all was said and done, Brittany did a terrific job putting things together. I was amazed at how easily she brought clipart into her MSPublisher documents. The finishing touch was the title done with candied worms masquerading as snakes. (You had to see it ...) I kept thinking of how well Hyperstudio would have worked out but the candied worm effect would really have lost something. It was hard enough imagining how we would leave our computer on display without picturing gummy snakes on my video display! 

The damage was an overflowing garbage pail of printed research materials. Not much was actually used since it wasn't all that age appropriate anyway.  

So I guess the lie persists. Better and faster printers seem to cry out "Use Me!"  

What about MOPy? As you print, it accumulates points and when you have enough points, your aquarium starts to have objects added to it.  

Ours now sports a rock, a plant and air bubbles. Our little environmentally unfriendly printing spree at least has prettied the environment for our cybergoldfish. 

(dp) 
 

Doug Peterson

Harry Groves