In a move that shows a blatant disregard for civil liberties and personal freedoms, a Rhode Island school district will be testing out a program that monitor’s student movement via RFID chips in backpacks. Right now, 80 children are using the RFID-equipped backpacks. Buses will also receive GPS units.

Parents and faculty will be able to login to a system to find out where their children currently are and where they have been. Tracking buses is one thing but this is just too big an invasion of privacy. Watching your kids all the time is the sign of someone or something that is insecure and a paranoid freak. Hopefully the pilot program will get canned before it goes any further.

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A group of young minds at the Saint Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights, MN have constructed from scratch a lithium phosphate ion-powered motorcycle that can travel at speeds of 60 MPH for 50+ miles before needing to be recharged. Safer than any Vespa you’ve taken for a ride, this electric bike has been built with the driver’s safety in mind.  Implemented in its design are “crush zones” formed by compressible materials to protect the driver by keeping him/her inside the vehicle during the event of a collision.

The bike is going to be shown at MIT next week and the team plans on inventing a solar-charging station to make the electric bike truly carbon free. It seems like eco-friendly motor bikes are the way of transportation in our greener future.
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Any student would love you if you told them that they wouldn’t have to take notes from the board anymore because the board would just print out what their teacher wrote down. Notes are a pain, and the M-11 Copyboard solves the problem of a white board’s contents being forever deleted when the eraser swipes it by converting what is written to digital content. It is capable of either printing out copies of what is written, or saving the content to a USB drive as a PNG image file. While PNGs aren’t exactly the most usable files (PDFs should be available at least), they are something. If you connect the M-11 directly to your computer, you have the choices of JPG, BMP and TIF in addition to the PNG export options. Also, if you run out of room on the white board, you can scroll the surface across like a conveyor belt and utilize a whole new area to write on. — Nik Gomez

M-11 Copyboard [via UberGizmo]