Thursday, January 4, 2018

Short Story: School of the Future (Part One)

Abie scanned her ID card at one of the large arched force field entryways to the school. The automated security system said, "Access granted, Welcome to school Abie Eridine." The force field turned green and allowed her to walk through it.

She entered into the school lobby and walked towards the staircase to her right, towards the private study rooms. Abie liked arriving this early for school because the school was still quiet at 7 a.m. She liked being able to get her four hours of required campus time done in the mornings because the lines where much shorter to meet with her teachers this time of morning if she needed to. Besides, if she stayed on campus for extra hours she could save them up and take days off school whenever she wanted to.

She liked that the school gave her three days a year for mental health days now and she got ten days of sick leave without needing a doctor's note, just parental conformation. Even on a day off she could remote in to class and join via video transmission. All the classes where recorded and uploaded to the school's database that could be accessed anywhere with a pass code and an internet connection.
Abie made her way to an open study room and scanned in to the time tracker. The force field granted her access. She logged into the hologram interactive touch walls to work on her biology homework from yesterday. She had to build a virtual cell and label it's parts correctly in the three dimensional simulation. She grabbed the augmented reality goggles and got to work dragging in the pieces to build her animal cell in the middle of the small room. Abie used two controllers that strapped to her hands to manipulate the holograms. She made sure to turn on the automatic file saving function in the program so that she wouldn't lose her work.

She didn't like biology too much but the interactive lessons in the holo space made it a bit more understandable for her visual learning style. Her learning program was designed to target her strengths in visual learning. It was also built to let her move through school at her own pace, at least to a point. Abie was still required to take a minimum of five courses per semester and to complete a chunk of lessons every three weeks due date.

The school was open from 7 a.m to 5 p.m. every day. Though, the teachers only stayed on campus from 7 a.m to 3 p.m. daily. The whole school had a lunch break between noon and 1 p.m. every day too.

Some said that the system was perfect, but, others said that it was giving the students too much freedom. As for Abie she liked the flexibility of the schedule. She was dyslexic and she knew that she was getting a much better experience with school than her parents did who where also dyslexic and graduated back in 2017 from high school.

After finishing her biology lesson, Abie locked the study room and headed down to the lobby for a snack and a ten-minute study break. However, when she got to the entrance of the lobby her ID card wouldn't grant her access.

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