QR Codes and the unexpected

Year 4 to 9 students, parents, and teachers

A Japanese development team, led by Masahiro Hara for the company Denso Wave, invented the Quick Response (QR) codes in 1994. Their intention was to improve on the traditional UPC barcodes, so it would be easier to track automobiles and automobile parts during manufacturing. But like so many technological inventions, they can have unforeseen consequences. Masahiro never expected that QR codes would become mainstream:

“At the time, I felt that I had developed something great, and predicted that it would be widely used in the industry in the future. But it was widely used by general users, which I did not expect. It was used as a payment method. It was completely unexpected.”

UPC barcodes are one-dimensional and can store around 100 characters or less. They encode information horizontally, through the width and placement of vertical lines. QR codes encode are two-dimensional. They encode information both horizontally and vertically. That means QR code size can store more information than a UPC barcode of equal size. At present, custom QR codes can store up to 7,000 characters. That makes them ideal for scenarios where size is at a premium, like food QR codes.

QR codes are widely used in education, as they can give students quick access and share any materials they need. This article from Edutopia provides some excellent educational applications for the QR code. Readers of Cyber Secrets* have come to the right place to find Beamer’s plan.

*The novel, Cyber Secrets - a digital citizenship adventure story, has a few interactive links that readers must follow to discover clues.

Question: What other (tech) inventions had unforseen consequences?

Casper Pieters PhD Dip Ed is an author and educator who uses adventure narratives to enliven the ICT curriculum for young people. www.casperpieters.com