Use Scratch to Make Interactive History Timelines

An 8th grade history teacher I work with wanted his students to make their own timelines of world historical events as a way of tying events together over great spans of time and constructing their own trends. It took a while to find the right software platform because I didn't think Scratch would be capable of representing such a dense amount of visual and text information. He also wanted them to use a slider as a tool to navigate through the information and I thought that would be hard in Scratch. But after playing with it I found it was absolutely possible.

Learning With Mycelium, Packaging of the Future

Corinne Takara and Chris Sweeney are exploring opportunities for learning with so many different materials and creative approaches, one of the most exciting of which for me is bio-fabrication with mycelium. I ordered a couple bags of hemp substrate from Grow Bio and followed the schedule and steps they recommend.

Animating Atoms With Scratch

Litium by Maddie

I'm working with an 8th grade science teacher on an exciting project. His students are becoming familiar with the periodic table of the elements and the basic parts and characteristics of elements.

Useful Math Visualizations

Over the years I've made some useful applications for people, which is very gratifying. Currently I'm seeing a program from a couple years ago come back around to see usefulness in the geometry classroom at my school due to the curiosity and insight of one of our math teachers, Matt DeGraff. He observed that such visualizations do aid in his students understanding of a problem and help them think about describing it in mathematical terms. His use of the program and our discussions about it are giving me the idea that a few different programs I've developed around it should be integrated into one to allow students to visualize a certain problem as an aide to seeing solutions and explaining them. Briefly, here are the three programs, more explanation to come:

Polygon vertex problem visualized as polygon

Laser Cut Boxes and Light Up Plushies: Pulling Out All the Stops In the Maker Space

I just did a hard and fun project with two English teachers as part of their 11/12 grade students reading Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. They made stuffed monster plushie dolls with hand sewn LED circuits and designed wood and acrylic boxes to "contain" them (containing the monster being one of the themes in Frankenstein).

Opensim in the Classroom: How To Get Started

I've run sims with Opensimulator in my school for eight years now (!). I think it's immensely rewarding for students and well worth the effort. It's come a long way as a practical technology for schools. I'm not a techno-wizard but I'm so familiar with it now that it's pretty easy for me to run saved worlds or set up a sim from scratch, so I'm documenting the steps here for newcomers to the technology to use in their own forays into Opensim work.

OpenSimulator In the Classroom Through the Years

I haven't run any sim projects for a while and I miss it. I just found a cache of pictures of sim projects and am amazed at how far it's come. Here are some of the pictures to give an idea of the territory students and I covered together. What an adventure!

Our first sim, 2009! With a spare assortment of prims students acted out skits for
their drama class.

LilyPad Arduino In the Classroom: Interactive Shirts

Last summer as a participant in the Constructing Modern Knowledge conference I had the opportunity to develop a project with the LilyPad Arduino (and meet Leah Buechley!). I worked with a wonderful group of educators to prototype a hat that lets you know with LEDs when you should apply sunscreen. I had only prototyped circuits with the LilyPad before, never actually sewing one into a project, so one big thing I learned during that project is that embedding the components into fabric involves as much problem solving and time as programming and prototyping the circuit.

Developing A Light Logo NeoPixel 24 Curriculum

Light Logo, created by Brian Silverman, is a version of the Logo language that is used to program a few versions of the NeoPixels, from rings to strips, through an Arduino. See Josh Burker's post for how to get started, and see my Instructable for how to get a 24 NeoPixel ring more-or-less classroom ready. I'm developing a curriculum for it with 8th grade students as my guinea pigs and here are some thoughts that have come up as I use Light Logo in the classroom.

Animate Stories With Neopixel Ring and LightLogo

I've been trying out the Neopixel Ring-24, a ring of 24 RGB LEDs easy to plug in to an Arduino. Instead of using the Adafruit neopixel Arduino library I'm beta-testing LightLogo, a new IDE for the Neopixel and Arduino to write programs in Logo. This can make a really beautiful device with its rich colors more accessible to younger

Animate Poems With Scratch

Some of the most successful tech integration collaborations happen at unexpected times. Our 5th grade English teacher, Jenny Kirsch, asked me to help brainstorm ideas for her students to somehow animate excerpts of poems they had written. It was meant to be a quick end-of-year activity, a fun way for the students to extend and present their work. What resulted was a very nice opportunity for

3D Print Pagoda Project

Our 5th grade history teacher was doing a study of Vietnam with her class and wondered if her students could make and print pagodas. After looking at some examples and doing a couple test prints I settled on a general design that featured hexagonal or octagonal base with openings on some or all sides, which was repeated

Student Machinima in OpenSim With Greenscreen

I have a student, 11th grader, working on one of the most complex tech projects ever. Her English teacher gave an open-ended project assignment for students to make something that depicts a scene from Bram Stoker's Dracula. She decided to make a machinima that would require up to four avatars, all controlled and filmed by herself, in one week.
I think Rand Spiro's Cognitive Flexibility Theory describes the use of technology to solve creative problems well. Of course there are optimal setups for creating machinima but here I had to help a student realize a very complex project with minimal training and portable equipment, as she had to complete it over the Thanksgiving weekend.
So here's what I came up with. I will find out on Monday how successful it will have been:

1. We have a school OpenSim virtual world, but currently port forwarding is not set up in the firewall, so it's not an option for working at home. She has a Mac so she couldn't use SoaS. So we set up her own sim, installing MySQL, Mono, and Diva distro. After a few hiccups she was up and running.
2. We needed the Diva account functionality to set up the character and camera person accounts and I had chosen Imprudence for a viewer and for some reason the Diva splash page wasn't showing up. I found Singularity which turns out to be quite awesome.
3. Next was loaning her a PC she could use for the filming. I put Fraps and Singularity on it and taught her how to change her MyWorld.ini and RegionConfig.ini files to reflect her LAN IP so the PC could log into her sim. I taught her how to use Fraps, which is dead simple.
4. For multiple avatars in the same scene, all directed by her, she would need a green floor and background, which she would then have to edit together in a video editor. She made some nice avatar costumes and developed gestures from the stock opensim animations.
5. She would have preferred to edit the footage in iMovie on her Mac, as would I, but having the files on the PC in AVI format complicated things, as they would have to be converted to MOV for iMovie. It was too much for me to explain and add to the workflow. So I opted for having her use Movie Maker on the PC. That decision could prove to be the project's undoing as greenscreen is very hard to work with in WMM. We'll see. You have to use WMM 6.0 and install RehanFX shaders, and syncing the overlaid clips is almost impossible. It seems pretty much just set up to make cheesy music videos with ridiculous backgrounds. But it would have to work.
6. UPDATE: I am happy to say she managed to get the DVI  files copied to her Mac, and used either Perian or Evom to convert them. iMovie makes clip editing much easier, even after applying the greenscreen.
7. So the greenscreen workflow consists of syncing two avatar clips, applying the greenscreen so they both appear over green. Export that, and reimport it. Add a third avatar clip and sync those. Apply the greenscreen filter again and export that. Repeat for the fourth avatar clip. Finally, reimport that and greenscreen it with the chosen background image, and if possible figure out how to work in multiple background images for scene changes, which I'm not even sure is possible.

I hope all this works, we'll see.
UPDATE: She completed the video and it came out amazingly well! Here it is. She did end up figuring our how to convert the files from DVI to MOV and move them to iMovie. That should teach me to assume something will be too hard for someone.

Raspberry Pi in the Classroom

I posted this today on an ed tech listserv and figured it's worth getting out here, too.

The Raspberry Pi is ready for prime time in the sense that the one-per-order restriction has been lifted and you can now purchase as many as you want. I've been tinkering with one this summer and I keep coming back to the question of what will we do with them in our schools. I think it's an urgent question which I'll explain as I go (sorry for the tl;dr).

The Raspberry Pi is a $35 computer. $35! (The one with only 1 USB port and no Ethernet is $25!) It's the size of a bar of soap. It comes with no case (yet); you have to make one. No I/O devices, just a board and ports. That number still doesn't compute for me, but consider how many you could get for an iPad. But you might say well then you have to get a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, at least. Actually, all you really need are a power supply (mine runs on a Blackberry charger, even 4 AA batteries will work), an SD card (the only storage!), and a network connection-either Ethernet or several wireless adapters will work. Then what? It's Linux, so you can hook it up to a monitor and keyboard just to enable SSH and create a few accounts and tunnel in from any computer on your network. And besides, the educational value of an iPad lies in all the apps you have to purchase, not to mention the time and expense of setting up an infrastructure that makes collective use feasible.

But cost is somewhat beside the point. Well, though, certainly not for public schools or cash-strapped independent schools. The main point is that it is nothing like the experience of an iPad, in fact it's the antithesis, and a sorely needed one, which is really the point made by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Where the iPad (sorry, I really mean all proprietary devices) should work out of the box, you must hack your world and the Raspi just to make it work (hmm, i have to buy a charger...do I have any 5v chargers around? How do I know if it's 5v? wait I don’t have enough USB ports for a mouse, keyboard, and wifi adapter…ok a non-powered USB hub won’t work but a powered one will, why is that? Oh, there’s some help here, http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#Working_USB_Hubs, …now, a monitor, what, no VGA? Wait, I can plug it right into my 64” TV?!? And it looks awesome! etc, etc). Where the iPad wants you to think you don’t need to know anything about computers to use it, the Raspi forces you to learn just to get it to do anything. I didn’t know anything about Linux before I got this and now Linux is blowing my mind. I’m realizing the power, control, and options you can have with a computer if it’s designed to let you have those. Combing Linux forums for basic information I’ve read so many answers to queries that start, “Well, here are 4 ways you could do that…”

So getting back to the question of what to do with this device I can see it doesn’t belong as a standard integrated device like the iPad is becoming or laptops have been. It’s all about getting back to the basics of computer science and even physical computing. It belongs as a standard device in these makerspaces we are talking about and developing. It can do anything you want it to, really (though running it as a media server at home was a bit more than it could handle with 256MB of memory on board). We need to be alongside interested students helping them think about what they want to do with it and then guiding them through the mind blowing experience of learning how to get Linux to do anything you want with the decades of crowdsourced information you can tap into out there. I can see coming up with some really creative applications and having people see it and say, “What, a computer can do that?!? Wait, that’s a computer?” It’s really akin to the Arduino, in fact people are figuring out how to get the two to work together (http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1171). Interesting side note, this link is to a post about some resentment on the part of some in the Arduino community and makes the point that the two are fundamentally different and in fact can work well together, and I realized in looking at the accompanying photo that that difference is represented in a striking way by looking at the USB ports, where one uses the host type A port and the other the target type B.

Anyway if you’ve read all this thank you and I would love to hear your thoughts. 

Great Student Opensim Build: St. Peter's Basilica

St. Peter's Basilica, Maderno's Facade

A ninth grade student at my school, Susannah Meyer (she was happy to be credited), just finished an amazing build for her history class Renaissance Faire event. I really did very little of this beyond advising her on how to approach it and it's really gratifying to see a student get so much out of an experience like this and produce something that is such a sight to behold! She didn't do any more than the facade of the building, but that was plenty to tackle. As you get into the details of a piece of architecture like this you begin to appreciate what an immense task it is to make the real thing.

You Wanna Buy a Parthenon?

Actually it's free! This OAR file contains terrain modeled on the Athens Acropolis, a model of the Theatre of Dionysus built by me, and a model of the Parthenon built by about 40 8/9th grade students in their geometry class this past October. The models are built to scale, which was the point of having students do it as a geometry activity. The only thing that is way off is the Acropolis itself, which should be about twice as big, but it would have far exceeded the boundaries of a single 256 x 256 meter region.

I'm releasing it with an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license. For attribution you can specify "Erik Nauman and The Hewitt School" as the original creators. Only one texture is used aside from the default viewer textures and that is a white marble texture downloaded from CG Textures. The link to the OAR file is here. My students and I would love to hear how anyone uses it, so please leave a comment if you do.
Here's a video of some of the students working.

Second Annual Mars Sim Journey

 A year ago our school took a giant step for 5th grade girls by sending them into our OpenSimulator Mars crater sim to find meteorite samples and enjoy the low-gravity orange haze of the red planet. That first experience is documented here. This week the same science teacher and I are once again introducing our current 5th graders to the experience and I'm happy to say I've learned from my previous mistakes and made some valuable improvements. Disabling flying and showing the students how to use the mini-map allowed them to stay focused on the goal of working as a team and getting everyone through the mission together, which is really what the experience is about. The other technique they took much greater advantage of is local chat. I wish I had the logs because they reflect so much collaborative problem solving and cooperative negotiation. The one other improvement I made was to specify a different account for each pair of students right on the tutorial handouts I gave them, which prevented the duplicate logins that caused groups to kick each other out of the sim repeatedly last year and had me pulling my hair out until I figured it out. These changes greatly reduced the tendency toward chaos that took over at times last year and undermined the simulation experience. So the result has been that they really get the experience and what it's about. It's a really fun way to practice working as a team and solving complex problems. And hopefully we've captured their imaginations about the world of space flight to boot.