Two New Google Apps Worth Checking Out

I told the science and English/history teachers I work with about these two new apps from GoogleLabs. Now I imagine they are spending their vacations browsing the human body and published word usage history, respectively. The first is the Google Body Browser. Think Google Earth for the human body. Truly amazing! For it to work you have to download the beta version of Google Chrome. The other is Google Ngram Viewer. This lets you enter a word or collection of words and search the entirety of what Google Books has scanned and made public to give you a graph showing their occurrences over time. If you enter more than one word the graphs are shown together so you can compare. It's an amazing tool for English, history, and even math. Really any discipline if you want to see how certain domain-specific terms have changed in importance over time.

How do kids visualize science?

 My 7th grade students are building models of microscopic things they are studying in science class in our sim. The science teachers said they briefly cover many topics and don't have time to explore cell division, elements, compounds, photosynthesis, and nucleic acids in depth. So I thought it would be helpful for the students to make 3D models of these things to have a more vivid mental model of them when they come back to studying them more in depth later on.

 All I did is show them how to build. They had to find images and build 3D models that made sense to them since I'm no science teacher. Now what surprised me is that some of them reproduced 2D representations in this 3D environment. I assumed they would be able to imagine a 3D version of the pictures they were looking at but in many cases they couldn't take that leap.

 So it seems to represent a developmental snapshot of sorts in terms of their ability or lack of ability to visualize these abstract things they are learning about. As I told the science teachers, I'm not sure there is anything we should do about this. It could be that as they continue to study these topics they should make new models that reflect their deeper understanding, including what these things look like in 3D space.

To Sim or Not To Sim

I know, silly title. Here’s my main question: Are virtual worlds effective environments for the presentation of dramatic arts? Maybe some genres are more appropriate than others?

The reason I’m asking is I presented a short video of two students' inworld performance of a scene from Approaching Zanzibar. Here's the vid. Part of the dialog is about fears the characters have about visiting an aunt who is sick with cancer. To my horror the whole auditorium of 4-8 graders reacted with laughter during some of the most sobering and serious lines. I’m sure this was in part a way to relieve anxiety about a heavy subject. But I also believe it had to do with the content being delivered by awkward-looking cartoony figures. This leads me to think we really shouldn’t be trying to present serious dramatic material in this format. Kids this age have never even seen anything like this. Their closest point of reference is probably video games. If a performance with any emotional gravity comes across as goofy, funny, or unconvincing this might be the wrong medium for those kinds of dramatic experiences.

On the other hand there are dramatic genres that seem like they would lend themselves well to the fantastical possibilities of virtual environments. I would have liked to show the Alice in Wonderland scene but the FreeSWITCH service that's been so dependable kept dropping Alice’s voice during their performance for some inexplicable reason.


The Peter Pan scene might have been good, too, with Peter flying onstage and having trouble getting his shadow to attach properly. But I was kind of smitten with the local light effect and wanted the kids to see it. It's like that with virtual worlds. The magic of it is hard to explain to people. They have to see it for themselves, have the experience.

So what kind of dramatic performances are VWs good for? Now I'm thinking material that takes advantage of the special capabilities of the platform--the ability to fly, script objects to do unexpected and magical things, the ability to make amazing, gravity-defying costumes, the ability to appear and disappear magically (teleport). In our Aesop's Fable of The Frogs Desiring a King Jupiter was able to throw down a huge log onto the stage out of thin air. That was a surprising, fun experience and in that world it also made sense. It just added to the magic the kids watched unfolding in front of them.

I don't think serious drama should be avoided altogether in VWs. The drama teacher I do this with put it well when he said one of the best things about it for him as a drama teacher is it forces the students to treat dramatic devices--tone of voice, gesture, movement--more consciously since they have to do it from a distance through the narrow parameters of the avatar. They can't fall back on their own default expressions like they can in RL. So I still think it's an effective tool for students to learn more about all genres of dramatic performance. I just don't think all genres in this medium need to have an audience. 

Cricket Microcomputer Cell Phone

Created by my 9th graders! What I love about this is the experience of cramming all the electronics inside a box. They even routed the IR beamer from the computer to inside the box so it matches up with the transceiver inside. It really feels like an electronic object with the UI on the outside and the complicated stuff on the inside. This is a simple robot as you can't choose the numbers you dial but just hit the same switch and it dials pre-programmed numbers that are displayed on the LED. We aren't working on conditional statements yet. It is their first project after all.

Student Performance in OpenSim

Performed by two 8th grade students. Note my atrocious camera work. But my excuse is we can so much with tech in education; it's just so hard to do it well. What I like about this, though, is the virtual puppetry (what we're calling it) is getting better and this scene uses local lights in an effective way.

Virtual Learning is Fun

Many times during my work with students in HewittSim unexpected things happen. Once a student accidentally attached an 8 foot tall mushroom to her spine, becoming a walking fungus. If students click on the wrong surface of a chair they want their avatar to sit on, they can end up sitting sideways with their avatar looking none the wiser.

Usually we are pressed for time and when these mishaps spring up during our short class periods as teachers we have to suppress the urge to tell students to quiet down and focus. They are very funny and you can’t blame kids for being amused by things that are so preposterous in this parallel universe we’ve begun inhabiting for our educational adventures.

So when today’s math class explored our completed Parthenon to measure parts of it looking for examples of The Golden Ratio, we allowed the girls to get off task a bit when they discovered a runaway piece of marble floating at least 100 meters above the building. It was just pure fun to fly up and stand on it with empty space around and below our avatars. It was just as normal in this unusual world to walk right off and fall to the ground intact and continue with the task of measuring. I actually think having a laugh at the crazy things that happen enriches the learning experience they are having because of its novelty.

A Special Place

We just finished our first go-round with the 8th graders' dramatized scenes in our sim. Some videos will come soon, but I wanted to put up some photos of their stages. They spend a few weeks in charge of these stages, setting up and modifying props, learning to navigate their spaces and execute their blocking. And to different degrees, they become works of art themselves. The Alice In Wonderland scene is the most impressive, of course, but others are thoughtfully laid out and harmoniously composed. I like that you come to have a similar experience on a virtual stage as I imagine you do on a real one. The cast rehearses and pushes together towards the final performance, and when the show is done, everything is taken down and the stage becomes empty and bare, waiting for the next dramatic cycle.

Super Cricket IR Distance Sensor

Gleason Research released a new sensor to use with their Super Cricket microcontroller. It's an infrared distance sensor, which got me excited thinking we can start doing with the crickets what my younger students have been doing with NXT robots. When I tested them out I found that rather than outputting the actual distance reading, the sensor sends the microcontroller data similar to that of other cricket sensors--that is, a number from 0 to 255 that is inversely related to the intensity of environmental variable. So as the photocell sensor returns a higher number for lower light levels and a lower number for higher light levels, the distance sensor returns a higher number for close distances and lower for greater distances. You could work out some data points and calibrate the sensor that way for use in a conditional statement, but it would be nicer to have it return an actual distance. With the aid of this website, I was able to figure out a conversion formula that takes the raw data and outputs something close to actual centimeters. I used the formula given on the website but had to divide the result by 2. Its range is about 8 - 50 cm and it's more accurate from 8 - 15, becoming progressively wider than actual centimeters until up around 50 cm it's about 5 cm too wide. There is probably some fiddling I could do with the formula to lessen the slope a bit but for our purposes--making a functional educational robot--it should work well enough.

So here's a test program I put together:

global [distance]
to convert
     setdistance ((2914 / (sensora + 5) - 1) / 2)
end
to main
     loop 
     [convert
     display distance 
     wait 2]
end
This will display the sensor data, converted to cm, on an LED display.

Exciting Developments with Microsoft Kinect

I'm much more excited about what people are doing with Kinect than what Kinect is made to do out of the box, no matter how Microsoft feels about it. There are some great developments, and so quickly!

• Shadow puppet 
• iRobot
• Ahhh, here's a collection
• And the motherlode

And to think after I showed my students a couple early hacks they wondered why you would want to do that...

Action! Our School's First Live Virtual Performance

Our K-12 school was immersed for a week in activities revolving around Sophocles' Antigone with loads of exciting projects across the entire curriculum. But Antigone is not for the little ones, so the drama teacher and I cooked up a virtual performance in the style of Ancient Greek theater that would give the elementary students an idea of what it looked and felt like. The drama teacher had five students in grades 10-12 rehearse an adapted Aesop's Fable, The Frogs Desiring A King, and perform it in our standalone sim. Over the summer, I made a replica of the Theatre of Dionysus and some basic clothing. So the show took place at the foot of the Acropolis, upon which The Parthenon was being built by other students! How cool is that! I had to figure out some fun solutions to theatrical problems, like the giant log, which is rezzed from a button at the top of the stage. The stairs that appear briefly are actually rezzed by the log and help the actors get on the log more easily. Voice chat is provided by FreeSWITCH and the recording was made with Fraps in the Imprudence viewer.

As it happened scheduling conflicts resulted in the students having only three 40 minute classes to go from zero to showtime. They had never set foot in a virtual world, much less get an avatar to act, so I think they did a terrific job considering. And one fell ill so the drama teacher had to step in to play Jupiter. Ah, show biz. The little kids loved the show and I think had an experience of Ancient Greek theater that was in some ways closer to the original than the rest of the school.