EduTechBlog
new technology | better education
Sep 3rd
7 days, 7 levels, 8 Bit – An Animated History of Creation
SUPERNATURAL CREATOR 2 on Vimeo.
This simple, minimalistic and therefore even more impressive animation was created by Mareike Ottrand during a workshop with only 3 days for conception and realisation at the F2F International conference.
The animation is based on the “ex nihilo” version of the creation myth, known from Genesis I in the Bible in Judaism and Christianity, and from the Koran’s Sura VII in Islam. The funny and creative idea was to match the seven days of the creation week with seven levels of a video game called “Supernatural Creator 2″:
- 1st day / Level 1: “Let there be light!” The light is divided from the darkness, and “day” and “night” are named.
- 2nd day / Level 2: “Let a firmament be…!” God creates a firmament to divide the waters above from the waters below. The firmament is named “skies”.
- 3rd day / Level 3: God commands the waters below to be gathered together in one place, and dry land to appear. God commands the earth to bring forth grass, plants, and fruit-bearing trees (the fourth command).
- 4th day / Level 4: God creates lights in the firmament to separate light from darkness and to mark days, seasons and years. Two great lights are made, and the stars.
- 5th day / Level 5: God commands the sea to “teem with living creatures”, and birds to fly across the heavens. He creates birds and sea creatures, and commands them to be fruitful and multiply.
- 6th day / Level 6: God commands the land to bring forth living creatures. He makes wild beasts, livestock and reptiles. He then creates humanity in His “image” and “likeness”. They are told to “be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it.” The totality of creation is described by God as “very good.”
- 7th day / Level 7: God, having completed the heavens and the earth, rests from His work, and blesses and sanctifies the seventh day.
A particularily strong moment arrives, when the creator is asked the common video game question “Try again?” and chooses: “No!” before taking a rest in Level 7.
Nice idea, minimalitic graphics and sounds, great work!
Aug 30th
Montessorium – Math is all around us
Maria Montessori (1870-1952) took the idea that the human has a mathematical mind from the French philosopher Pascal. A mathematical mind, in her words, is “a sort of mind which is built up with exactity.” The mathematical mind tends to estimate, needs to quantify, to see identity, similarity, difference, and patterns, to make order and sequence and to control error. Young children observe and experience the world sensorial. Math is all around them from day one. How old are you? In one hour you will go to school. You were born on the 3rd.
The concrete Montessori materials for arithmetics are materialized abstractions. The child’s growing knowledge of the environment makes it possible for him to have a sense of positioning in space. Numerocity is also related to special orientation. The Montessori materials help the child construct precise and internal order.
Intro to Math by Montessorium elegantly adapts this idea for the use with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. It provides several activities to teach the numbers 0-9 and the concepts behind them: arranging a collection of rods from smallest to largest, learning how many bars are in another collection of rods, tracing numbers as they appear on screen, matching written numbers with rods, and matching dots from a box with numbers.
When Montessori meets Montessorium. (c) www.montessorium.com
Maybe Montessori classrooms will include some iPads with Montessorium’s apps in the near future. There is a great potential for an enhanced learning experience using different approaches to the same old idea: that math is all around us.
Intro to Math by Montessorium on the App Store.
Wooden Montessori Materials at www.kidadvance.com.
Aug 12th
DeviantArt’s Muro Drawing App
If you ever wondered what HTML5 is good for
DeviantArt’s new drawing app Muro works in all modern browsers. You can directly start drawing on a blank canvas using different brushes, all without Flash or any other plug-in. Several brushes are available to everyone, some of the advanced features are reserved for registered users. The image above was created by DeviantArt user loish using the new tool. It’s fascinating to see how new technology can help to liberate online creativity, which is no longer restricted to writing texts, but open to a much wider range of expression. If you ever wondered what HTML5 is good for, here is the answer.
Jul 30th
How to Do Research for Kids
In libraries and on the internet, you can find answers to almost any question you can think of. If you know how to do research, it can be much more fun… and faster too!
This is a very good, board game like online-introduction on how to do research for kids. The award-winning site site was created in 2003 by the Kentucky Virtual Library Kids and Teachers Workgroup, with design and animation by Shere Chamness. Thanks to its clever focus on the essentials of research (plan, search, take notes, use the information, report, evaluate), it is still extremely helpful. Nevertheless, I was wondering if there is any newer version of something like this out there “in the known universe”? I should do some additional research, but now I know exactly how to do.
Jul 28th
Crossing the Universe on a Logarithmic Scale
Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames.
“Powers of Ten”, a 1968 short film by Charles and Ray Eames, is a quite impressive application of the logarithmic scale. The film is an adaptation of “Cosmic View”, a 1957 book by Kees Boeke. Both the book and the film deal with very short and very long distances and the relative size of things in the universe. Although Einstein wouldn’t agree with the trip, because very soon the camera travels faster than the speed of light, you should have a look at what it means to cross the universe on a logarithmic scale. Every ten seconds you will add a zero to your distance and stride away from earth by the factor ten: from meters, to 10 meters, 100 meters, 1000 meters and so on. Some minutes later and lightyears away you pass the nearest star. The way back is even faster and leads you through the skin and the DNA to the subatomic scale. Impressive! Enjoy the trip!
Jul 26th
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World
Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, talks to Mike Wallace in an interview on May 18, 1958. His views on freedom, technology and bureaucracy provide some interesting parallels to our life in the era of the internet. Happy Birthday Mr Huxley and welcome to the Brave New World of Google, Facebook, Microsoft & Co.! Nowadays, hierarchies are called networks, subordinates have become users and the organizations are bigger than ever.
As technology becomes more and more complicated, it becomes necessary to have more and more elaborate organizations, more hierarchical organizations, and incidentally the advance of technology is being accompanied by an advance in the science of organization. It’s now possible to make organizations on a larger scale than it was ever possible before, and so that you have more and more people living their lives out as subordinates in these hierarchical systems controlled by bureaucracies, either the bureaucracies of big business or the bureaucracies of big government.
You can find a trancription of the interview here.
Jul 22nd
Nuclear weapons – Countdown to Zero
In 1945, the U.S. government tested the first nuclear bomb ever. The first experiment in Los Alamos was led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb. As the blast went off, Oppenheimer became aware of the terrifying power of the nuclear bomb and of mankind’s inability to entirely comprehend the implications of this invention. In the above sequence Oppenheimer recalled the sacred Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: “Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”
Today, around the world there are more than 23000 nuclear weapons. Many people agree that there should be zero. The New START Treaty, a bilateral nuclear arms reduction treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation, was signed in Prague on April 8th, 2010.
A new feature length documentary film by Lucy Walker “Countdown to Zero” traces the history of the atomic bomb and makes the case for worldwide nuclear disarmament. It premiered at Sundance and screened in the Cannes Official Selection earlier this year. You can preview an excerpt with a quick introduction to Oppenheimer, the man behind the bomb, featuring interviews from the documentary film. Let’s count down to zero!
Jul 7th
I am an Explorer!
The Feynman Lectures Online
Play! The best science teacher ever: I’m an explorer okay, I get curious about everything and I want to investigate all kinds of stuff. (c) Microsoft Research
The Feynman Lectures on Physics have become a long time classic amongst science students around the globe. Last year Bill Gates announced that he had purchased the rights to videos of seven lectures that Feynman gave at Cornell University in 1964 called “The Character of Physical Law”. Microsoft has created a project web site called Tuva that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content. You can watch the videos for free.
If you are wondering why Microsoft has named its project ‘Tuva’ – after a small republic in Siberia, with its capital Kyzyl located near the geographical center of Asia – the following documentary about Feynman made by his good friend Ralph Leighton is definitely a must-see. It is a very personal portrait of a curious mind at large, an explorer, a drummer, a painter, a singer, a teacher, and a scientist who would have preferred to renounce the Nobel prize in 1965 (“I didn’t like the publicity beyond.”), and who died to early to fulfill his last journey.
For further Reading: The Feynman Lectures on Physics and Tuva or Bust!
