Happy 25th Mazza Museum

Posted on September 30, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Today was the 25 year celebration for the Mazza Museum the world’s first and largest teaching museum devoted to literacy and the art of children’s picture books.  The featured presenters were pop-up book artists Robert Sabuda and Matthew Reinhart.

Here is one of the pictures (Reinhart on left, Sabuda on right) from their presentation showing how the art of pop-up books is created.

Today was the first day Star Wars – A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy was available to the public.  They also announced (and showed pictures) of The Chronicles of Narnia which will be available in the next month or two.

Pop-up books offer a unique artist/engineering experience.  Watching the process from conception to mass assembly was intriguing.  If you haven’t seen their work, check out their web site.  There are many educational titles available.

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PhET

Posted on September 29, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

I was helping one of my kids with some physics homework today and needed a simulation of projectile motion.  I remembered a nice set of physics simulations I had used a few years ago.  I typed “physics simulations” into Google and the site was at the top of the list.

Physics Education Technology (PhET) is a set of simulations created by the University of Colorado.  I first used the Circuit Construction simulator to show a student how to setup a wheatstone bridge.  This isn’t the most complicated circuit in the world, but it requires half a dozen different parts.  One of the resisters needs to be adjusted in real time and that is where the simulator was invaluable.

Tonight I needed a ball traveling at 10 m/s straight off the edge of a table 1.0 m tall.  I could have setup a video camera (recording at 30 frames per second) recording a tennis ball rolling off the edge of the kitchen table, but I would have never been able to get the ball going exactly 10 m/s.  Plus, I would have had to dump the video to the computer before we could do any real analysis.

The projectile motion simulator at PhET was perfect.  We were stuck with using a cannon, but could adjust to the starting height and angle to match our needs.  We could also project a golf ball, baseball, bowling ball, pumpkin… even an old Buick.  The sim includes a tape measure to make measurements after the experiment.

All the extra tools were great, but I really only needed to show that the X and Y components of motion are independent.  We shot the ball at 10 m/s and 1 m/s.  Both times the ball took the same amount of time to fall to the ground.  The faster shot went out farther, but still took the same time to drop from the table to the ground.  After using the simulation with different settings, I could tell the light had come on.

Physics is more fun with you blow things up, but this simulator did the trick today.

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The GIMP

Posted on September 28, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

Every fall I teach an Internet development online course.  One activity in the class deals with creating simple graphics for web pages: banner, background, transparency, animated gif and graphical buttons.

These graphics are placed on a web site developed as part of the course.  I don’t cover specific use of programs: FrontPage, DreamWeaver, PhotoShop, etc.  The students are free to use whatever is available to them.  The web development side is never a problem.  I know enough about most HTML editors that I can help students through most problems that are unique to each editor.

Graphics are a different story.  Few students have a good graphics program or the knowledge of using one.  I can’t ask them to go out and buy a $70 copy of PaintShop Pro let alone a copy of PhotoShop.

This year I decided to try GIMP.  It’s a free, open source, photo retouching, image composition and image authoring program.  It is as close as you can get to PhotoShop without spending any money.

There was only one problem with my plan; I had never used GIMP before.  I was sure I had downloaded and installed it several times, but I had never spend an hour trying to use it to create something.

I blocked out a little time and dove in.  I was surprised how easy it was to do fairly sophisticated image editing.  Within two hours I had created all the graphics for the class activity.  On top of that, I felt good enough about my skills that I did an interactive session with my class and showed them how to use the GIMP.  I prefaced the session with, “I have only used this program for two hours, so I might not be able to answer questions about advanced use of the tools.”

It went pretty well.  I recorded the session in Elluminate so it could be reviewed as the students worked with the software.

The GIMP web site has many tutorials.  I reviewed some of them as I learned how to use GIMP to create an animated GIF (the only thing I couldn’t figure out on my own).  The tutorials are divided into Beginner, Intermediate and Expert.

For a free program, the GIMP is a great application.  Many of the processes used in GIMP are identical to those used in PhotoShop.  For a student, it’s a powerful program to learn the basics of image manipulation.

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WIPO Does Copyright

Posted on September 27, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has released its second “Children’s Guide” to copyright.  The title is Learn From the Past, Create the Future.

The book is appropriate for a student reading at the nine to twelve year old reading level.  There are good examples of what is and what is not protected by copyright, how copyright works, how long it lasts and how copyright is managed.

The document also explains plagiarism, piracy and other forms of copyright infringement.  There are sections that explain how different technologies (like P2P) can be used to violate copyright law. 

One nice section is the eight pages explaining public domain and the limitations of copyright.  There are lists of resources for free music, photos, movies and literature available in the public domain.  There is also a paragraph that mentions Creative Commons.

There are also games throughout the 72 page document so your little ones can play along as they read about copyright.  Here is a good activity to get them started. 

The document is available in the “free publications” section of the web site.  The second page of the document says “copyright WIPO 2007”.  Does this mean you can’t print the document for your students without permission from WIPO?

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Five Minute Rule

Posted on September 26, 2007 by Alvin Trusty

One of the most common questions I’m asked in class is, “should I save this to my USB drive?”  I have never answered the question with anything other than an affirmative.

It boils down to the value of my time.  The last USB drive I bought cost $20 and it holds 2GB of data.  A typed page is about 2k if left in ASCII format.  A typed page uses about 0.00002 dollars worth (two thousandths of a penny) of space on my USB drive.

If my time is worth a few dollars an hour, it makes sense to save everything I take time to create.  I draw the line at five minutes.  If recreating something takes more than five minutes, I save it on my USB drive.  If it takes less than five minutes, it might not be worth getting the USB drive out of my pocket, plugging it into the computer, waiting for the security software to load, typing my password and navigating the folders to find the file.

Otherwise, it gets saved.

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