http://gizmodo.com/learn-how-to-code-with-star-wars-the-force-awakens-cha-1741510958
Category education
These Robots Want Homes
Mary at The Foundary Makerspace showed me a spectrum of robots that want homes. These are all programmable robots, and some are tablet controlled. Contact Mary Keene through The Foundary’s website or Mary’s Facebook page.
We’ll start with the classroom robot kit made for programming with SolidWorks. It has a programming book as well.
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Next is the Bioloid. This is apparently a tournament soccer robot very popular in South Korea.. You control it and program it with a tablet. Programming can be very advanced.
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The last one is a faithful Lego NXT kit. This looks like a first generation, but these still work well.
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Frog path at Willapa Bay Nature Preserve
Happy new year! This is not halite.
We went for a walk around Squires Lake today. When we got there is was about 29F. It warmed up to almost 36F when we left at about 1:30. The ice we saw was incredible. The kids were fascinated with the crystal lattice expression of water, and the power it had to lift the surface of the trail two inches higher than when it was muddy. It really does remind me of finding halite in dry lake beds in the Mojave desert.
Creating Stop Motion Video
For fun today, Jesse constructed a stop motion scene with legos and a hand-drawn backdrop. Meanwhile, I wrote an animation process. I wrote it as two scripts: one to resize input from my camera, the other to actually animate the pictures.
My ImageMagick resize script is reasonably simple, and if you search for other animation techniques, you will see many scripts like this. To use all four cores on my processor, I fire off 5 resize jobs and then do a job wait for them to complete so that I do not bog my system down.
#!/bin/bash set -x set -e # ----------------------------------------------------------------# # resize the input directory and put it in the output directory # # and also re-names the files to simple numbered format # # ----------------------------------------------------------------# i=0 j=1000 find 0-input/ -type f -iname "*.jpg" -printf "%f\n" \ | sort \ | while read f ; do g="1-resized/r-$j.png" echo "convert 0-input/$f -geometry 728x480! -normalize $g " convert "0-input/$f" -geometry 728x480! -normalize "$g" & i=$[ $i + 1 ] j=$[ $j + 1 ] if [ $i -eq 4 ]; then # wait a bit for job in `jobs -p`; do echo -n "...$job" wait $job done i=0 fi echo "!" done echo "done"
My animation script is not all that different from other animation scripts you can search for on google, either. However, mine does not loop, does no fades, and plays very slowly. The first ‘-r’ switch specifies how long the input frames should last, so in this case, about 750ms (1.25 frames/sec). The output frame rate is the second ‘-r’ switch.
#!/bin/bash # -f : output format # -r : frame rate # -i : input file pattern now=`date +%Y-%m-%d_%H%M` ffmpeg -r 1.25 -i "1-resized/r-1%03d.png" -r 24 "2-animated/animation-$now.mov"
I have a post of it on my G+.
Learning about Animal Tracks
Why Bikes Make Smart People Say Dumb Things — Medium
This so telling about our society:
We’ve been conditioned since infancy to ignore most of these fatalities, along with the behaviors that cause them. If you’re a typical American, your first experience of speeding was while strapped into a car seat, and you rode past half a dozen fatal accident scenes before speaking your first complete sentence.
Liam at Columbia School
NASA reveals the mystery of how stars explode
Give childhood back to children: if we want our offspring to have happy, productive and moral lives, we must allow more time for play, not less – Comment – Voices – The Independent
I think many teachers and parents would agree.
“…a common Chinese term used to refer to the products of their schools is gaofen dineng, which essentially means good at tests but bad at everything else.”