Darryl Gove's blog
Junior First Lego League
Last Sunday was the Expo for the Junior First Lego League. This is an annual event where teams of up to six children (aged between 6 and 9) work together to build a model out of lego.
We had a team of 5 kids who had put a lot of effort in to meet this year's challenge. The challenge was to design a model that demonstrated three levels of detail, the model had to fit in a 15"x15" area, and have at least one moving part. Our team chose to do a spider. We had a view of the spider on its web which had the least detail. A view of the spider's body, which actually had the most identifiable parts of the spider. Finally at the closest view we had a spider's head.
For me, one of the fun parts of the exercise was getting a bundle of kid-friendly reference books on spiders and learning about them. Spiders are one of the many things that we see on a daily basis, but it's not often I get the opportunity to really learn about them. The advantage of using kid-friendly books on this, is that the level of detail is just right for picking up the interesting bits, without the huge amounts of detail that might be found in text books on the subject.
Sunday's event was organised by playingatlearning which is a local group that specialise in supporting this kind of event. It was an enjoyable experience to be able to see all the other teams from the area who had all done stellar work in meeting the contest rules.
The organisers of the event had also got one of the teams competing in the First Lego League to come along and demonstrate their robot. Needless to say a robot eclipsed all the JFLL models, and quite a crowd gathered around the tuning that the FLL team was doing in preparation for their competition in San Jose on the 20th.
The whole experience was very rewarding. It took a couple of months of meeting up to decide on the model and to build it. But it was thrilling when, at the expo, the team was given the challenge of designing a fourth level of detail, and they really worked together as a team to achieve it.
Posted at 11:12PM Jan 08, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Personal |
Celestia
Also looked at Celestia (Josh also suggested this), which is an open source space simulator. It allows you to see very detailed images of the objects in the solar system, and beyond. There are plenty of add-ons, which include fictional items such as the space stations from 2001.
Posted at 10:00AM Jan 01, 2007 by Darryl Gove in Personal |
Stellarium
I've spend a few minutes playing with Stellarium. It's open source planetarium software. It allows you to set up your current position and get a labelled view of what you will see in the night sky from that location. What is particularly nice about the package is that it includes detailed pictures of many of the objects, so not only can you identify them, you can also see what they should look like.
Posted at 10:00AM Dec 31, 2006 by Darryl Gove in Personal | Comments[2]
Edward Scissorhands
Got out to see the Edward Scissorhands ballet on Tuesday evening at the Orpheum theatre. Parking at the Holiday Inn was very convenient.
The show was excellent, I'd seen it billed as a musical; but it isn't. There's no singing, or songs in the show, just a mix of new music and music from the film. The choreography was excellent, there were some great set pieces, and the scenery (and costumes) were very impressive. The UK site has a pretty complete gallery of pictures.
Posted at 10:00AM Nov 23, 2006 by Darryl Gove in Personal | Comments[1]
Going underground (or water)
A friend pointed out to the home page of Subterranea Britannica (subbrit - not to be confused with an equally odd site britsub). SubBrit is a somewhat bizarre site documenting all the underground shelters, and other subterranean facilities spread over the UK. It seems surprising how many tunnels and underground bunkers there are around.
On the topic of concrete relics. I was given a DVD of the BBC series Coast. It's a very good programme,for example, one part that caught my attention was the segment on sound mirrors. These were some huge concrete reflectors made during World War 1 to allow a listener sat at the focal point to detect the sound of enemy planes flying over the channel - before the plane was visible. The programme demonstrates them working. However, RADAR was invented about the same time, and the ears fell into disuse.
Posted at 10:00AM Oct 22, 2006 by Darryl Gove in Personal |
