Where I’ve Been Online (Weekly: Aug. 5-18)

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

~ A record of places on the web I want to remember ~
(There are 2 weeks here because I was away in Berlin for a week.)

ÜberConference – About

For most people, audio conferencing starts with the awkward process of finding and typing in dial-in numbers and PIN codes. Tedious even when you have the numbers right in front of you, it is worse if you are out of the office or away from your computer. Then once in a conference, it can be hard to tell who’s in the call or who’s talking. Time is wasted on rounds of “Who just joined?” and “Who’s already here?” as each person joins the call. Background noise can be annoying and there is little the call organizer can do to help all this issues.

With UberConference, conferencing is a breeze. First, forget the pain of finding and typing in long PINs. Participants can just dial into the conference number and will be automatically authenticated based on their phone number.

Then UberConference brings a whole new visual dimension to audio conference calls. From any computer, anyone in the call can see the names, photos, and other information of the others in the call. The display shows the current speaker, and the organizer has a number of helpful tools to keep the conference running smoothly. They can record calls, mute participants to get rid of background noise or put “earmuffs” on people they may not want to hear part of the conversation

Overview – GameSalad

Create Your Game

Logic based. Drag & drop functionality.
Designed for designers.

There’s no faster or easier way to get started building a game than with GameSalad Creator. Its visual, drag & drop based style requires absolutely no coding whatsoever. Avoid spending hours poring over code, and spend more time finding the fun.
“Rapid” is an understatement.

GameSalad’s wide variety of complex behaviors provide almost limitless freedom for varied game genres, styles, and mechanics. On top of its incredible versatility, GameSalad brings a whole new meaning to the phrase “rapid prototyping”. Explore the possibilities in hours and days instead of weeks. It’s fast. It’s versatile. It’s GameSalad.

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How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps | The Homeless Adjunct

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

How The American University was Killed, in Five Easy Steps | The Homeless Adjunct.

Like the first commenter says, a must read.

Here’s the spoiler:

  1. defund public higher education.
  2. deprofessionalize and impoverish the professors (and continue to create a surplus of underemployed and unemployed Ph.D.s)
  3. move in a managerial/administrative class who take over governance of the university.
  4. move in corporate culture and corporate money
  5. Destroy the Students

Congratulations America – you have taken one of the main things that made you strong and good, and wrecked it.

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Don’t Confuse Technology With Teaching – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Approximate Reading Time: 5 minutes

Don’t Confuse Technology With Teaching – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Excellent.

Like I’ve been saying for many years: education is NOT efficient. You can’t make it efficient without losing value.

Online learning is not equivalent to good f2f learning. It is especially not better*. However, given well-designed and carefully tended elearning, it can make access to learning possible that is impractical or even impossible face to face. That does NOT mean we shouldn’t keep working at making the online experience better. We absolutely should.

*Good online learning is likely FAR more valuable than bad f2f learning. And there’s an AWFUL lot of bad f2f learning available. Obviously bad instructors aren’t even the biggest problem – most students can tell when they have an uncaring or knowledgeable teacher at the helm and those who are motivated figure out how to compensate. A bigger problem is the pseudoteacher: the charmer who knows how to make students like her but who really doesn’t know that much, or who provides the same old crap over and over dressed up to look like something new and worth-while. These people dupe their students into believing they have learned something, when all they really provide is outdated or superficial junk. (Can you tell these people really bug me?)

Here are a few of the more salient bits from the article:

Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.

Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.

A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher.

It is as though elite educators, upon noticing that we can’t program a computer to discern what is on the mind of an undergraduate, decided to pretend that if we just let those seeking an education talk among themselves (in grammatically felicitous sentences), they will somehow come to express difficult ideas in persuasive arguments and arrive at coherent, important insights about society, politics, and culture.

But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive; it requires the time and effort of smart, highly trained individuals. We will not make it significantly less time-consuming without sacrificing quality. And so, I am afraid, we will not make that core task significantly less expensive without cheapening it.

 


Here is the article in its entirety (done because I think this is a really good article, and stuff on the web can disappear suddenly):

August 13, 2012

Don’t Confuse Technology With College Teaching

Don't Confuse Technology with Teaching

Stuart Bradford for The Chronicle

Enlarge Image

By Pamela Hieronymi

This spring, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a $60-million venture to offer free classes online. Just last month the University of California at Berkeley said it would also join the effort. John Hennessy, president of Stanford, recently predicted that a technology “tsunami” is about to hit higher education. When justifying their decision to remove Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia, the Board of Visitors cited, in part, the need to ride this wave.

As we think about the future of education, we need to sharpen our understanding of what education is and what educators do. Education is often compared to two other industries upended by the Internet: journalism and publishing. This is a serious error.

Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.

Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.

Just as coaching requires individual attention, education, at its core, requires one mind engaging with another, in real time: listening, understanding, correcting, modeling, suggesting, prodding, denying, affirming, and critiquing thoughts and their expression.

A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher. Every age has its autodidacts, gifted people able to teach themselves with only their books. Woe unto us if we require all citizens to manifest that ability.

Of course, computers do much more than deliver podcasts. They enable new forms of communicating. They present information in incredibly understandable and previously unimaginable ways. They even interact with students, correcting assignments for which there are clearly delineated standards of error and success. They can greatly expand the power of the multiple-choice quiz; they can learn which drills remedy which errors. Computers are getting ever better at correcting grammar and expressions in natural language.

These capacities should be celebrated. But they should not be confused with the training provided by one mind interacting with another—when, for example, a teacher discerns what is on a student’s mind (even though the thought may be novel and half-formed); sees how it relates to the material; and knows how to question, encourage, challenge, or otherwise prompt the student to find his or her own way out of confusion, to a clearer expression of thought or a more powerful argument or analysis.

In their online venture, Harvard and MIT may evaluate essays in the humanities with natural-language programs and crowdsourcing: peer-graded essays for everyone, all the time. It is as though elite educators, upon noticing that we can’t program a computer to discern what is on the mind of an undergraduate, decided to pretend that if we just let those seeking an education talk among themselves (in grammatically felicitous sentences), they will somehow come to express difficult ideas in persuasive arguments and arrive at coherent, important insights about society, politics, and culture. As someone who spends time with students in directed conversations on difficult subjects, I’m sure this method won’t work. We will, instead, produce graduates who cast assumptions they’ve never really questioned into grammatically correct slogans, and the sloganeers with the catchiest phrases, the most confidence, and the most money will shape the future.

Education matters because ideas matter. Oppressive regimes around the world recognize this and restrict the flow of ideas. Our approach has been, instead, to train ourselves to traffic in ideas, civilly and judiciously.

Technology can make education better. It will do so, in part, by forcing us to reflect on what education is, identify what only a person can do, and devote educators’ time to that. (When we build machines that do everything a person can do, we will have created either fellow citizens or enemies; we’ll then have other problems.)

Can technology make education less expensive? College is expensive, but colleges do things other than educate. Many courses simply convey information and provide technical vocational skills. These could be automated, presumably at savings. The price tag includes the campus experience—an education of a different sort—with all its lovely, cherished amenities.

But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive; it requires the time and effort of smart, highly trained individuals. We will not make it significantly less time-consuming without sacrificing quality. And so, I am afraid, we will not make that core task significantly less expensive without cheapening it.

Pamela Hieronymi is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles and, this year, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

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The Number That Shows Why Apple is Suing Every Android Manufacturer in Sight

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

The need to strut is strong in this one….

The Number That Shows Why Apple is Suing Every Android Manufacturer in Sight.

I guess when Apple can’t compete using its beauty and amazing marketing, it simply tries to squash the competition by what amounts to censorship.

In the trial, Apple (who is seen as American) manages to convince the judge to ban testimony by Samsung (who is Korean) designers. In America. What a surprise.

 

Turns out, Apple does indeed do market research, even though they say they don’t (WHAT?! Apple, LYING?).

Not surprisingly, one of the big secrets that Apple guards so jealously, is that a big part of their popularity comes from the fact that people trust them. So, if it comes out that they are no more trustworthy than any of the other big tech companies (something many of us have always assumed, but something that the Apple cultists steadfastly refuse to believe) there is the chance that Apple will lose some of its ‘cool’ factor, and with it, more market share.

Their response? Redouble their efforts to hide information. They will go to court at the drop of a hat. Their control over developers gets even tighter.

Kind of tyrannical, no?

I will freely admit that Apple has done wonders for the physical appearance of tech devices. They have also helped to drive better looking interfaces. When it comes right down to it, they have actually invented very little.

 

And they are among the biggest offenders when it comes to luring people away from knowledge of how things work. Keep your followers happy and ignorant. Very much like a cult.

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Where I’ve Been Online (Weekly: July 29-Aug. 4)

Approximate Reading Time: 4 minutes

~ A record of places on the web I want to remember ~

03 Aug 12

Ian Bogost – Academia Still Isn’t So Bad

Despite it all, working in academia (on the tenure track anyway) is still a positive lifestyle choice, and we who benefit from it better be willing to admit to the benefits, even if we should also remain committed to correcting many of the flaws Lane discusses. Life is complicated, and articles like Lane’s offer a needed reminder to all of us. But it’s also worth remembering that university faculty have moved back and forth between academia and industry for decades. Indeed, many academics in Lane’s field can take a leave of absence to go work at a company like Google, enjoying the benefits of both worlds. Nothing’s perfect, and lots of things are troubled. But corporate life is not an obviously better life than academic life, even in today’s corporatized university climate, and even given the apparent wealth of companies like Google.


OUYA: A New Kind of Video Game Console by OUYA — Kickstarter

Cracking open the last closed platform: the TV. A beautiful, affordable console — built on Android, by the creator of Jambox.


Welcome to FoWL: Friends of WikiLeaks!

Friends of WikiLeaks (FoWL) is a network of men and women from across the globe who defend WikiLeaks and promote its mission and values. We provide public support to WikiLeaks and to individuals and organisations aligned with WikiLeaks. This site will help you to join with people like you in your area and across the world. You will make new friends and allies, care for treasured values, and fight in common cause.


Open Source Web-Based IDE | WIODE

Web Installed Open Development Environment

With built-in support for HTML, JavaScript, JSON, XML, CSS, PHP, Python, SQL and expandable to more languages; WIODE is perfect for developers who want to work in their native environment – the cloud. Coupled with strong security, an easy-to-use API, built-in version controls, snippet library and a slew of other features and you get one hell of an editor…FOR FREE!


Important Facts to Know About Learning Math | MindShift

We’ve explored a variety of angles about different aspects of teaching and learning math — everything from stereotyping girls to how to deal with math anxiety to the importance of spatial thinking. Here are some helpful articles that examine the learning processes.


30 Jul 12

The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic – NYTimes.com

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.


29 Jul 12

Second Avenue

Despite increased government spending, US educational outcomes continue to decline. Nowhere is this more evident than in the STEM disciplines– Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Multiple studies have demonstrated the efficacy of digital learning to produce improved outcomes. Second Avenue fully understands that technology serves as a critical enabler to achieve fully customized learning environments and unlock the potential of all students.

Founded by educators and gamers, Second Avenue specializes in the development of interactive media for education. We pride ourselves on building effective, interactive learning environments that are innovative, accurate and visually compelling. Our team includes subject matter experts, programmers, artists, learning designers, quality analysts and project managers. Here at Second Avenue, we offer alternative learning paths and challenge the status quo. It is time to reimagine learning.

Second Avenue is a certified women-owned interactive media company in Rochester, NY that provides custom software development for interactive modules and serious games, managed services for learning management systems, training services and content authoring for clients such as W.W. Norton, Pearson, K¹², and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Our company’s portfolio is growing, and we’d love to do business with you too.


Edudemic | Education Technology, Apps, Product Reviews, and Social Media

Mission Statement

Our mission is to make people smart.

And not just pseudo-intellectuals who like topical thinking and trivial knowledge. By people, we mean giving everyone access to the leading edge of thinking in the most accessible, consumable, compelling way possible.

But to do that, we have to change the way people think about learning.

That means not a university, not lengthy books, nor a constant flow of high-brow editorials. Rather, diverse forms of new thinking.
Background

So we’re making people smart not by offering access to huge volumes of information, but rather by pulling back the curtains on the learning process. Public and private, K-12 and higher ed, formal and informal, academic and authentic, our goal is to mainstream the learning process.

As a fluid platform dedicated to what’s next in learning, we have to be quick on our feet. Technology, emerging trends, social media, and culture change fast–and in 2012 and beyond, faster than ever before.

By connecting these four areas, we hope to support the progression of how people access and process information, collaborate with others, and combine existing wisdom with new thinking to create a better world.

The Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century was spurred by intellectuals that turned to science and reason in pursuit of widespread social reform. With public education recently dominated by institutionalized and standardized forms of learning, Edudemic’s mission is to not “fix education,” but rather evolve the way we learn.

That is, change the culture of learning.

Tags: education web2.0 resources technology teaching edudemic

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Is Online Learning Better than F2F?

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

I’ve been pondering this question for a good number of years.

Most online courses still consist largely of readings followed by quizzes. The better ones include video lectures, and the really good ones include include interactive elements. The very best ones include simulations and games and other activities.

Whatever the format, we’ve come to realize that nurturing a community of learners is key.

That’s all well and good, but I could never see how any of this could match the experiences I have had with my classes when I taught face to face.

Lately, I’ve been hearing people talk about how ground-breaking these new massively online courses are, and I’ve been having trouble understanding what’s so amazing about them. Finally, while listening to this TED talk, I stumbled upon an answer.

Daphne Koller: What we’re learning from online education | Video on TED.com.

Turns out, they’re not. They are, however a vast improvement over what normally happens in the classroom.

It seems that most undergraduate university courses – especially those in big, arrogant schools – are lousy. They consist of enormous classes where ‘famous’ professors lecture from the front, but who never actually interact with most of their students. The students might as well be watching a video.

Compared to that, of COURSE these online courses are better – they provide students with access to all the things Daphne Koller says are wonderful about these massive courses. Things that I have routinely done for my students directly my entire career.

 

Now I get it.

Online isn’t better than what I do – but it IS better then what is usually done. Of course, this new model is not all sunshine and teddy bears, either (see Ian Bogost’s comments).

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Gamification – The New Chocolate Covered Broccoli?

Approximate Reading Time: < 1 minute

Gamification has some real potential, but it will be discredited before it even gets started if people insist on using it as little more than a new veneer plastered over antiquated methods.

Here’s an article that explains how to use Chore Wars to ‘gamify your classroom”. Except, the problem is that the game is simply being used as a wrapper around the same old industrialized learning.

Gamify your classroom with Chore Wars | Digital Play.
This comment causes me deep concern:

The idea is to encourage the students to do more exam practice tests by making it fun.

Really? Is THAT what you think this is good for? Getting kids to do more tests?

 

 

Admittedly a lot of ideas embodied in gamification are not actually new: like choice, detailed progress tracking, earning scores based on performance, moving up to the next level, etc. (I remember using SRA Reading Kits – I LOVED those things).

On the other hand, gamification does provide a handy lens through which to examine these ideas. It provides a framework that I’m finding very useful.

If your understanding of gamification is that it is simply something in which to wrap your same old instruction, try reading up on it some more.

 

It actually requires some serious re-thinking, if you want to make it meaningful and seamless.

Here are a couple of sources that might help:

The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework As A Game

The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education

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Telus Spark : If This is Science We are Doomed, Part 2

Approximate Reading Time: 6 minutes

This is part 2 of my two-part tirade on Calgary’s new Telus Spark “Science” Center.

Here’s where I get to talk about the (virtually non-existent) science. In the SCIENCE center.

I almost brought my ipad with me to the brand new “science” center.

It’s a BRAND new facility, right? Museums have come along way in the last 10-20 years. At over $160 million, and after all the hype, I expected it to be a showcase of modern techno-enhanced museum design – you know, the kind with things I can point my phone or ipad at to get more information on whatever it is I’m looking at. Additional images, websites (stuff right on the Telus Spark website even), animations, little podcasts, etc. I figured there’d AT least be wi-fi in the building and little QR do-dads everywhere.

Well, good thing I didn’t bother to bring it. I did not notice anything – that’s right folks, NOT ONE place where I could connect or communicate with a mobile device. In fact, with very few exceptions ALL of the explanations (such as they were) were painted or postered onto some wall or board. The exceptions? A couple of screens that displayed a series of paragraphs. Can you scroll through the text if you read faster than a 6 year old, you might ask? Well NOOOO. You can’t. They are NOT touch screens. Can you go back and re-read something you missed? No siree. It’s just a display screen scrolling through pages of text at a pre-determined rate. (yawn)

As if it isn’t bad enough that the technology being used to present the exhibits all appears to have come from about 10 years ago, most of the exhibits told me ALMOST NOTHING about anything. Want to know more about those core samples? TOO BAD. You’ll have to go elsewhere because this exhibit is not going to be any help.

The blackboard style decor for the signs is cute. You know what would have been cuter? Something that LOOKS like a blackboard but is really a touchscreen that gives patrons access to more information.

Like many of the exhibits – the rocks exhibit COULD have been cool. it COULD have taught people something. (Notice the order in which I said that? Science is COOL! You will NOT get that impression from this museum.)

I realize that we are in Alberta and that everything in Alberta seems to have to have something to do with petroleum, but really. If this “science” center is supposed to be a tourist attraction, then I can maybe see focusing so heavily on all things energy-related, but if it’s NOT, couldn’t we PLEASE PLEASE look at the science of something that ISN’T of interest to the energy industry? I realize that a lot of funding came from the local oil companies (you can tell that because they have plaques all over the building), and there’s really nothing wrong with that, but really, do you have to be that blatant? This does not look like a “science” center so much as “here’s what the oil industry in Alberta wants us to look at”.

OK. It’s not all about oil. There’s a “Being Human” section at this “science” centre. I thought, “Great! I’ve heard about this part – there’s a human sexuality section.”

Sadly, it too isn’t about science. It’s far more sociology than science.

Want to know what blinking has to do with eggs?

I DON’T KNOW. And you won’t find out here.

This exhibit consists of a table and two chairs where you can sit down and have a staring contest.

(I’ll let everyone ponder the “science” of that for a few minutes….)

Esthetics are Important

Esthetics are important. They’re not enough to carry something, but they do matter. Many of the exhibits are quite crappy looking. The industrial look does not make things more sciencey. Mostly, it just makes them look unfinished. This exhibit is supposed to be about how water flows – I think (I can’t remember). Do you suppose they could have done something more esthetically pleasing? This looks like the sink in a high school shop at the end of the day.

When I talk to people about education, I tell them that there are 2 questions that everyone should have a right to ask any time they are being invited to learn something:

What is this Good for? and Why am I doing this?

These are fair questions to ask of a teacher. They are also fair questions to ask any time you are presented with something that is supposed to be educational.

At this “science” center, much of the time, the answer to both questions is: “I DON’T KNOW.” And that’s very sad. Science really is cool, but you’re not likely to get that impression here.

Here’s an exhibit that COULD have been cool. You get some coarse sand in a bin and some balls. The sign above says something about making craters. I recently saw a thing on TV about how to make a crater (here’s a demo that NASA put on youtube).

Telus Spark? Well, they give you material that won’t show you anything about how the force is distributed, but worse yet: the material in the bin is LESS THAN 1/2″ DEEP. You can’t show diddly. Idea: really cool. Design and implementation: FAIL.

Here’s another one:

This one’s about wind and how it flows around. Ever seen a hay field on a breezy day? I have (I get to see one out my living room window). It’s beautiful! Mesmerizing. It looks like an ocean of green waves. I can think of a number of ways to build an exhibit that show us that same amazing effect. Use nylon wire with little ‘seeds’ attached to the top. Do it right and it will look really cool. You could even make the wire be different colours along the shaft so that you can see waves in different colours. Think of the cool things you could do with lighting…..

What did Telus Spark do? They pasted what looks like an old shag carpet on the wall. It moves NOTHING like a real field. It’s awful.

Science Is……

Oh wait! THIS looks cool:
The sign says:

Solar panels convert light into electricity (it doesn’t tell you how though) – the more light that strikes them, the more electricity they generate. We use the electricity generated to make musical notes – transforming light into electricity and electricity into sound energy (again, we’re NOT going to tell you how – because THAT’S SCIENCE).

Another failed opportunity. How about having notes reflect the intensity of the light? Is there some order to the notes and the solar receptacles? If so, WOULD YOU CARE TO TELL US?!

THAT’S WHAT SCIENCE IS ABOUT!!!!

It’s all well and good to “provoke conversation, experimentation and collaboration” but that’s only the FIRST part of what science is about. If you fail to enlighten, you have failed! If you manage to provoke conversation but fail to help us answer our questions, that’s a fail.

The sign says, “Bottle the Sky: Our visitors have been filling these jars with colours to match the sky they see, or to recreate a sky from their memory. The colours all come from natural pigments.”

Do we get to know WHICH pigments and dyes?

Well NO.

Do we get to see any pictures of skies for comparison?

NO, can’t do that either.

Are the coloured bottles arranged in a way that represents a sky?

NOPE

As far as I can see, they are totally random.

What do I learn from this? ……

I get that science is less about the products and more about the process. Believe me, I TOTALLY get it. I’ve been a scientist all my adult life. Among other things, I’ve been breeding rabbits for over 20 years. I study the colour genetics; I breed for production, health, temperament – all of which have a lot to do with genetics and biology (if you care to learn). I study animal behaviour (they call that ethology – and yup, that’s science too). I’m absolutely on board with the notion that process is important. BUT – process without enlightenment is just a bunch of stuff you do. It is NOT science.

Provoking questions and then failing to provide a path to an answer turns people OFF.

Here’s an exhibit where we get to smell stuff. Why? It says that smells evoke memories. How? (which would of course be the science part) IT DOESN’T SAY.

I have another bit of news for you: inquiry based learning is NOT about putting a bunch of crap in front of kids and standing back as they play around with it.

It involves GUIDANCE; it often involves very careful orchestration of “teachable moments” – setting up situations where your learners will face questions they want to answer.

THAT’s when the magic happens! But ONLY if you have some way of helping them find the answers.

Science is not “just a bunch of shit that happens” (= processes). Science is about trying to find out why.

Missed Opportunities

This could be cool. And it is, sort of. But it could be so much more……

This “science” center is filled with missed opportunities. Exhibits that could be really cool, but that miss the mark. This one is kind of cool, but could be so much better – and it would not have cost very much.

There are 3 sliders you can use to alter the effect of the image. They are:

  1. X-Ray
  2. X-Ray and Infrared
  3. X-Ray and visible light

Why can’t you separate out the X-rays, you might ask? Why indeed.

Here’s another one that could have been something more than a toy:

This one says how the size and shape affects the sounds they make. Density also makes a difference – very dense materials vibrate faster which gives you a higher note. It also says that a regular internal structure will cause the sound to resonate longer.

We have a number of materials arranged as xylophones and some things to hit them with. So far so good. I walked over to the one that was all wood – and – sure enough – each block made a different sounds. Cool! What woods are these? IT DOESN’T SAY. They are not arranged in any kind of order that I can tell. No way to get a feel for what the sign says, other than difference in sound – some of them so slight it’s hard to be sure.

Sigh.

 

This sign hangs above an exhibit that has some foam/bubble thing going on – I didn’t actually check it out – I was more distracted by the behaviour of the people who did…..

Can you guess what EVERYONE we saw did here?

That’s right kids – EVERY single person who came up to this exhibit pulled the orange cord. And nothing interesting happened. Another lost opportunity.

??????

I’ll leave you with this one. If you can tell me what this is and what it has to do with science, please post your answer below, because I really don’t know.

REALLY.

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