I can’t show you a picture of this hole, as you have to do it blindfolded. Words will have to suffice. Picture this… Wait I forgot, you’ll be blindfolded, so don’t picture this… feel this:
Blindfold on, you will begin by hitting a very small golf club with a very big golf ball. The mini club will not go very far as it does not roll very well at all.
At this point you will need to get down on your knees and feel around for your mini-club. This will probably happen after every stroke. Did I mention that you are not standing on astro-turf? You are actually up in a Giant Sequoia.
Now you can decide whether or not to keep hitting your club with the giant ball or if you just want to flick the club with the ring finger on your non-dominant hand. But this choice is now or never. Most people switch to flicking.
Once you find your mini club and you flick it again, the club will likely fall out of the tree. So now you need to try to climb out of the tree blindfolded. Don’t worry, the tree is surrounded by mattresses.
Now that you are lying in a pile of mattresses, again, search for your mini club by feeling around with your hands. Found it? Great! Flick it again, away from the tree if you remember where it is. Keep flicking it until you get it onto a local bus. This may take a while.
Once on the bus with your mini club, wait until the driver announces the name of a stop that reminds you of your childhood. This is where you need to switch from flicking to kicking. Oh yeah and you can switch out your mini-club to a beach ball. I put a deflated one in your pocket. Inflate it! Quickly now! And then kick it out the door and chase it!
Now that you are wherever you are, continue to kick your ball until someone asks you if you if they can play with your ball as well. This person is Hole 4 of our golf course! Tell them nicely that they are welcome to play with the ball, but you have to get back to your mini-golf game! The run back to the course and begin Hole 5.
Here is how this video came to be. You will probably note that my process is fraught with inefficiencies and could be done in approximately a lot less steps.
The theme of my story is one I don’t think has ever been done in any story ever before ever: Good vs. Bad. Let’s see how this plays out!
The ending is deliberately vague because I wanted you to be left on the edge of your seat. Maybe the good guy won. Maybe the bad guy won. Maybe they joined forces to defeat the Mastermind. Maybe this is all a dream. Why is the mean guy covered in smoke? Is he from The Upside Down? What’s the good guy looking at? Is it a Pokemon? What’s with the Mastermind’s hat? Is he wearing it ironically? Find out next time if we can secure funding for a sequel!
Commodore 64ing yourself feels exactly like what I think it might feel exactly like to go into the grid. I’m going to take Alice with me.
So, the first and possibly only tool you need to use is the c64 yourself page provided in the Daily Create directions for the day. But when you watch yourself enter the grid, the process looks like entering the future and the past at the same time which is awesome so I wanted to capture that as well, not just the final product.
Enter another tool: Gyazo. This one allows you to record screencast GIFs . I’ve used it before to record little bits of how to do things in our learning containment system. You only have five seconds, so it’s a fun exercise in what you can do with strict limitations.
Look, Katie and Lucy came into the grid too! We all live here now.
Her analysis of the history, present and future of Ed-Tech in this book and on her blog reveals cycles of excitement and abandonment of ideas for using technology in education. Over and over. History repeating itself. Over and over. It’s very easy to get excited about new technology. It’s harder to figure out how to use it to the best of its potential for helping us teach and learn.
What’s better? Someone using PowerPoint 2007 to create a beautiful visual complement of slides for a passionate talk, or using brand new Virtual Reality goggles to ‘explore’ a scene that you could reasonably go and actually explore in real life? I’m not saying VR does not have exciting potential, but it should be used for what it could be best for: immersion into scenarios in which you could not actually be immersed IRL. Like say the past, or the inside of a circulatory system, or floating above a city. Not some environment to which you can actually go. Just like PowerPoint should be used what it is best for: creating slides that are a visualcomplement to an exciting talk, not as the whole lecture itself. Cutting-edge is not better than trailing-edge unless you are using it meaningfully.
Forty years ago, researchers developed a programming language that would become a brilliant educational tool.
Maybe it was a brilliant educational tool. I wouldn’t know because the way it was used in my school, as far as I can recall, was a few times over a couple of months. I got mildly excited when I first made the turtle create a square. But really I didn’t know why we needed to make it make a square. It just disappeared from our computer activities when the shine wore off. Perhaps if they stuck to it a little longer, I could have experienced the real brilliance of it. They were excited to get us coding… for a little while and then it went away. Ultimately it’s my own fault to not yet have the skills I wish I had. I just wish now that they went a little further with it.
I’m guessing you can recall hearing reports or seeing articles in your recent past about the need to teach our children coding and programming. Ads for coding bootcamps for kids maybe? History . I do think it’s a great idea. I hope we can stick to it a little longer this time.
I don’t want to say that I think it would have been better if they never gave us the LOGO opportunity at all. I think of that little turtle fondly. I just wish I had the chance to get to know it better. What I’m trying to say is this: take the time to think about how you can meaningfully use the new technology that you are excited about before you begin working with it. And if you decide to use it, keep pushing through a little more once the excitement fades. Revise and re-implement and only abandon when you truly have found something else that works better, not just another new shiny thing.
If you have a look at https://www.daysoftheyear.com, you’ll see that every day has 3 or 4 themes to it which is absolutely ridiculous, so I am reclaiming today as just a day.