Shimmering Glitters

Make Day has been announced! Pi Day, March 14th, will be something special this year.

Not sure why this is so mesmerizing... but its another nice little thing someone made while teaching themselves something - how to program a bit using some Flickr tools:

http://metaatem.net/words/Learning%20Technologies%20Center

Our local, beloved Stratasys is now selling the uPrint Personal 3D Printer for $14,900; this is very exciting for educational institutions. The next step: cutting the price of printing cartridges down from $200 apiece.

 Kirsten Ellenbogen sent an email pointing to the Make:Blog article on the Learning Studio's travels.

I'm posting at 2:50am, so this must be pretty amazing....and it is!

Prezi is a fantastic web-based presentation creator. Instead of creating "page-by-page" presentations like Powerpoint, Prezi let's you create one massive image/diagram that it zooms in and out of. This allows you to represent complex data sets without segmenting ("paginating") the information or losing the big picture.

The Exploratorium's Learning Studio (aka "Mike & Karen") have started a blog as they run PIE workshops with Tibetan Buddhist monks in India.

They are giving detailed accounts of this very amazing experience. Which brings me to the question: are there any other distant, exotic lands that could use a PIE delivery?

My brother went to a talk by the creator of this awesome toy, there's a chance he can get one to us for research purposes!

Topobo is a 3D constructive assembly system with kinetic memory, the ability to record and playback physical motion.

Here is Keith's example

Keith and I prototyped these jaws in order to figure out how certain jaw structures work. If the position of the conydle (jaw hinge) makes a difference.

I asked Craig Theisen if I could borrow his OLPC for a bit as I heard Scratch is now part of the build.

I've been using it on and off for about a week. It is pretty great ( except for the keyboard  for my adult fingers) I used it on a sunny day on the bus and it attracted very positive attention of adults and kids, plus was small enough to write and play with.