6th grader Gray recently finished an independent project using the Phun 2-D physics engine.  His goal was to “make a magnetic accelerator cannon or a railgun sort of thing to fire very fast destructive projectiles,” and  “it was achieved through balancing properties of mass and density.”  Nice work, Gray!

My name is Rowan, and I am a 6th grade student doing an independent tech project about important issues around the world.  My website has links to other websites that are helping to solve these issues.

Check out my website to see how you can help too. You can leave comments right here on the tech blog.  Thanks.

Barbie has been around for 51 years and there are 126 different versions of the doll! While popular around the world, there are many people who don’t like this toy because they say her body is unrealistic, she perpetuates a stereotype and she doesn’t represent real women.

Mattel, the company that makes Barbie, is trying to improve her image by creating dolls that give girls a positive role model – mainly by creating versions that have jobs. There newest doll is the Computer Engineer Barbie, a coding woman with matching pink laptop, glasses and accessories.

Students – feel free to respond to this story and answer one of the questions below using the blog “comments” field.

Do you think that Barbie is a role model (good or bad) for young girls?

Do you think this Barbie is dressed for work? Why or why not?

Is this new doll inspiring, insulting, or something else entirely?

On Monday, the 7th grade talked about the band OK GO and their inability to post embeddable videos due to the record contract they have in place.  State Farm Insurance stepped in and gave the band money to make a new video that falls beyond the EMI agreement.  Enjoy this massive Rube Goldberg machine:

7th grade time in the lab is split between two lessons today – bridged by digital identity:

1. OK GO is a band that became popular through some awesome YouTube videos.  Instead of signing a recording contract and spending millions on advertising, they made a couple of low-budget, hilarious films and posted them online.  The videos were so popular that they got signed by EMI.  You can see the famous “treadmill” video (more than 49 million views) at YouTube because embedding has been disabled at the request of the record label.

The band recently made a new video  and posted it on their website for all their fans, but EMI (the record label) was not happy and made them remove it.  This is bizarre because the internet made them famous but now their bosses asked them not to use this tool to connect with fans.  To watch this video, you have to go to YouTube so that EMI can get paid by the advertisers.

OK GO has a great online presence, using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and their own website to promote their brand (band).  We took a look at their Facebook page and found out that they are performing at the Sasquatch! music festival in Washington in May.  That took us to the second part of our class…

2. We opened Google Earth and searched for the The Columbia Gorge, where the music festival takes place every year.  From there, we prepped for the upcoming Washington State History quiz on notable locations around the state.  We used Google Earth to locate the Coulee Dam (pictured below), Adams and other mountains, major freeways, lakes, tribes and more.

Students got their hands on an Apple iPad today – weeks before the product has officially been launched!  We did some testing and compared the size of this new device with an iPod and a laptop.  Overall impression was that the screen seems small for web surfing, but it is a fun gizmo.

If you are interested in trying out the iPad for free, follow this link for access

The 8th grade Community class has been analyzing the results of their 2010 Digital Identity Survey. 88 students (out of 103) completed the request for information. There is a lot of information to work through – from social networking accounts to gaming consoles to parent perceptions of tech use. Below is a small sample: student cell phone ownership and texting trends.
cell/text

8th grade students have been learning about the aspects of avalanches as well as safety and awareness (partly in preparation for the February snow camping trip). They simulated three different avalanche terrains on a flat board, and used flour, salt, sugar, and potato flakes to simulate varied snowpacks. As they increased the angle of the board, they measured the angle of incline as they observed what was happening to the different layers. They looked for slab and loose avalanches and reported at what angle they occurred as well as the distance of the slide. They used their data to derive generalizations about snowpack and incline in nature.

The engineering section of 8th grade Applied Math Lab (AML) has just finished a unit on structure building. Using a required number of newspaper sheets, students worked in groups to create a structure that could withhold the weight of one small book, two small books, a math book…?!, a dictionary…?!, two dictionaries…?!, all of this combined, and more! Students followed a design process that included building, testing, evaluating, and redesigning.

The 6th grade spent the period deconstructing the marketing around Apple’s new iPad announcement.

We started with the official video that greets visitors to the Apple website.  What does Apple want us to believe about the new device?  How do they use music, backgrounds, demonstrations and interviews to convince us?

Next we broke up into groups to figure out if the iPad is a technological evolution or revolution.  Every group clearly agrees that this is merely an evolution – as Abe pointed out, “it’s just an iPod Touch that won’t fit in your pocket.”

Could the iPad be a replacement for your home computer?

“No way,” said Pearl and a few others.  ”There is no way to connect your digital camera or a printer.” Students also pointed out that you need another computer to efficiently upload contacts, calendars and mail.  Without USB, your limited in the devices you can plug in.

“There is no DVD player” pointed out Rowan. Mason thinks this is because Apple wants you to spend money at their stores to get content.

We use websites every day to do all sorts of things: watch video, communicate with others, research and explore.  How is it that computers know what a website should look like to the viewer?

6th graders got behind the scenes today as we learned about hyper text markup language (HTML), a way that computers speak so that webpages show up in a way that humans can understand.  HTML is a foreign language, but we can learn to speak it and therefore have a better understanding of how websites work.

Every time you visit a website, your computer downloads the HTML code before it shows you the images, words and videos you are looking for.  You can actually see this code by right-clicking on a webpage and selecting “view source” or “view page source.” Depending on the browser you use, you may see color-specific code, where tags are one color and content another.  You can even add comments into the code that are for other coders.

We did this with a few pages and saw some similarities:

• at the top of the code, it always says <html>, which tells the computer what language the document is in.
• each page has a <title> tag, which shows up at the top of the page
• HTML tags begin and end with ‘crocodiles,’ which look like this < or this >
• a slash (/) means end/cut/stop

Next we jumped into building our own webpages!  We used a program called Kompozer, which allows you to write actual code, or just write content and have the program turn it into code.  So far we are just getting started, but there were some cool discoveries.  Kallie figured out how to change the background of the entire page, and Eli inserted some images from the web into his page.  Rebecca made one page link to another and Mason got his page open in Internet Explorer so he could see what it would look like if it was really online.