Friday, October 22, 2010

2011 Windstorm Challenge

Mt. Ararat students Jacob K. and Ian H. designed, built and submitted their entry to the 2010 Maine Wind Blade Challenge. Organizers recently announced the deadline for the 2011 Challenge and announced the opportunity to participate in a second challenge: The Windstorm Challenge (http://www.deepcwind.org/windstorm/index.php and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Orono-ME/Windstorm-Challenge/151153578227990)

Mt. Ararat students have expressed interest in creating an entry for the Windstorm Challenge:



These entries could provide outstanding examples of Capstone Projects. Can we find video teams who could create the a documentary of such a project as their Capstone Project?

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Google charts and more

I have started programming app inventor apps. Some members of the Google app inventor group provide new insights. Here is one: The Google Charts API provides the tools to produce a growing variety of charts and maps to visualize data and share the results in web-based images. The tools are sufficiently flexible to support the creation of QR Codes.

A sample map. and to the tools: Chart image playground-Quadratic equation

Use a QR Code scanner to test these codes.

I hadn't fully appreciated until I worked with this tool that the 'data' can be many forms (urls, app store links, phone numbers, poetry, mathematical equations, ...) and now under control of anyone who has a Google account. This capacity solves on of the outstanding questions that I had about the development of some ARIS Quests.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Interested in Developing Apps?

Are you interested in learning more about developing apps for mobile phones? I need some original images to incorporate in a demonstration app for App Inventor development. This image in Russian is not particularly helpful to most of us despite its Creative Commons License: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pitch_Roll_Yaw%28rus%29.png. Once the images are created (probably with SketchUp), I'd like to explore the possibility of using SketchUp to animate motion sensors. If people are interested in learning more about programming smartphone apps, then this will be an opportunity to do that, too.