Roland's Cube

This past weekend my wife and I visited Phoenix, Arizona to be present at the ordination to the Deaconate of a very close family friend. Phoenix is a really nice place (although it rained all day Sunday in the "Sun" city). On one of my walkabouts I spotted a rather interesting building. The GollyGee Blocks® scene here shows my rendition of that building.

Of course there were many other building around but I just wanted to show this one! We also visited the Phoenix Museum of Art and saw an interesting exhibit on the French Impressionists. One neat technique they showed involved grid translation. This is a technique where a grid is superimposed on a picture and then each portion of the picture is transferred to another medium a block at a time.

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We really do have children that love our creativity product GollyGee Blocks®. Here is a shot of a fan at one of our past educational trade shows studiously creating a 3D scene. Here we are using a projector and screen (outside of the picture frame) to display the product she is working on.

Thanks to my son Jonathan I am now able to upload digital photographs to my weblog. Have to size the pictures before inserting in the MarsEdit application.

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 03:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today's scene is about a flying cow. This can be fun for kids to do in conjunction with a writing assignment/exercise. They could write a sentence, paragraph, or short story about the adventures of the flying cow.

The cow is in the objects menu as are the wings. Put the wings on the cow while the stack toggle is on. You can turn and size the wings as well. The cow's eyes are dome's sized and colored.

The pond in the picture was made with a stretched sphere. There are other tips on making the rest of the things in the scene (e.g. the house) but I'll cover those later.

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I wnat to tell you a short story that deeply bothers and saddens me. I call it cutting the mustard.

Saturday evening my wife (a high school teacher) and I had supper at a local restaurant and our waitress was a young woman my wife had previously taught with at her high school. The young teacher had moved from that high school to another in an adjacent county recently. This young gal has a master's degree from the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia (touted as one of the finest in the country) and has been teaching English for about 4-5 years. She is waitressing to make ends meet since her school salary just doesn't cut the mustard.

It seems to me that something is very wrong with this situation. How do we ever hope to obtain and keep bright talented young (or any new teacher for that matter) teachers with a salary that makes the person have to do a second job - and I know this teacher is not alone. Surely we value our children's education enough to have our teachers receive a living wage.

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 05:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The weather here in Reston, VA is iffy today. Looking out my window I can see a light snow falling (more like dusting). We are supposed to get some wintry mix this afternoon. I went to my archive snapshots to dig up a scene which characterizes today.

Well, that didn't work! I am using MarsEdit and it won't paste an image larger than a couple hundred KPS for some reason - could be our ISP as well. The image was a BMP and was 948 KBS. It's really frustrating because I have lots of scenes, photos and images that won't uploaded.

Well, I'll try a smaller, new one I just made.

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently read an article in Edutopia (http://www.edutopia.org/) entitled "The Venetian Bind" that talks about a controversial flood control plan for Venice, Italy. This is an interesting article (November/December 2007 addition) about the civil engineering project proposed to mitigate the exceptional tidal effects in Venice as well as those that might ensue as a result of ice cap melting worldwide.

The scene I include today was made with GollyGee Blocks and is my quick rendition of the photo that accompanied the article. Notice the dog knee deep in tidal waters around some of the world's most historic architectures.

The rising tides problem suggests a whole set of science projects that schools might consider at various grade levels. Thinking cap required! Maybe wave action on structures is a starter?? Maybe some social studies/math topics that look at the effects of rising tides on population areas??

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the more powerful tools within GollyGee Blocks® is the multiple camera angle. Currently we have the normal perspective view (Camera 1 Icon) and the Bird's Eye View (Camera 2 Icon). I have found that the Bird's Eye view allows some very accurate placement of forms/objects in a scene. Perspective/depth perception will fool you in the normal view. Here are examples of the view types.

Normal View (Camera 1) default setting on opening GollyGee Blocks®

Bird's Eye View (Camera 2 toogle)

The sharp observer will also note that the plane has been rotated before going to the Bird's Eye view. I will write about plane rotation (horizontal/vertical) in another entry.

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 03:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We are in the process of getting our GollyGee Blocks® Activity Guide (aka Teacher's Guide) ready to put up on our website. I'm excited about this as it will give teacher's a chance to see many different and exciting ways to use our creativity application in the classroom. Hopefully we will also put up back issues of our monthly newsletter on the site in the near future. We are going to discontinue the newsletter and concentrate on using this blog as a vehicle to give news about how to use GollyGee Blocks®. Stay tuned!!

The eyes on the dog (objects menu) are spheres which have been appropriately scaled to the dog, stacked on his head and colored light blue. The text is the 3D text in the shapes menu, sized, moved and lifted over the head of the talker (I don't in any way suggest that I am the simulated writer/talker since I really don't have opposing thumbs like this guy does). The "bubbles" (signifying an idea) are spheres sized and moved to indicate the person is talking.

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 09:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a scene I created to illustrate how to use GollyGee Blocks in teaching students about visualizing construction themes. What would be an interesting enhancement to the application would be a grouping function that allows the user to group just what they want. Blocks does allow a parent-child type hierarchial grouping when the magnet feature is on. With a user defined grouping I could have grouped the entire wall, rotated it and put it against the first wall and so forth to make a framed room. Well, the reason we didn't do this is that we would defeat the simplicity of Blocks for younger children. Tradeoffs anyone?

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 02:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Washington Post has a good editorial on NCLB written by Senator Kennedy ("How to Fix 'No Child'"). Senator Kennedy, one of the original architects of the NCLB Act, says the "stakes are high" in the renewal of the Act this year. I agree with Senator Kennedy that we must look for the good that this Act has made and fix the things that are not going well and have many educators in an uproar (e.g. penalizing schools for low performance, tin cup funding).

Senator Kennedy is keen in observing that we must encourage innovation in the classroom and not just do "teaching to the test." He advocates putting politics aside (good luck on that one) and putting emphasis on making progress in school reform, working together to fix what needs to be fixed. I laud Senator Kennedy (and I'm not really one of his ardent fans) for this effort.

How I made the scene:

I used a cylinder for the cup with a smaller cylinder embedded/colored black to simulate the inside. Handle is two spheres, one smaller with a green texture to make it look like you can see through it. Coins are spheres stretched into disks and colored. Try it yourself! Go to Gollygee.com for a demo download.

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's an example of using GollyGee Block's rotation capability to teach basic math concepts. This example illustrates the commutative law of addition:

a+b = b+a

Now by rotating the horizontal plane 180 degrees:

Clearly the results on one side of the equation are equal to those on the other side. The commutative property only holds so long as the variables have the same values.

1+2 = 2+1

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From a lesson on The Algebraic Laws:

"Whenever two variables have the same values in the forward as they do in the reverse direction the variables commute. When two variables have different values in the forward direction than they do in the reverse direction the variables are said to be anti-commutative."

Joseph Buczek, "School Principals Guide to Student Math Improvement"

Posted by Roland Blocksom at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)