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Well, we reach the end of February 2008. According to the Washington Post editorial the Roman calendar was slightly out of whack with the great astronomical scheme of things. So, thanks, Julius, for the opportunity for another day in which to excel.
This scene isn't quite as cute as the Google title on its' home page today, but...then again, they have more people making coffee than we have in our company!!
Last week we loaned our trade show exhibit to a friend in need. After the show the display was returned and my two grandsons "helped" bring in back into my son's place. These are third generation "Blocks" since our company consists of Jonathan (Jon) my son, and me. These guys are great!
Here is my rendition of the Roman Colesseum which I visited way back in 1962 while in Rome, Italy. I was somewhat disappointed by the interior of the arena mainly because the floor was gone and the understructures exposed. What I had expected was a pristine arena based on watching all those movies with gladiators and chariot races. But, if you really think about it, the place was amazingly well preserved and the visit extremely educational.
Making scenes that illustrate the important things that a student may see on field trips or vacations to famous places is a great exercise for projects in World History, Social Studies, or Government classes. I have many more ideas in my head from places I've been which I will share from time to time. The scenes created by the students can be used in reports and articles.
The scene could have been much more complex, but I just wanted to portray an idea quickly. Our creativity product, GollyGee Blocks®, is great for that.
Right on schedule last night the lunar eclipse was seen. The lunar eclipse weblog link from Jessica Daminano also contains a reference to a lunar eclipse simulation that is very interesting. The eclipse started around 8PM and ended around midnight,give or take a few minutes. The sky was cloudy but the clouds were patchy so the moon was visible most of the time. In our area the moon appeared as if heavily veiled in a black cloth.
I came inside and made a GollyGee Blocks® scene somewhat representative of what we saw just as the moon reached full eclipse - around 10PM.
I remember seeing a solar eclipse in November of 1975 while I was in graduate school at Monterey, CA. We were able to view it through a smoked glass.
Today's scene is symbolic of an event that happened today and one that might. According to the news, the space shuttle Atlantis landed successfully after a mission to install a laboratory on the International Space Station. The second event, which was tentatively scheduled for this evening but might be delayed due to weather, is the shoot down of one of our USA 193 satellite by a Navy ship in the Pacific Ocean. We'll see on that one.
The scene I've selected for these events is an amalgamation of two scenes. The first is the rocket plane done by a student in North Carolina (they were doing a science unit on aviation) as modified by a second grader in a local school who put eyes on the plane. These are our "eyes in the skies."
Thanks to my son Jonathan who has enhanced this weblog with some tracking info and comment capability. Technology marches on.
A quick word from your friendly GollyGee webmaster, I've enabled comments for this weblog so we can all talk about the neat things Roland is building. The comments are protected from spam by reCAPTCHA, which I've been using on my blog for a while. I've also added our web site stats tracker code, so we can see how many people actually read this!
Give the comments a test on this post if you want.
This morning I arrived at my desk to find a beautiful long stemmed red rose standing in a vase. This rose was the same one that my wife received from the restaurant when I took her out to dinner last night on our Valentine Day's date. We had a wonderful time and a great meal. I hope that you are as blessed as I am.
Here is my rendition of the Rose in GollyGee Blocks®.
How I made it: I first tried individual petals using a flattened dome. That didn't work out to well. Using some problem solving ideas, I then decided to use multiple domes superimposed on each other, each slightly moved to simulate multiple petals. This worked better. I stretched and tilted the domes and then using another stretched dome scaled, copied, tilted, turned and positioned them to be the leaves. The stem of the rose is a cylinder elongated sitting on a dome.
I tried this in wire frame mode to get the vase to look like the transparent glass it is. See what you think.
I know some of you might have seen this GollyGee Blocks® scene before. Credit here is due to Matt, husband of our fabulous consultant Laurie Tech Resources. So, without further ado, Happy Valentine's Day!!
The hearts are made from cubes and half circles. I'll see if you can figure out how to put them together! Email me if you can't.
Jonathan (creator of GollyGee Blocks - and also my son and business associate) sent me a link from his new used iPhone (I'm jealous) that talked about Whale watching off the coast of Hawaii. In the picture I grabbed using Image Well there is a large Humpback leaping from the sea. Great shot Larry!
I've tried by hand at recreating the image using GollyGee Blocks®. This is also another great example of problem solving for students - breaking down the picture into basic shapes and putting them together to make a picture. By the way, in the event I haven't said this in previous posts, the whole idea of GollyGee Blocks® is to help young students with critical thinking, problem solving and spatial reasoning.
The whale body is a scaled cylinder with a stacked and stretched dome as the head. Coloring (black on white) is done by copying the body and scaling slightly smaller. Then place on original body and put on colors. The whale fins are done using the airplane wings in the objects menu. The whale body is positioned using the tilt tool. I also rotated the building plane in two directions to get a horizontal horizon.
An interesting activity with GollyGee Blocks is to write a short story using some theme. I have modified my traditional pumpkin scene to become a pumpkin coach for Cinderella's trip to the ball. The pumpkin is made from intersecting spheres with a column stem. Adding tires and horses is the modification I have made. Try something like this in your classroom. The sky is the limit!
The other night we opened our front door (about 10PM) and a small bird flew into our house. We had one heck of a time getting it back out. Opened the back door to the deck and it just flew from one end of the family room to the other end of the dining area. Finally got it into the laundry room, closed off the door and got it into the garage without harm. It was a baby female Cardinal (our state bird). We have a number of Cardinal families in our yard. The males are the beautiful bright red ones. This particular bird must have a nest near our front door in the holly bushes.
Here's a scene done by a 2nd grader. The scene is a caterpillar and a bird under some mushrooms.
Not bad for a 2nd grader. The bird needs a head and then it would look like a dove.
A second grade student in one of our favorite local public schools came up with this 3D checker board. I have revised the scene by coloring the pieces a better color to be seen (he had them in red/black). The students in this class were actually playing a game with this. The undo function also lets you correct any wrong moves and can take you all the way back to the beginning to retrace the whole game. Another thing you can do while undoing is to save each frame and animate the game. You use the Move menu to move the pieces or the delete function to take them off the board. You can also use the rotate arrows to move the board around in all directions. I have also seen a chess board done by a 6th grader where he made his own pieces.
I went on a trip to Zimbabwe (Southern Africa - was formerly called Rhodesia) in the late 1990's before a lot of the problems came about (the underlying problems were there, just no major oppression and rampant chaos/inflation). One of the fun things I did was visiting a national wildlife park (Hwange - near Victoria Falls). A truly amazing event I saw was an elephants (actually there were three of them) eating leaves from trees. Our jeep was within 25 feet of these magnificent creatures (they are somewhat impervious to tourists if not much disturbed). I do have some photos of this trip somewhere. I must locate them for uploading.
I also visited the spectacular Victoria Falls and the architectural remains of the Great Zimbabwe (one of the world's great mysteries). I may do a post on the falls later on.
In today's scene I have tried to recreate an elephant from the basic shapes. I got the idea from an ad on TV that shows pipe-like figures pitching some drug (can't recall the company - really effective ad!!). So here it is.
I could have done a lot better but the idea is what I wanted to get across. This could be a writing exercise for a language arts class or a geography lesson involving places people visit.
Just a short post this morning to tell readers that some third - fifth grade students from the Marietta Center for Advanced Academics (MCAA) won first, second, and third places in the 3D modeling category at the Cobb County Georgia Technology Fair on Saturday February 2 using GollyGee Blocks®. Cobb County is the second largest school district in the state of Georgia.
MCAA is a magnet school in the Marietta Georgia City School District in Cobb County. MCAA is a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) school for grades 3-5. Read more about them at http://www.marietta-city.k12.ga.us/aboutus/factsheet.asp (sorry, I still can't seem to make this pasting of URLs work in this application!!).
Congratulations to the students whose projects won. I will have some of their work to show in the near future. They won with projects on space stations.
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The following scene was done by a Garrett County Maryland group. It depicts a space environment created by putting a space-like texture on the GollyGee Blocks planes as well as adding the rockets and alien figures.
This scene is a continuation of the Building scene I posted yesterday on the Phoenix visit. This particular scene shows streets and cars (made from the shapes menu).
