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This picture from the Children's International Festival wasn't taken on my cellphone and is much better than the last posting.
The kids who worked on our large flat screen TV (42") had a real ball. The images were so vivid and when the camera speed was set higher the scene rotations and translations were mindboogling!
We were invited to participate in the Childrens International Festival this past weekend at the National Park Services' Wolf Trap Farm Park. Our booth was located in the technology pavilion backstage in the Filene Center. The Filene Center is is the huge outdoor/indoor theater where major arts/music productions are done over the Summer at Wolf Trap. Very interesting place! If you are a theater nut you would have loved looking around. Also, if you are in the DC area during the Summer months, Wolf Trap is an excellent venue for entertainment of the highest caliber.
The attached picture shows children creating with GollyGee Blocks® (sorry for the poor resolution from my phone camera). We had pre-schoolers to sixth graders mainly. Along the way we collected over 100 scenes of their creations which I hope to be featuring somehow on some website. The biggest problem we had during the show was getting the kids working on the computer to let another child have a turn. They all wanted to create.
The festival took place on Saturday and Sunday and the weather was hot, sticky and still. Temps inside the pavilion were probably in the high 90's. Still, all in all, the show was a big success.
The Washington Post is running a series of articles on Schools & Learning in their Metro section. On Monday, September 8, the article focused on "Building Blocks" - "Math From Pre-K to Grade 2." The emphasis in the article is on the development of math sense and skills for young learners.
In the section on "What Second-Graders Should Know" the writer talks about examples taken from the Virginia DOE standards. In the area of Geometry the student must be aware of identifying, describing and sorting 3D figures such as shown in the GollyGee Blocks® scene.
The neat thing about GollyGee Blocks® is that the student can rotate the 3D objects in all directions as well as look down on and look up under each object. The wireframe mode allows the student to look into the 3D shape, a nice tool for describing a shape attributes.
This GollyGee Blocks® scene was done by a 6th grader in a local school. I'm not sure that Urban Renewal (my title) was his intention as he called the file "Destruction in the City." Maybe I should stick with his take.
Anyway, an excellent example of work with GollyGee Blocks® by a bright young student.