This scene is a typical math lesson you could use in your classroom with GollyGee Blocks® to teach concepts of fractions. This scene uses the dome shape, but you could use any shape or object as well.

On another note, we just received word that GollyGee Blocks® is a Fall 2008 Great Interactive Software for Kids award winner from the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC). The ALSC is a division of the American Library Association (ALA). Wow! We are excited!

How to make the pumpkin: Select sphere and bring into plane. Toogle stack OFF. Bring in several more spheres and merge them in a circular shape to make the pumpkin. Turn stack ON and select a cylinder moving it onto the center top of pumpkin. Position the stem (cylinder) where you want by selecting Move tool and using lift. Color pumpkin and stem.

This scene can be done for early grade language arts (P is for Pumpkin) lessons.

If you want a really cool pumpkin, put eyes on it (use a dome or sphere and scale to size. Teeth can be pyramids scaled and stacked up or down. For at Witch's hat, use the cone and a flattened sphere (use the stretch function in the Move tool to flatten). Position flattened sphere on top of pumpkin and then stack cone on top of that.

I didn't put the teeth in this one, but you can. Download a free demo from the GollyGee Software website and have fun. Happy Halloween!!

It's been a while since I added a picture to the blog. This one is particularly interesting. The stars are made from pyramids and cubes. The construction is simple. Start with a cube and stack pyramids on all the sides. This gives the viewer the perception that the star is coming through the cube (which it is actually not doing). Add the sky texture to the ground plane and the space texture to the back plane and Hoila! a space scene.

Things still tough here at GollyGee Software. With the economy in the pits, we aren't seeing many orders out of the educational community.

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.

I haven't been to the beach this Summer YET!! I want to see the sunset over the ocean. Hopefully some of you readers will have had a wonderful experience someplace where the water meets the sky.

I stopped the blog in mid June after most schools were over for Summer break... starting up again for the Fall. My sister Susie, who teaches in Mareitta City Schools, Georgia, has been back in school since early August. My wife, who teaches AP Computer Science in Ashburn, Virginia, goes back on Wednesday (students don't return until after Labor Day here).

Our Summer has been occupied with mostly work and no play. My wife attended a very great course at Carnagie Mellon in July and I have been working at my part time job a bit. Youngest son is off on the Alaska Cruise ship run as a professional musician on Royal Caribbean. Oldest son, GollyGee Blocks® creator, is off in Colorado this week on vacation. Daughter, working for a Blackberry subsidiary, has been to San Francisco a couple of times for work (we get the dog!).

Think we might have one opportunity to do a short weekend at Chincoteague, VA in early September to visit two sets of friends moving there (retiring actually) from New Jersey.

I would ask that all my readers (I fantasize that there are many, though I think this is not really the case) consider telling other educators about our creativity product . If you don't have this product, you need to get it for your students. Orders can be done at our online store (we just shifted over to PayPal) or you can contact me directly at roland@gollygee.com.

Hope your upcoming school year will be successful and fun.

This scene was done by a second grader in my home town. The kids were doing a math unit on symmetry, this one illustrating the principle of reflection. We had a lot of fun with this set of classes.

Anyway, I haven't posted for a while mainly because we, as a company, aren't doing so well in this depressed market. Matter of fact we are about kaput. We never have been able to crack the education market in a way good enough to sustain growth. Main reason is that we are not good marketers and the public school market takes some special attention with all the attendant bureaucracy of purchasing, approval cycles and getting buyer attention.

Don't know what we are going to do (other than repay loans) in the future. Stay tuned, I hope to post here once in a while just to maintain the discipline and hope that an occasional reader will come by and derive some added value for the time spent.

We are still selling our creativity product GollyGee Blocks at our online store or you can order it by fax 703-995-0381. It's a great product for the cost!

I've been thinking about my yard and generating a landscaping plan the last several weeks with the warmer weather coming in. So far, I've re-mulched some areas (I have a leaf shredder which chops up the bigger leaves into nice fine mulch), trimmed the Azaleas, planted some Mountain Laurel, removed a dead Dogwood tree, and moved two Kousa Dogwood "volunteers". I need to design an overall plan so that things don't look like a shattered approach. I also like to reuse the leaves as mulch because it makes good use of the natural material and is high in nutrients. My shredder is small so this takes some time.

The scene I've done is an attempt to draw maybe Peonies or other full flower. The buds are spheres and the leaves are right prisms. I didn't add many other features.

This scene reminds me of the economic situation in Education today. I don't know how other vendors are doing but we certainly aren't setting the world on fire with educational software sales. After all the obligatory software needed to run and administer school computers is purchased, there isn't much left to get students some applications that would really help them in their thinking processes. Sign of the times?
I hope not! I have more faith in the educational system than that.

The scene makes use of several pre-defined objects in the GollyGee Blocks® menu. I put the crane cab on the truck and added stretched cylinders to make the crane boom. The street comes from the shapes menu and is colored black to mimic a road.

A tribute to some of our First Responders. This is a dangerous and hard job these folks do. We had a fire in our townhome some years ago and I was amazed at how fast the fire company responded and the level of their professionalism (Fairfax County, VA Fire Department). The damage kept us out of our house for about six weeks. You don't want to go through that, especially with small children!

This GollyGee Blocks® scene was done by a North Carolina teacher in Orange County. All of the objects are constructed from basic geometric shapes. The detail is wonderful. His students have done great work as well.

My son brought back a neat book from his recent trip to the Sultanate of Oman (another story sometime) entitled Apricots Tomorrow. The book is a compilation of Arabic sayings transliterated into English accompanied by some very clever cartoons.

The bones were the hard part of the scene. I used a column for the bone shaft and merged spheres to make the bone ends. Since the scene is in 3D, the placement of the spheres on the column proved to be a daunting task, since it is hard to approximate exactly where the column is in space. Maybe you can find an easier way to do it. I just used the brute force method!