A farago of news, musings, and valleities
I’ve created a landing page for my TinkerCAD tutorials and resources. I’m going to send my kids there when they need more challenge than I can give them in class. It’s still being built out, but I guess it’s ready to link here, at any rate.
I just realized I never posted my Enigma Challenge here. I put this challenge on my board for my kiddos. There was a medal (and of course, a round of applause) for completing it.
Castle Farms makes a great photography testing ground. There are big, expansive landscapes, small intimate outdoor areas, well-lighted interiors with lots of points of interest, and dark little hiding places. So naturally I took the opportunity to try out my new Ricoh Theta V 360 camera. These are a few of the shots I took, dumped into a quick and dirty Google Sites site. I used Momento360 to host the photos, as I couldn’t immediately get them to view directly in WordPress. Loading time is a bit long, be patient.
I’m up in Charlevoix, MI for a while, which means I get to visit my favorite library. Charlevoix is a city of under 3000 people, although the population spikes significantly in the summers. But the library is huge – I’ve seen smaller libraries serving areas with ten times as many people. Apparently the city ended up with an unused school, and decided to produce the library of every librarian’s dreams. Billed as “the community’s livingroom,” the library really does feel like you’ve stepped into a vacation cottage. The atmosphere is open and full of natural light, with Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired architecture and artwork scattered everywhere. There are comfortable chairs and tables throughout the buildings, many with some amount of seclusion. There are private study rooms and two auditoriums. There is a quiet reading room, a history room, and two separate teen rooms. The children’s wing is larger than some community libraries I’ve visited, with a large reading room and many separate areas for activities, reading, and technology. There are 3D printers, computers, puzzles and games. It seems that whatever it is you’d like to pursue, if it can be done in a library, they’ve found a way to cater to it.
It occurs to me I haven’t posted many laser cutter makes. This will remedy that. Here are a few of my designs.
Some days you have a full schedule of work ahead of you, but a group of rising third graders show up at your door asking you to teach them 3D printing instead. Guess I’ll be getting my work done this weekend instead!
