2-page spread

Recently, I have been working on a picture book that I plan to self-publish through a print-on-demand service.  I want to share my experience so you can expect some extensive posts in the near-future where I will explain the process that I went through.

For the time being however, I am posting a couple of pages from the book to get some advice on formatting. It seems that most POD services will reject any pages where a text element goes across a 2-page spread. I am posting this picture here to ask for some advice from the community.

The above image is two separate pages while one below is a 2-page spread.

This is a jpg created from the original CMYK Photoshop file.

For this one, I changed the Photoshop file to RGB before exporting.

Obviously, the colours for the third are what I was going for.  The second is off by quite a bit.  This is something I need to learn more about.  What I understand so far is that RGB is for screens (Red, Green and Blue being the 3 primary colours when looking at light) while CMYK is for print.  Nevertheless, when I printed this on paper, the CMYK version still looked too saturated compared to the RGB version.

**edit
I completed the book and published it successfully in both print and digital formats. I am now maintaining teacherben.com as a site to promote my books (the next one is nearly complete) and using teacherben.net for showcase and sharing my professional work. Please have a look at teacherben.com if you want to learn more.

Creating a Number Line with Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is a pretty extraordinary tool (or set of tools) that is easy to forget about unless you teach math every day. I come back to it every couple of months and I always plan to dig deeper and explore all of the amazing things it can do. Thanks to a few useful posts on MakeUseOf, I have started to get into the habit of using it more often and there certainly are a lot of fun things you can learn.

For example, I typed in 'dimples golf ball' and it gave me the number of dimples on a Calloway HX golf ball and some others (332) but then produced a handy drop-down menu where I could select from a number of other well-known brands to see how many they have (Nike One Tour golf ball, 378, Srixon AD333, 333.)

I typed 'CN Tower' and it gave me a photo, a couple of maps, the height (553m), number of floors (147), completion date (1976) a series of comparison rankings (national, 1st, worldwide, 2nd), other tall buildings nearby (First Bank Tower, 0.8km away, 298m tall, city rank, 2nd) and the number of recent wikipedia hits.

Fun!



This morning, I was watching Mr. Needham's 7th grade math class and they were plotting numbers on a number line and looking for patterns. That's something that Wolfram Alpha does with ease. You just enter a series of comma-separated values and let it do the rest.

Have a look at this MakeUseOf post, Become a Wolfram Alpha Expert With These Useful Search Techniques. It includes links to some other resources as well so there's plenty there to get you started

.

Using variables in Scratch: Math and Language Arts Integration

In today's grade 7 class, we looked at creating variables in Scratch and it provided some interesting challenges for the students that really got them thinking.

In the first part of the lesson, I introduced the idea of an random walk. First, it was just going in two directions. A student stood in the middle of the room and each time a classmate flipped a coin, the student would move either forwards (heads) or backwards (tails). Then, they were asked to figure out how to program this into Scratch. When the first couple of groups had worked it out, i asked them to have the sprite move in 4 directions based on a random number. Here's the solution:

a random walk in two directions

So, we looked at how, with the heads/tails random walk, the sprite has a 50% chance of heading in either direction. In the 4 direction version, they had a 25% chance of going in any particular direction. So then, I posed the question, "How would you modify this program so that your sprite can go in any direction, but has more of a tendency to move down and to the right?"

So this time, instead of generating a random number between 1 and 4, it could generate a number between 1 and 6. In this case, perhaps 1 means up, 2 means right, 3 and 4 mean down and 5 and 6 mean left. Then, I asked the kids to work out the percentages. After this, I let them play for a while, and there were some surprising results as they added their own touches, through in a little more randomness for how far the sprite would move on each turn, the colour and so on.

Next, I had the students create a simple Madlib using the same thinking process. The program would ask for a 'noun', a 'verb' and an 'ing-adjective'. One step at a time, the program will ask for user input, then that response will get put into a variable. Here is the solution:

this code is associated with the background in my example

I had another sprite speak the lines although I'm sure there are other ways to do this..

The kids already started discussing how they could use this to make all sorts of different projects such as quiz games and so on.  Conveniently, they are learning parts of speech in English class and percentages in math (totally unplanned) so hopefully, I will be able to get another teacher in on this one.

MIT Creative Tools workshop

Last weekend, I had the chance to participate in a great workshop at the LEAD Center in Hong Kong. It was run by Michael Smith-Welch, who was on the team that originally developed Scratch at MIT. The workshop was called MIT Creative Tools and we mostly played around with MaKey MaKey kits and Scratch Boards. We sometimes forget how much fun it is to play around with this stuff. We get caught up in teaching it and don't get to share in the joy of discovery along with our students. So it was a nice opportunity to just sit back with some colleagues, make a few new friends and play.

My friend Alan and I made a Play-doh piano using the MaKey MaKey.

Another group also focused on making music.  These little pie plates were turned into a drum machine.

At first, I wasn't convinced about the MaKey MaKey.  I saw the banana piano videos and thought is was a bit too gimmicky, but after spending an hour playing around with one, I am sold.  It really changes our thinking about the design process and focuses our attention on the user experience rather than just the technical problems of getting this or that to work.  We saw a video that showed a group of students recreating Dance Mat Revolution where the players are jumping into buckets of water!  Fantastic!

The Scratch boards that we used are very similar in that they allow you to add some more interesting inputs to your Scratch projects, such as a light sensor or a slider or even using some aligator clips to measure the electrical resistance in a circuit (unlike the MaKey MaKey which just gives a digital signal that can only be on or off, the Scratch boards have analog sensors that can return a range of values.  So, for example, you could have your project play from a whole range of notes or display from a whole range of colours, depending on the amount of light shining on the sensor or how close the aligator clips are together along a wire.)  I had two of them in my classroom that I barely touched.  But with a new grade 7 Scratch unit starting this week, I broke them out and started goofing around with them.

It turned out to be a weekend of Scratch.  Just the day before, I had discovered a project called Enchanting that allows you to program LEGO Mindstorms kits using Scratch-like blocks instead of the program that comes with them.  It is still in beta, but pretty stable and you can already do a lot with them.  Here's a video that can get you started.  (Btw, I got in contact with the developer and he is looking for people to help him with testing and translation if anyone is interested.  His email address is on his site.)

Then, I woke up Sunday morning to an invite to participate in the closed beta for Scratch 2.0!  I am still playing around with it, but expect an update in the near future.

Easy poll with Google Docs

A colleague just asked my how he could set up a simple poll online.  I find that Google Docs presents a very easy way to do it and I thought I would share it here in case anyone else is interested.

1) Create a spreadsheet in Google Docs.  Give it a new name other than 'untitled document'.

2) Put the names that you want for each of the fields at the top of each column.

3) Go to the 'tools' menu and select 'Create a form'.

4) You should now see your poll pop up in a new window.  Give the poll a name and save it.


5) Email it to your target group or embed it into a web page.  You can do this either by clicking on the appropriate button in the form or later on in the form menu on the spreadsheet.


6) Revisit your spreadsheet to see the responses.  Easy as pie!

MYP Design Pilot

This year, I am officially participating in the pilot program for the new MYP Design curriculum.  I have been unofficially taking part and working with the documents for a couple of years already (thanks to a friend that shared what was happening at his school), but this year, there is a lot of new stuff and now I am in contact with everyone else in the program and things are a whole lot better.  I am not able to talk a lot about it as we have been asked not to share any of our work publicly until the pilot is over in February.  That being said, I can safely say that most people will be very pleased with the changes.  There is a lot more alignment with the PYP and DP, including more consistent use of the Command Terms across all subjects and more focus on Concepts.  By calling the new program 'Design', it is clear that the emphasis is on process rather than product and the new Design Cycle lends itself more easily to a wider variety of projects, from food to ICT.  I am sharing all of my units on my google apps site (http://wiki.teacherben.net/) and I hope that people find this useful.  After a compete renovation of the program here at HKA, all of these units are brand new and very much works-in-progress.  Since I am sharing them publicly, I have had to remove the rubrics and a few other things for the time being.  But please feel free to send me any feedback on what you see.  At the moment, some of them are still using the terminology from the previous set of documents but as I move along, things will start to reflect the new language.

Installing a Processing sketch on your Android device

This year, my students and I have been learning the basics of programming using a programming language called Processing (see previous entry).  One of the great features of working with Processing is that you can run your programs on a variety of platforms, including your handheld devices.  After just a couple of weeks of playing around, I was able to create a program that ran on my Android phone.  I have been using my kids as the target audience for my creations so i haven't thought much about the details, such as customizing the icon or how to upload the app to Google Play (aka the Android Market).

I thought I would share the code I used to create the Android installer in case anyone is interested.  I got it from here but his instructions are for Windows and I am currently using a Mac.  I had to modify a couple of steps.  You can find more thorough explanations on the Processing wiki here and here is a post that goes through uploading your project to the Android market.  I haven't tried it yet.

You will need to install the Java Development Kit (JDK) and the Android Software Development Kit (SDK) before we get started.  These include the following tools, which we will be using in the process:

1) You will be running the following commands from a terminal:

keytool, jarsigner, zipalign, ant 

If you get errors along the way, make sure that you can run these commands from a terminal.  You may need to download ant separately.  The others should have been installed with JDK and the Android SDK.

I created a simple project called 'test01'.  You can just replace test01 with the name of your sketch and the name (ben) and path (benjamincooperman) to yours.  It makes things easier if there are no spaces in the name.  Here's what I did:

1) By default, new projects are in 'standard' mode.  At the top right, you will see 'standard' in a little box.  Change it to 'Android'.  You may have trouble if your project includes any additional libraries, such as the Minim library for using sounds.  There is probably an Android library that does the same thing but you will need to research that.  In one case, I was using Minim for sound, but as an Android project, I had to use one called 'apwidgets'. The nice folks on the Processing forum helped me work out how to switch libraries and you can check out the thread here.

2)  Export your Android project by going to file > Export Android Project.  You will see that there is an option to export as a signed package but that feature has not been implemented yet so these instructions should work for you in the meantime.

2) Open a terminal and browse to the android folder inside your sketch folder.  On a Mac, the easiest way to do this is to type 'cd ' then locate the android folder in your sketch folder and click and drag it onto the terminal.  (mine was: /Users/benjamincooperman/Documents/Processing/test01/android)  It will look something like this:

cd /Users/benjamincooperman/Documents/Processing/test01/android

3) Next, type the following into the terminal and hit enter:

keytool -genkey -v -keystore test01-release-key.keystore -alias ben -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000

It will ask for a password.  Put something in. It will ask you to re-type the password.  Then, there will be a series of questions.  I answered the first one (what is your first and last name) with just my first (ben) and then I ignored the rest of the questions and just hit enter until I got to:

Is CN=Unknown, OU=Unknown, O=Unknown, L=Unknown, ST=Unknown, C=Unknown correct?

Type 'yes' and hit enter  and enter again to enter the password you already used.

4) Type the following into the terminal, hit enter and wait a bit for it to finish:

ant release

5)  Then, type the following and hit enter after which it will ask you for the password from step 3.

jarsigner -verbose -keystore test01-release-key.keystore /Users/benjamincooperman/Documents/Processing/test01/android/bin/test01-release-unsigned.apk ben

6)  Next, type:

jarsigner -verify /Users/benjamincooperman/Documents/Processing/test01/android/bin/test01-release-unsigned.apk

It should say 'jar verified'.

7)   Next:

/Users/benjamincooperman/Documents/Processing/test01/android/zipalign -v 4 /Users/benjamincooperman/Documents/Processing/test01/android/bin/test01-release-unsigned.apk test01.apk

If all went well, it should say 'Verification successful' and you will now have a test01.apk file in the android folder that you can install on your phone.  Most file managers that you find in the Android Market allow you to install software.  Just be sure to have have your phone set up so that you can install from unknown sources.  You can find that under Development Settings.

I tried to make this as clear and simple as possible since these are the same instructions that I am giving to my students.  If you see any errors or you have suggestions, please let me know.