Spray Paint Planets

One of my students really got into spray-paint art this year, especially planets. By the time she was done she’d completed over two dozen pieces; some on paper, some on wood, some on clear plastic or acetate, and some of which we backlit with LED’s. Her paintings are all over the Makerspace, which generates a lot of interest.

However, now that this student has graduated, we’ve had to find another way to teach the process. I’m using the above video as a quick introduction to the process (note: it starts at 36 seconds because the author uses a single rude word in her preamble).

WW2 in Real Time

TimeGhost is an utterly amazing project. They’re currently going through World War II, week by week, in real time. That is, every week they post a really good summary of what happened in the corresponding week of the war.

They’ve also done WWI in the same way and have ancillary channels about other conflicts, like the Cuban Missile Crisis Day by Day.

Definitely, worth a look.

Trophic Cascade: The Effect of Wolves on Yellowstone

The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park resulted in enormous changes to the ecology: more plants and animals as the wolves reduced the deer population and changed the deers’ behavior. The change in vegetation resulted in stabilization of the rivers, so the wolves changed the geomorphology of the park as well.

Sorting algorithms (with Hungarian Dance)

This TedEd video explains a few common sorting methods used in computer science. Sorting can be a challenging computational problem because of the enormous number of comparisons between items that can be involved, so computer scientists has spent a lot of time looking into it.

The video below shows the Quick Sort method using Hungarian folk dance.