Gary Garber's Blog

Reuters just recently posted a video of Star Wars like weapons. I had to share this.

You can view an older video of the Laser Weapons from 2010 here.

Back when I was in high school, there was talk of Reagan’s Star Wars program to shoot lasers up at Battle Mirrors and bounce them down into the Soviet Union. It never worked because of atmospheric refraction. But as a senior in college, I got to spend two weeks working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (in 1992) where they had just declassified the Laser Guide Start Program, which was one of the few successful parts of the original Star Wars programs.

On Thursday Leonardo and I attended the Grand Reopening of the CEEO at Tufts. They were having the Ribbon Cutting.

Here, Leonardo was building an EV3 Robot for a non-wheeled robot race

Leonardo Won!  Mainly because his robot went forward and the others went backwards.

Here, Leonardo is playing a real live gain of space invaders.  A joystick controls a hovering spaceship driven by an EV3.  This was a project from the intro to programming engineering class at Tufts.

These are the trophies that were awarded to those who won the robot races!

This is what you see when you enter the CEEO.

As I prepare for parents night here at BUA, I often get questions about the pedagogy employed in my classroom.   I often turn parents to this article from Science Service, (who publish Science News) about the problems with the Scientific Method.  There are some nice quotes from Heidi Schweingruber,  director of the Board on Science Education at the National Research Council.

"In the future, she says, students and teachers will be encouraged to think not about the scientific method, but instead about “practices of science” — or the many ways in which scientists look for answers."

“In the past, students have largely been taught there’s one way to do science,” she says. “It’s been reduced to ‘Here are the five steps, and this is how every scientist does it.’“

But that one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t reflect how scientists in different fields actually “do” science, she says.

“Ninety percent of the experiments I did as a scientist didn’t work out,” says Bill Wallace, a former biologist with the National Institutes of Health.

You may have noticed the article also quotes a mild mannered physics teacher from Melrose.

Today I gave my Webinar comparing VEXIQ to EV3.  You can catch it on the O'Reilly site. It should be archived soon.

On the way into school, I heard that LEGO has now surpassed Mattel as the largest toy company in the world.  This is partly due to increase sales and mechandising due to the LEGO movie. You can read about this in the Wall Street Journal or USA Today.  I was excited to read that there is a second LEGO movie in the works and a LEGO Ninjago movie in the works.  The LEGO Movie is touching for those of us who perhaps work too hard and need to remember to spend more time 'playing with LEGOS' with our own kids.

Can you explain how these work?