My 12yo is into retro gaming and has recently become obsessed with Portal. He decided he wanted to make a weighted companion cube PC case. We had a (very) old Mac Mini in a drawer that I’ve had since before he was born so we got it out and installed […]
Making
22 posts
I’ve been wanting to build a greenhouse with my 5th grade students for a couple of years. I knew it would be a chaotic process but I finally bit the bullet and did it this winter. I’ve made the plans and materials list public and the slides I made for the […]
About a year ago, I decided to teach myself how to use the Godot game engine. It’s a powerful, open source engine that’s good for making 2D games like side scrollers, top-down adventure, visual novels, etc. It can do 3D too but, from what I’ve read, is no match for […]
My paternal grandmother was Danish. She died before I was born but growing up, I knew her sisters and brother–my great aunts and uncle. My great aunt Zeta made pickled beets. She always had a jar open and I would ask for them as soon as we got to her […]
I’m working on a middle grade fantasy book called The Bone Flute. The book, perhaps not surprisingly, features a magical flute made from a vulture’s wing bone. I have made branch flutes and bamboo flutes but never bone so I decided to give it a try. It’s not easy to […]
I’ve never liked the band that my pixel watch came with but I also don’t really like any of the options I’ve found to replace it. So, I decided to make my own. I started by designing it in Corel Vector: I took that to the laser cutter and cut […]
One of my favorite books growing up was A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin. The original edition was illustrated with wood cuts by Ruth Robbins. I loved those illustrations. My favorite was the hawk in flight, circling above a tower keep. It’s a great scene in the book, masterfully […]
I’m writing a new middle grade fantasy book that features a stone age flute. While doing research, I came across this tutorial on how to make a branch flute and decided to give it a try. First, I had to find a good stick. Out on a hike one day […]
At my school, we have four pillars that represent our values and philosophy: Character, Community, DEIJ, and Academic Excellence. We also have four actual pillars in our gym/multi-purpose room/theater. A few years ago, I was teaching our 7th grade Design + Code + Make class, running a project where the […]
There is a bird family nesting in a potted palm hanging from a beam in one of the outdoor atriums at our early childhood center. The teachers asked me to set up a web cam so the students could see inside the nest and follow the progress from eggs to […]
My 5th grade robotics students are having trouble engineering their catapults so I made this prototype to inspire them.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, board game sales have skyrocketed. I thought it would be fun to have 5th graders design and build their own board games. It’s a great project for teaching the basics of the design thinking process and it pulls in a lot of skills we […]