Odds 'n Ends from My PLN

Google Mystery Animal

​One of the curious tweets I saw over the Thanksgiving break was about Google's Mystery Animal, a Google AI voice experiment.  This is essentially a 20 questions game. How can you use this in class?  Well, aside from having fun, it is an excellent way to hone questioning skills. Do you need special equipment?  Nope- you can connect with Google Home, if you have that, or simply use your browser.  Try it! You may like it.  Your students may be inspired to find out more about this sort of coding works.

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2 Great Resources from...#FlipGrid... of course

I was excited to check out a tweet about another great resource on FlipGrid from Karly Moura and Sean Fahey. They have put together an Educator's Guide to FlipGrid- a free ebook. 

If that wasn't enough, this past week brought tweets about FlipGrid Explore for Hour of Code- with an excellent hyperdoc by- Karly and @AdamShortShorts.  Amazing, generous educators!  BTW- Karly and Sean will be presenting online onClassroom 2.0 Live on Saturday 12/16 (noon EST).

Illusions

One of the projects I have been thinking about offering in our STEAM space includes various visual illusions, recognizing and creating patterns.  I saw-yet again on twitter from my PLN- this very cool Scratch project with speed illusions done in Scratch. Check it out below. It may take a minute to load. 

 Visual Illusions to Sierpinski Triangles to fractals and more

As I investigated visual illusions, I got sidetracked by patterns, including Sierpinski Triangles, patterns and finally fractals. The math involved in these is interesting. It may help students to build/draw these patterns in order to increase their understanding of the math, and their appreciation of the art.  Try the fractivities at fractalfoundation.org.

Sierpinski Triangle Project

These projects can be toned down for younger students or go 3D and fancy with older students. Erica Clark has an excellent blog post and directions on her website.

Want to try decotropes? These 2 sided optical illusion toys are fun and easy to make.  You can even download the template from Ana's site

But I think my favorite project wasn't an illusion, but a math pattern. I had never heard of spirolaterals. These are really cool patterns.  Try these with your students.  H/T again to Erica Clark. 

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