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1967 JPL employment ad, remixed: now with more Mars Curiosity "Mohawk Guy" A Super Mario cat in a mushroom hat John Cage turns 100 this week. Celebrate silently for four minutes, thirty-three seconds. An airship boom in Southern California China: 770 pounds of eggs spilled from truck cause mad scramble (video) 1967 JPL employment ad, remixed: now with more Mars Curiosity "Mohawk Guy"
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 02, 2012 12:13 pm Hahah! Boing Boing reader William Jaspers saw the 1967 ad for jobs at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory I posted yesterday, which ran in Scientific American—and with a little help from Photoshop, he updated it to feature the MSL space celeb Bobak "Mohawk Guy" Ferdowski, who works on the Mars Curiosity team at JPL. Now all ...
Read in browser A Super Mario cat in a mushroom hat
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 02, 2012 11:53 am Wearing lavender sunglasses (well, for a little while). [Video Link]. From Shironekoshiro's YouTube channel, a daily source of cute comfort in my life.
Read in browser John Cage turns 100 this week. Celebrate silently for four minutes, thirty-three seconds.
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 02, 2012 11:39 am On Wednesday, September 5, 2012, the late composer and music theorist John Cage would have turned 100. Here's a list of events around the world commemorating his life and work.
Read in browser An airship boom in Southern California
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 02, 2012 11:19 am Photo: the Aeroscraft in a hangar in CA. Image: Worldwide Aeros, Inc. In the Los Angeles Times, an article about an aerospace industry boom of sorts in Southern California, involving new twists on an old technology: airships. Who's buying? The military, and other government agencies, primarily for defense and surveillance purposes. [I]n recent years, the ...
Read in browser China: 770 pounds of eggs spilled from truck cause mad scramble (video)
By Xeni Jardin on Sep 02, 2012 11:02 am From Beijing Cream blog: In Zhengzhou, Henan province on Thursday morning, a man in a motorized three-wheel wagon was a bit eager at a yellow light, according to a witness, and crashed into another vehicle, causing him to lose his cargo of 700 jin of raw eggs. We're not talking about a restaurant server dropping ...
Read in browser Meet SparkTruck, an “educational build-mobile” for the twenty-first century.
Dreamed up by a group of Stanford d.school students and funded through Kickstarter, SparkTruck is a mobile maker space currently traveling across the United States. At schools and summer camps and libraries around the country, the SparkTruck team offers workshops to help kids “find their inner maker” as they design and build projects like stamps, stop-motion animation clips, and “vibrobots.”
[video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmRKXqDwieY&feature=plcp]
This might seem all shiny and new. And it is—but only in part. What’s so striking (and exciting) about SparkTruck is the way it combines old and new. It does so in the tools it gets kids using, which range from pipe cleaners to laser cutters. It does so in its educational approach, which combines cutting-edge (get it?) STEM and design pedagogy with the fundamentals of an old-school shop class. And it does so in its method, which combines the iconic, century-old technology of the bookmobile with the hot new form of the maker space.
In doing so, SparkTruck joins a growing number of libraries which are combining time-tested principles (like equal access to information) with new technologies (like 3-D printers), putting in maker spaces and media production labs alongside bookshelves and meeting rooms. As I’ve argued over on bookmobility.org, these combinations make sense because reading and making actually have a lot in common. They’re both creative processes that take existing materials and combine them in new ways. Getting people engaged in those kinds of processes—through imaginative thinking, contemplation, hands-on problem-solving, and collaborative learning—is what both maker spaces and libraries are all about.
Taking that commitment on the road with scissors and hammers and 3-D printers and a great big bookmobile-like truck, SparkTruck serves as a laboratory for new approaches, as well as a reminder that trying new things doesn’t have to (and probably shouldn’t!) necessarily mean tossing old ones out.
After all, what would those vibrobots be without classically crafty pipe cleaners and tongue depressors? And what would a library be without the creative, participatory, straight-up awesome experience of reading?
SparkTruck schedule [sparktruck.org]
How to arrange a visit from SparkTruck [sparktruck.org]
SparkTruck YouTube channel [youtube.com]
Signature: --Derek Attig, bookmobility.org
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