April Hail-Showers

Oh Portland, will you ever get warmer? Apparently not this year.


haildrops keep falling on my dog

What do you do, anyway?

I get asked what my job is all of the time, and generally I say that I run a project that visits schools, after-school programs, and community-based organizations and teaches young people to make videos. This project is called OLLIE.

Then the other person looks vaguely confused by all of this and says, "Oh... cool."

This is the kind of project I get to make at work. Not all of them are this entertaining, but they have one thing in common: young people learning to use a new tool (video) to express themselves.

Every school we visit has a different theme. This group's theme was school lunch, and my group was particularly concerned with nutrition issues. Because they are kids, of course the students had a laundry list of things they didn't like about school lunch. Finally we settled on one area of focus - the prepackaged Jamwich peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

even more disgusting in real life...

This particular project was really special to me because I got to work with my second cousin, Isaac. We didn't really know each other before this project, it was great to get to know him.

cute runs in the family

What I did on my 28th Birthday

For my birthday, I got an awesome tiny digital camera from Dan. Of course we had to take lots of photos to document the day, here are a few:

Robots do jobs we don't want to do! Yah!

Selections from "Robots," by Sean.

Robot Vacuums
Robots do jobs to help us. Here's an example. Your floor is dirty and you're going on a business trip for your job. You don't have time to vacuum. So set up your vacuum robot . To clean the floors.

Vocabulary
8. Brain: A computer that controls the robot

Lots of other good stuff to see including labeled diagrams and creative spelling. Take a look at the high resolution version.