Dead Zones

Grand Challenges for Engineering

Here is a link to all the Grand Challenges for Engineering and the video contest finalists.

The Girl Who Silenced the World for Five Minutes

Here is her biography from Wikipedia.

Provide Access to Clean Water

One of the grand engineering challenges that we need to solve is providing access to clean water. Here is a link to an article explaining the challenge. Here is a video of one man's solution to the problem. He created a water filter in a bottle called the Lifesaver Bottle.

First Day of Step Up!

Yesterday was my first day teaching Globaloria in the Step Up! summer camp. It had been really great so far. I have a small group of students, just 8 kids and they are all boys! They are all really smart and good with computers so I am really looking forward to working with them this summer. There is a pretty wide age range. Some of the kids are just going into fifth grade and one is going into ninth grade and there is every grade level in between. We are having class in the Silicon Labs building downtown and it is a little creepy because there is no one else here.  Sometimes if feels like we are in a movie in this fancy building with no people. May this is the zombie apocalypse and we are missing it because we are too busy creating video games. When I got here, I wasn't sure where to go or what to do, but I was really glad my friend Charlie was here to help out. Once we got our computers, figured out how to get online, and started playing in Flash, things got much better.

Yesterday we got to know each other a little, got our wiki accounts, created an avatar in Flash, uploaded our avatars to the wiki, and played a few games. What is a game making class without playing games too, right?

So far today we have done some more exploring on the wiki, personalized our own wiki pages by adding photos, videos, text colors, and background colors, and now we are working on blogs (which is one of my favorite things about Globaloria!) The next thing we are going to do is learn how to personalize our blogs (also one of my favorite things about Globaloria.)