My friend Bruce Henderson asked me to put together a few recommendations for STEM related activities for the Newton STEM site. Here’s what I recommended with a few embellishments for baldwisdom fans!

Instructables.com has thousands of cool projects, from the outrageous to the absurd — much of which is doable with kids and full of STEM. I have a few instructables there too, but you’ll find lots of crafts, projects for enhancing toys and lots and lots of simple electronics projects like the Atari Punk Console. You might want to browse it by different types of projects, like Food, Play, or Living. Or search by topic like Lego.

EvilMadScience.com sells do-it-yourself and open-source hardware designs that originated from its blog, Evil Mad Science Laboratories.

Make cool designs on eggs, or anything round with the egg-bot, which also serves as an introduction to CNC (Computer Numeric Control) machines. Or build an LED Menorah.

MAKE magazine, a quarterly magazine with lots of do-it-yourself projects , is great subscription gift for makers of any age.  They also have a lot of great stuff in their store and recently had a special issue on cool kits, and most of them are available here.

Radio Shack is now carrying the Arduino, which is an easy-to-use, open-source electronics prototyping platform for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments. There’s a Getting Started with Arduino kit that includes has the Arduino board, a great introductory book, and some electronic components to do the projects in the book.

While you can get Arduino at Radio Shack, my favorite purveyor of electronics kits and inspirational parts is Adafruit.com. They make their own opensource hardware kits, and carry the best of others. Adafruit also sells a variety of Arduino related shields, bundles and accessories, in addition to her original kits.

And of course, there’s Lego Mindstorms NXT — the Lego robotics system that allows you to make sophisticated robots and machines and program them in an easy-to-learn graphical environment. Used in schools and in First Lego League competitions, it’s best suited to Middle school students and above. Some people have difficulty getting started with NXT, especially if they don’t have an engineering background. Here are some great books to get you started:

• If you buy just one book, Building Robots with LEGO Mindstorms NXT
  really breaks it down, letting you gain insight into how to use the various Lego elements to solve problems. It also covers programming and has several project ideas to get you started.
• Another great book is The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Discovery Book: A Beginner’s Guide to Building and Programming Robots It is a great introduction, taking you through the elements and basics of programming with several great projects including a six-legged walking creature.
• Winning Design!: LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Design Patterns for Fun and Competition
  is a great resource for ideas — both mechanical designs and programming approaches– that actually work in the context of the FIRST Lego League competitions.

Illustration by Kevin Osborn based on an original image by ebay seller 2411florence

I’ve been looking for a fun art project for a while. I came up with an idea that is probably silly, but I think it might just be fun.
I’ve ordered a latex Buddha mold and am planning on making 108 Buddhas. The original vision that prompted this was a large number of Buddhas stretching out to infinity. Also, I was thinking of my 365 self portrait project where I was doing something everyday. Everyday is a bit stressful at the current time, but I do like the idea of working fairly consistently but with variety. A couple of thoughts were to make an ice Buddha (for impermanence), different materials (plaster, resin, dirt) and trying to tie them in to various dharma concepts. I think it will probably take about a week per Buddha, and there will probably be a few failures that won’t make it into the set. I can think of about 5-10 variations right now, but that’s far short of 108, so it should be interesting and very challenging. I also think it would be fun to invite others to do Buddha images, paintings, sculptures and whatever, and share them on a flickr group.
I have a few more details in mind that I’ll share later, but wanted to know what people think?

I haven’t updated this in a while, largely because I really no longer work in IT. I’m doing research now (augmented reality and eddy current NDE research) and find myself wanting to share again, but not so much work stuff, as things I’m interested in and having fun with (which sometimes will include work… we just bought a Kinect, stay tuned!)

So, from this day forth, I declare this blog to be about fun, geeky fun!

Let the posts begin!

LIve CD’s have been around for a while and are a great way to try out the many different linux distributions. I recently had to find a better linux install for an Asus eee PC, and I could have dug up a USB cdrom drive, but more convenient would be booting from a usb thumb drive. Many distributions have tools to create bootable USB’s, but not all.

Xubuntu’s wiki pointed me at this terrific tool that will create a Live-USB from any distribution. UNetbootin will even download the the iso for many of the standard distros. If the one you are interesteed in isn’t on the list, simply download the iso and use their diskimage option. As an added bonus, there’s both a windows and linux version.

A great tool to add to your toolkit!

Today, March 24 is Ada Lovelace day, and I pledged to blog about a woman in science or engineering that had a profound impact on me. Ada Lovelace was a protege of Charles Babbage who wrote about his work on the “Difference Engine” widely recognized as the first computer (purely mechanical) including a set of notes in her appendix that is recognized as the first computer program. She also speculated on uses of computers far outside numeric computation, including the composition of music.

There are a lot of contemporary women who are currently inspiring me, including hackers Limor Fried, Jeri Ellsworth, and Lenore Edman, but my thoughts turned to a much earlier influence, my High School chemistry teacher, Dr. Donna Bogner.

Dr. Bogner was one of the best teachers I have ever had. Constantly looking for new ways to inspire kids, tolerant of our explorations (and explosions!) letting us discover things for ourselves, even when it meant taking some risks, as long as we observed safety precautions.

She went back to school on her own initiative to learn computer programming so she could add that to the High School curriculum, at a time when the nearest computers were a couple blocks away at the Junior College. The initiative, curiosity, and “just try it” attitude I learned from her has served me well, both in my career and as a dad, and school science volunteer.

Since I graduated from Hutchinson High, Dr. Bogner taught freshman chem at Wichita State for 15 years and  spent some time at Princeton as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. This led to consulting for Exxon and Pfizer, all around developing science materials for the secondary classroom. She did 5-6 summer workshops a year for the Dreyfus institute all over the country.

Dr. Bogner is still active in reaching young minds in what she describes as her “fifth retirement” developing science curriculum at  Mid-Continent Research for  Education and Learning. Among other things, she translates technical details from  NASA’s extraterrestrial missions and Nano-chemistry  into materials for classroom use. Particularly interesting to me, she also adapts these materials into forms that are accessible to visually impaired students which she understands because of her own visual impairment.

I just wanted to say WOW! and thank you, for all your inspiring work, Dr. Bogner, and hope some other girls will read this and be inspired to follow in your footsteps!