WHAM Covers us.

http://eplayer.clipsyndicate.com/embed/iframe?windows=1&rel=3&pf_id=9210&aspect_ratio=3×2&show_title=0&va_id=3384507&auto_start=0&volume=8

So we don’t have time to get parents on board the EHCRP, likewise because we were a late arrival, we don’t have much in the way of buy-in from the school’s staff of guidance counselors. To get the students to sign up and to keep them coming, the program has to make students want to come. In other words: the program has to be fun. The curriculum has to be fun. From my experience with the population I knew that even in their junior year, only a small minority of students coming into the program would already be thinking in mature terms, i.e. have the maturity to go out of their way to get involved with a program that is going to prepare them for college. I’m not being cynical; it’s just the reality. Even in suburban districts with helicopter parents, the vast majority of high school students are not self-motivated. In a district with 95% single parent households, the student who would take on more work after school voluntarily is a rare bird indeed.

But these students do play video games. While less than 1% might be academically self motivated, 95% play video games and are motivated by them. Interestingly, as motivational structures, video games had managed to accomplish many of the things that we were aspiring to do in EHCRP. In my design document for “Locks & Keys” I made a list of what games can do with kids(and adults for that matter), and why we should use an MMO:

So here it is, in a nutshell: Why should we use an MMO (massively multiplayer online) style game structure?

1. MMO’s inspire players(students) to perform repetitive tasks which would otherwise seem utterly monotonous. Ironically the same game structure also encourages independent and creative thinking. Thus curricula which involve both creative thinking and memorization are perfectly suited to this learning/motivational structure.
2. MMO’s also inspire students to be very detail oriented, as completing tasks, quests, et cetera require meticulous preparation, and exact attention to detail. In many cases anything less than 100% is a fail. Success is only achieved through perfect execution.
3. Our program needs to motivate our students to be successful. The immersive nature of a real-life game provides a motivational structure absent from a traditional academic approach. This approach utilizes highly structured social interaction to maximize student effort through cooperation, peer pressure, and competition; in other words, as a social context, the MMO channels what could otherwise be distractions into motivational forces.
4. If we are successful, and the immersive game which informs the class is as addictive as I hope it will be, students will take the problems and puzzles from the class home with them, and will work on them outside of class on their own and within their guilds. This is a very common effect of using this structure for these classes.
5. We need the students in the program to sell it to other students. If our students love the experience we are giving them, then this will go a long way towards solving any recruitment and retention issues we might otherwise face.
6. Since the game designing is front-loaded, i.e. mostly done before the semester begins, classroom management is fairly easy. Students will have tasks and goals to pursue at all times which they will be encouraging each other to pursue. Front loading will be hugely beneficial to the program instructors as this means that the prep workload will occur at the beginning of the semester rather than at the end, freeing us up to manage the inevitable end of semester workload that we all face.
7. The biggest downside to using this curriculum structure is that grading and record keeping is very intense, and much in excess of what it is for a traditional curriculum.

(continued)

I have a fair amount of experience working with urban students in after school programs in the Rochester area. I have worked for the Monroe Community College Upward Bound Program in a variety of capacities for the last seven years. I have also been peripherally involved in MCC’s STEP (Science & Technology Entry Program) over the last four years. During that time I’ve gotten a good feeling for the student population, and I have a good sense of what’s involved in setting up and running an after school program and what kinds of things are needed to make these programs successful.

Trying to get EHCRP off the ground in a brief period of time, the big hurdle we all anticipated was how we were going to make a remedial math and English after school program attractive to kids. To put things into perspective, this program asks kids to come and do two hours of math and English three times a week after they have already had a full school day. Programs like Upward Bound and STEP rely on coordination with parents to, in effect, “enforce” student participation. But this requires a fair amount of planning time and coordination, as well as parent participation and goodwill. Starting planning the program in January for a start date in the end of February meant that this approach was unfeasible. So the question was how were we going to get students to come, and how were we going to get them to keep coming back? The answer that we all arrived at was, “Well, it has to be fun.” We all realized that if the program was fun, students would come and keep coming back.

But how does one teach remedial mathematics and English for six hours a week and make it fun?

Six months ago, I would not have had a proper response to this question, but the week before this question was first posed to me, a friend, Liz Lawley, who is a Professor of Interactive Games and Media at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), posted a link to a book on Facebook, entitled, “The Multiplayer Classroom” by Lee Sheldon. Another friend of mine, Stephen Jacobs, also of the Department of Interactive Games and Media at RIT had been telling me about Lee Sheldon’s work piecemeal for some time, but at the time I did not have the question to which Sheldon’s work would be the answer.

So when we first met to discuss the planning of the EHCRP, I was able to say to the other program participants that I thought that I had a solution to the question of how we were going to motivate student participation–make the program a game. (continued)

Chris also introduced us (I’m wiping the dust off of what little I know/remember) to the suite of development tools that we will be using for the start of the deep dive on Wednesday, git commands and some other relevant scripting commands. I was just able to follow the barest thread of what he was doing. I understood conceptually, but I have no experience with the details/specifics–a condition I am trying to remedy today and tomorrow.

BUT when I went to setup my MacBook, I realized that the fact that my Tiger OS is no longer supported was going to be a significant barrier to doing development on that machine. We are going to hack on an old Firefox bug. None of the tools support Tiger at this point. So Chris got a server online at Seneca (College) where I could work remotely. However, when I got home, I remembered that I had a netbook for which I was ready to do an install of an Ubuntu stack called Easypeasy. Got Easypeasy installed, but then could not get the new OS to talk to the wireless–likely a driver issue, and that was as far as I got. By that point it was nearly 10PM and I was thrashed. So I’m up early today (Wednesday) and I’m hoping to be working on my environment this morning. I’m going to cart my new Linux machine with me to see if I can find a gearhead at the CSI (Center for Innovation) to get me talking to the internets. : ))

What followed was fascinating, not the least of which because Chris seemed to be answering all questions that I have been wondering about since I became involved in Open Source. He discussed the range and distinctions between OS licences (of which there are over a hundred approved by the Open Source Initiative)by marking out the ends and the middle of the spectrum.

Chris then went on to lay out the time line of events that led up to and included Open Source in far greater detail than I had previously ever seen it done. When he was finished, he brought up the issue of CS academic programs recently having problems recruiting and retaining new students and that one explanation for this seemed to be because the current crop of new undergraduates are the first to have no experience with programmable devices, computers with command lines having disappeared nearly 20 years ago. He then went on to talk about raspberrypi, an effort from the UK to develop an inexpensive ($25) programmable device that would bring back that ability to tinker in a computing device that inspired the current CS establishment some two and three and four decades ago.

All in all, a fascinating day.

My father’s name was Harvey Marsden Shein, and in hindsight he was as geeky a dad as one could imagine. As an undergraduate he studied Philosophy and Mathematics at Cornell. In the military he was assigned to be a JAG. When he was discharged, his first job was doing work on nuclear physics at Bell Labs. But what was perhaps most unusual for a man of his considerable talents was his personal interest in other people. He loved people, to talk to them and hear their stories. He paid attention. My mother, Elva, likes to tell the story of the evening she decided that he was “the one.” They were on a date in downtown Boston, walking on their way to an eatery where they had a reservation. Suddenly my father noticed something, stopped and taking my mother’s hand asked her to follow him across the street. Looking up and down the street in a confused manner stood an old woman in a housecoat with a scarf tied around her hair. My father asked her if she needed help. She responded that she could not find her way home. After a few moments he was able to determine that she was indeed lost and was able to get the phone number for a relative from her. He then led her through the revolving door of Copley Plaza—much to the raised eyebrows of the doorman there—called her relative and waited with her until they arrived to pick her up. This was typical dad. Utterly capable in some ways, utterly not in others.

Being an extraordinary listener, my father had all kinds of friends and acquaintances. I suppose that figured into why he decided to become a psychiatrist—despite the fact that psychiatrists in the 1960′s really were able to do fuck-all for their patients beyond house, restrain, sedate and electroshock them. But I like to think that he was good with the rather poor tools available to him. My dad worked very hard, and was really quite driven. When he passed away suddenly from hepatitis in 1974, he was an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, and Director of Residency at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. On top of that he founded and ran his own neuroscience lab in a basement of one of the buildings at McLean, and he saw a full load of patients at the hospital. So when we had one-on-one time together, it was a big deal.

Like many brilliant folks, my dad was really horrible at doing anything manual. He could cook nothing beyond boiling an egg or making a tuna-fish sandwich. It was many years later that I realized why restaurants figured so large in our family time. Because he could cook nothing, he knew all the best places to eat in Boston: Elsie’s Delicatessen in Harvard Square, Simeone’s Italian-American Restaurant in Central Square, and Ken’s Restaurant in Cooper Square—to name a few.

Likewise my father could do little more mechanically than screw in a light bulb–I have no idea how he managed in his lab. So when we were together, instead of fixing a car or building a go kart, we would talk about “ideas,” about science and philosophy. So from an early age, I became familiar with concepts and ideas that were utterly alien to my peers: inertia, parthogenesis, apogee and perigee, metallic bonding, protons, antimatter, black holes, displacement, and philology. These were my father’s mental toys and tools, and as a young boy, they became mine as well.

I was eleven years old when my father died. It was in July, and unbeknownst to me, I was mere weeks away from puberty. After the initial shock I was profoundly sad and lonely for the better part of the next decade. There was simply no one who could step in and fill the void my father left—in no small part because what my father and I had had together really was rare and special. My school grades were poor that year, and I had little interest in school or much else. I spent every dime on candy, and to my mother’s horror, racked up thirteen cavities at my next dental visit.

But as sad as I was, I did, however, continue to go to Boy Scouts. In the spring of the following year, our Boy Scout Council had a guest speaker come and do a show for us—a nationally syndicated science-education performer whose stage name was Mister Wizard, (Don Herbert). Mr Wizard had been quite popular in the 1950′s, had had a national television show for fourteen years, and had been hired by the Council to be the guest speaker at the Boy Scout Banquet.

I remember the show was great fun: Mister Wizard did not disappoint, and I was utterly enraptured. Standing on stage Mister Wizard began showing me the things my father and I had only talked about. I remember crackling VanDeGraaf generators, objects seeming to roll uphill, and demonstrations of electromagnets and magnetism. The entertainer went smoothly from one demonstration to another explaining the science behind each spectacle. Then at one point Mister Wizard revealed what looked like an overlarge hair-blower pointed at the ceiling. He turned it on, and produced a large rubber ball from a box on stage. Carefully, the science-man held the ball above the stream of air, and let it go. Instead of blowing away or falling to the stage, the ball hung there in midair, quiveringly defying gravity. The hall full of boys “ooohed” and “ahhed” at the sight of it.

As the ball hung there, Mister Wizard turned and addressed us: “Does anyone know why this ball is hanging there in the air?”

For a moment the audience was silent, but I knew the answer.

As if unbidden, I found myself on my feet wildly waving my hands in the air. My friends sitting in our row of wooden fold-up chairs looked at me like I had lost my mind. I think someone–an adult even– told me to sit down.

“Bernouli’s Principle!” I shouted at him.

His head jerked around to look at me, his expression thunderstruck. The room was silent except for the whirr of the blower.

Hesitating as if he had been struck by a fish instead of an answer, he finally replied, “You’re right.”

A second later he asked, “How did you know that?”

“My father taught me,” I replied–I had asked my father once how airplane wings worked, and my dad’s explanation had included Bernouli’s Principles.

“Is he here?” he asked.

Not sure what to say, I said, “No, he’s not around.” I may have had tears on my cheeks at that moment.

“Well, I’ve been posing that question to audiences for fifteen years, and you are the first person to answer it. Your father must be a remarkable man.”

“I think so sir.” I said.

“Do you think you can explain Bernouli’s Principle to us?” he asked.

“Basically the movement of the air around the ball creates vortices that push it from behind and counteract some of the force applied to its face.”

“That’s right! The air forms little whirlpools that hold it aloft. Fifteen years I’ve been asking that question, and no one has ever answered it before. Audience let’s have a round of applause for—what’s your name son?”

“David Shein!” I replied.

“Let’s hear it for David Shein!” he said, and the auditorium full of uniformed and badged boys applauded, me. It was both a weird and very good feeling.

For boys in the 1960′s and 70′s, science was still an interest reserved for nerds and egg-heads. Geeks were not cool—they were targets for derision and abuse.  In this climate I had always been instinctively cagey about sharing what I learned from my dad because very few of my friends could relate at all. When my father died, I felt like a complete weirdo, and I often wished that we could have had more “normal” conversations, like about football, or fishing, or girls. After his death, I had no one to talk about “ideas” with anymore. No one seemed to understand or care about the very things that had been at the center of my relationship with my father. So Mister Wizard was a big deal for me. That little acknowledgment, that round of applause, in the banquet hall of Temple BethEl made my father and our mutual interest in science, cool—not weirdos or geeks, but cool. And though I was still profoundly sad and lonely, at least I knew then that we were not weird.

Among the many differences between working in the OS community and environment and working in a traditional commercial software environment, perhaps the most fundamental, important, and complex difference is how IP is treated and managed.  Anyone who has spent time looking at a FOSS or Open Source license such as the GPL knows how differently IP is regarded in this setting–indeed these differences form the basis upon which the entire collaborative social model of the Open Source Community is based.

At a glance the Obama STEM Videogame Challenge would seem to be a perfect fit for students laboring in this course, and the prizes offered by the Challenge are substantial: $25K-$50k.  Our students are working to produce educational humanitarian software for students in need.  Some Challenge categories are almost identically delineated.  In one categore the Challenge even specifies that math oriented educational software should target students in the K-4th grade range–most of our students are producing educational software to fit a 4th grade math curriculum.

There is even an award category for students working in groups of four–which is most common sized working group in the source.

The problem that arises, however, is that we have already asked our students to jump onto pre-existing projects.  We did this in the hope of “clearing the decks” so to speak, to in effect give the thumbs-up or down to unfinished projects that had been created by prior groups of students in the course.  In fact most of the projects originated in the course’s three prior sessions are unfinished.  For a course using a traditional copyright IP model, older projects like this would be utterly dead, unless the originators had stuck with them and ushered them to completion on their own time.  But in the OS world, this need not be the case at all.  To have any chance of success at all in the OS community a software project must be at the very least both public and well documented.  Why?  Because everyone in the community, or almost everyone, is a volunteer whose only pay is the chance to work on something they find engaging and exciting.  Proprietary secrets are neither.  All of the pre-existing projects created for this course were managed with the idea that the project might be worked on, or indeed completed, by people other than its originators.  The bar for documentation, both within and without the code itself, has been set high, and has in most cases been met.  These projects have been designed to be picked up by others–that is the Open Source way.

But if a group of four of our students work on a pre-existing project, that was itself created by a different four students, was that software then created by a group of four students, or eight?  Suppose our students work on a new project, the concept for which was called for by a representative in the distribution field.  Does that person constitute a fifth person in the group?  Will the STEM Challenge allow entries with Open Source licenses?  If so which kinds?

According to our schedule, my students are supposed to make their final software project decisions tomorrow and start preliminary planning this weekend.  The course’s creator, Professor Stephen Jacobs, has written to STEM requesting clarification on these issues, but we have no idea when we will receive a response.  In the meantime the class and I now have a fascinating discussion ahead of us as to the exact nature of OS IP–with very real-world consequences–or should I say “Fabulous Prizes?!!”  I’m not sure yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Problem #1 I needed an engineer to sign off on my design and certify that the structure will indeed add energy to my house.

Problem #2 A couple more chickens showed up, and I realized that I would need a larger coop.

Problem #3 I’ve always wanted a shed to hold my mower and garden tools and shit.  The greenhouse would have just taunted me.

A fourth reason to do the coop in lieu of greenhouse is that I realized that I had never framed a new structure.  I’ve done a LOT of carpentry, including building new walls and rooms in my house.   Okay, forget I said that.   “Uh, no I haven’t Mr. City of Rochester.”

At any rate I felt as though I needed a dry run to develop these skills before I actually add to my house itself.  Ergo: Coop 2.0., or perhaps more accurately, CoopShed I.  I’m all about freedom, if you can’t tell by now.  So I started work on CoopShed 1.o so that I could fuck up aspects of it with relative impunity.  I mean how much are the chix and the shovels going to bitch if the studs are not strictly plumb.

So I started this in the end of July, planning to use entirely recycled lumber.  Then, realizing that I would need to work on my foundational skills for the greenhouse, so I did footings for CoopShed.  Yes, footings for a coop.  Overkill perhaps (ya think?!), but now I know how they work, and I can do them perfectly for the greenhouse next summer.

CoopShed. is about 8′ by 5′ overall dimensions.  The human entrance is on one of the short walls–a 36″ door.  That leads to a storage room 5′ by 4′ deep in which I will store my tools, lawnmower, and food for the chix.  From this room I will also get access to the nesting boxes of the chix in the other half of the CoopShed.  So I will be able to feed them and collect eggs from this room.

One other facet of this design that I should mention is that most of the south facing wall will be windows, and so the shed will have considerable solar heat gain.  I am hoping that it will stay relatively balmy most of the winter.  This will both make the chicken happy and make it less likely that their water will freeze.   I could run the calculations to see how well the shed will do, but part of me likes the idea of not knowing, and I want to just see how it does as is.  My chix did just fine last winter, and CoopShed will be–at the very least–warmer.

I suppose also that I should backtrack a bit and mention a second important reason why I needed to build this new coop.  Coop 1.0, which I built in June of 2009, is a tractor coop.  Wonderful invention, the tractor coop.  You never need to clean up the bottom of it because it has no bottom.  You just move it around the yard and let the chix poop on the ground and eat the grass.  The problem with the tractor coop is that–speaking from experience now–it is clearly a snow-free design.  When there is a foot or two of snow on the ground, and one has to dig out the feed, and break the crust off the water dish, one thinks: “This is not fun (i.e. it SUCKS!)  Why would one build a coop like this?”  The answer, I discovered, was that I found the basic design on the internet–where it is summer all year ’round.

So, a little older and wiser, I am now building CoopShed.  Which will hold five chickens, with perhaps capacity for a couple more, and which will be the answer to all of my chicken keeping dreams.  At any rate I’ll let ya know how it goes.

So as you can see I have the framing nearly done.  I have to do the floor.  I have no idea which is commonly done in what order.  I did my walls first, and I am putting up the roof joists now.  When I get those done, I will do the floor.

I’ve found that it is immensely satisfying to build a stand-alone structure by one’s self.  Immensely.  Here you have this place; that you have made; that you could take shelter in with your chickens–should the apocalypse arrive.  Of course you would be roasted alive with your fowl.  But the idea that here is a place you could sleep at night–that you made!  For me that feels like a big deal.  If the apocalypse does come and I’m out in some national forest with my family trying to figure out how to survive at least I have some idea of how to make a shack that we could all survive in.

Should I really be thinking about this?  I think a lot of people are thinking about this.

Here I go, about to dive into the significance of my chicken coop, coopdeconstruction as it were.  The long and short of it is that I don’t want things in my life that bear little or no responsibility to me.  What the heck does that mean?  It means I don’t want stuff that I can’t fix or that I don’t have a significant relationship to.  That’s kind of a weird to say.  Having a relationship with stuff.  For me that means if I didn’t make it, I understand it well enough that I can fix it or possibly alter it to suit my uses if I wanted to.  So what’s wrong with things one can’t alter or fix?  Well nothing, if they never break, or if they perfectly suit your needs.  But what happens when I rely on something that I don’t have a significant relationship with?  Well, what happens when you rely on a total stranger?  Answer: anything.  The most common descriptor for technology that you cannot fix or alter is “black box” technology, and black-box-tech is bad mojo–especially if you have come to rely on it.   The ink printer that clogs, the extortionist cell phone plan, copy protection schemes, the legal system, all of these are things that attempt to reduce or exclude your direct participation, and yet they are things that in many cases we find ourselves utterly reliant upon.  Have you heard this line: “When you believe in things that you don’t understand, you suffer.”  It’s the same peril that one undergoes when relying on a stranger.  You might get lucky and be just fine, but more likely the stranger’s desires will be divergent from yours and you will find yourself powerless in an untenable situation.

I’m quite weary of that.

My chickens, my coop, my desire to know how to build and/or fix all things that significantly affect my life–this, this is my expression of freedom, no, my assertion of freedom.  For all of the black box manipulations from which our culture is made: to the fake food, to better living through chemistry, to prescription drugs, to BPA’s, to commercial software with secret source code, I say, “Fuck off!”  These are merely high-tech modalities of what is essentially tyranny, and I will not cotton to these narcissistic manipulations anymore.

If you need me, I’ll be outside working on my coop.

Resentful of these gits who try to pawn little tech “secrets” online,  instead I Googled: “Revive Nicad Batteries.” “Voom!” I find a bunch of how-to’s.

The best appears to be this one on You Tube: 

This fellow uses an arc welder to do the job, which seems like a bit of overkill to me.  The one caveat about the video is that he does not specify how many amps he uses. If you do use an arc welder, I would keep the amps very low.  But it’s academic to me, since I sold my arc-welder a few years ago.  Instead I have a trusty 12 volt automotive battery charger that should do the job.  I find the polarity of the terminals on the battery, throw on some goggles and insulated gloves, fire up the charger and a few sparky taps later plug the formerly dead battery into the drill and “VROOM!”  Not only does it work, but the battery drives the drill as when it was new.

Then I remember that I still had the drill which had been replaced by the Ridgid–a nearly 18-year-old Skil “Warrior” (9.6 volts). It was still on my tool shelf, both rechargeable batteries long dead.  “Worth a shot,” I thought.  Hooked a battery up to my auto battery charger, spark, spark, spark.  Plugged it into the drill and “VROOM!”  It works again.  I had not run this drill for at least five years.  I now have two fully functional cordless power drills, each with two rechargeable batteries.  I am beside myself with glee.

The science behind this is apparently fairly straightforward.  Cadmium crystals, called “dendrites,” build up on the surface of the plates inside the battery and stifle the flow of current.  An electrical surge apparently really does cause the crystals to be shaken loose.

We use a ton of rechargeable batteries in our house, and they seem to get weak after about six months to a year of use.  I’m going to start zapping ours with the auto battery charger.  I’m a little sick about the rechargeable ni-cad batteries and devices I’ve tossed over the years.

I now have two power drills.  Bliss!