YouTube star Simone Giertz Creator of “Crappy Robots” Has Brain Tumor

Popular YouTube star and creator of humorous robots announced on YouTube yesterday that she has a benign brain tumor the size of a golf ball. She shows courage and humor in the face of this new struggle in a recent YouTube video to all of her fans.

Uncanny Renderings of Art History’s Famous Self-Portraits #ArtTuesday

Via Hyperallergic:

NARROWSBURG, New York — Most every artist must establish, to some degree, their relationship to the art canon. Some endlessly reference it, while others reject it; artist Allan Rubin, on the other hand, renders his artistic heroes into three-dimensional sculptures made from upcycled tin cans.

Rubin really puts the “can” in canvas, applying his paintings to metal rather than fabric. In 2016, Rubin created his first master artist sculpture of Picasso, touching off a body of work called CANON, now on display at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance.

“At first I made portraits of my cats and myself and my partner, CANdy Spilner,” said Rubin, in an email interview with Hyperallergic. “I became excited about the possibilities of the new material, because I could work smaller, make more works faster, not overload my already cramped studio, and delight my artist friends and followers who encouraged me to keep making can portraits. At first I resisted LABELing myself as a can artist. But now I’m willing to accept that this is my future.”

In addition to providing fodder for dad jokes, Rubin’s sculptures are neat combinations of geometry and painting, transposing the two-dimensional, highly stylized self-portraits created by famous artists throughout history onto the 3D surfaces of his metal constructions.

Read more!

---

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Interactive Massive Interfaces

Thanks for Michael for sending us this tip! Michael writes:

With our students, we had a lot of fun developing, programming and soldering up a 2-team-6-player game for Berne night of museums. To add thrust to the rockets, players have to jump around on a
trampoline equipped with LIS3DH Triple-Axis Accelerometers and the steering is done with massive seesaws, equipped with a GP2Y0A21YK0F.

There is also a shield involving rotary encoders.

See more on vimeo

Study: Analyzing How Tutorials Help Learners

(image credit: Overton2012 via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

An interesting study of online tutorials from Ada Kim and Andrew Ko at the University of Washington. The researchers sampled 30 popular and diverse online coding tutorials and analyzed what and how the sites taught learners. The sites sampled taught six programming languages Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript, C#, C, and included interactive learning including Scratch and Alice. The sites varied as far as aiming at specific ages.

Reviewing the approaches to the 30 site sample, they realized:

• Transforming information into knowledge is a key principle for effective learning. Binding a large set of disconnected facts is important as well as connecting prior knowledge into new knowledge. Establishing a learning framework helps students gain a deeper understanding of the material.
• The educational games provided the most immediate and personalized feedback, likely improving from deliberate practice. From a teaching perspective, games such as Gidget, Lightbot, CodeHunt, and tutorials provided by Code.org are currently most likely to be effective in learning.
• Deliberate practice helps learners achieve mastery in a particular domain.
• Clearly structured and articulated goals are critical to enhancing the effectiveness of deliberate practice, however, practice should be coupled with appropriately targeted feedback, including information about learners’ progress, to guide them toward goals.

The study suggests most online coding tutorials do not yet achieve many key principles in learning sciences. Development needs to better emphasize personalized support and contextualized feedback. They need to explain to learners why and when to use particular coding concepts.

The researchers recommend that teachers be very selective in their use of materials, focusing on the more evidence-based tutorials, particularly educational games. The games provide hierarchical structure, immediate feedback, and opportunities that learners actively write code and use subsequent knowledge for coding throughout the tutorial.

Interesting Findings in the Study:

1. Few tutorials explain when and why a particular concept is useful in programming.
   1. Few provide guidance for common errors.
   2. None provide personalization based on prior coding experience or learner goals, other than rudimentary age-based differentiation
2. Most of the tutorials did not teach the concept of objects or object-orientation.
3. Some sites start bottom-up (build on elementary principles) and others top down (Scratch: make the cat dance”)
4. Only a few tutorials, primarily educational games and creative platforms, offered project-based contexts that provided an explicit goal of a stage or a module.
5. Gidget equipped a sophisticated editor panel so that learners even could see the error messages and syntax errors in the editor, which was more instructive than just providing a text guideline for practices.
6. All interactive tutorials and educational games with a code editor provided some form of immediate feedback, but much of this was shallow. Almost half of the tutorials did not provide feedback when learners made errors. These tutorials fell into two cases:
   1. Some tutorials like Scratch provided open-ended practice, but did not provide feedback about right or wrong code relative to a goal or
   2. A tutorial’s code editor did not produce feedback about error messages.
7. Some tutorials provided feedback through instructor or peer communication. For example, MOOCs provided some opportunities to communicate with instructors or peers, and some resources had online communities in which learners could ask questions. While this feedback was available, none of it was immediate and learners had no guarantee of receiving answers to their questions. Assistance was rarely precise enough to improve learners’ conceptions of the material, and it was not customized at all to learners’ prior knowledge.
8. Coding tutorials gave more attention to emphasizing how to practice particular commands and functions rather than to provide information like when and why to use them.
9. Most of the web references did not establish a specific learning context for what they taught, whether an authoritative lecture based context, a goal-driven context, or a story-based context.

Study: Kim, Ada S and Andrew J. Koh, Pedagogical Analysis of Online Coding Tutorials, SIGCSE’17, March 8–11, 2017, Seattle, WA, USA. ISBN 978-1-4503-4698-6/17/03

What are you looking for in tutorials? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Interactive Massive Interfaces

Thanks for Michael for sending us this tip! Michael writes:

With our students, we had a lot of fun developing, programming and soldering up a 2-team-6-player game for Berne night of museums. To add thrust to the rockets, players have to jump around on a
trampoline equipped with LIS3DH Triple-Axis Accelerometers and the steering is done with massive seesaws, equipped with a GP2Y0A21YK0F.

There is also a shield involving rotary encoders.

See more on vimeo

Interactive Massive Interfaces

Thanks for Michael for sending us this tip! Michael writes:

With our students, we had a lot of fun developing, programming and soldering up a 2-team-6-player game for Berne night of museums. To add thrust to the rockets, players have to jump around on a
trampoline equipped with LIS3DH Triple-Axis Accelerometers and the steering is done with massive seesaws, equipped with a GP2Y0A21YK0F.

There is also a shield involving rotary encoders.

See more on vimeo

ADABOX 008 is all about building robots! JOIN NOW! Today’s letter is G for GPS! @adafruit

A while ago we made R is for Robots – a coloring book that explores robots, robot makers, and making robot friends. The next ADABOX (008) is all about building your own robots! Sign up now – we’re shipping late June/early July!

AdaBox is curated Adafruit products, unique collectibles, and exclusive discounts. All delivered quarterly. Subscribe now or give AdaBox to a friend.

Today’s letter is G for GPS!

GPS.gov – The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a U.S.-owned utility that provides users with positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) services. This system consists of three segments: the space segment, the control segment, and the user segment. The U.S. Air Force develops, maintains, and operates the space and control segments.

The space segment consists of a nominal constellation of 24 operating satellites that transmit one-way signals that give the current GPS satellite position and time.

The control segment consists of worldwide monitor and control stations that maintain the satellites in their proper orbits through occasional command maneuvers, and adjust the satellite clocks. It tracks the GPS satellites, uploads updated navigational data, and maintains health and status of the satellite constellation.

The user segment consists of the GPS receiver equipment, which receives the signals from the GPS satellites and uses the transmitted information to calculate the user’s three-dimensional position and time.

AdaBox 008 – MAKE ROBOT FRIEND! (video).