Bridge Building Bonanaza!

http://www.screencast.com/t/q3XS93Qr7Ks

Well today is a snow day (yes in April). Luckily my brother in law showed me the Bridge Building Game. It is a great game - I mean educational tool. It is also harder than it looks. I took 3 years of Engineering and some of the bridges are giving me trouble. I like it because it has some really good tools to help analize your structure. (The stressed structure members chage colour to show strain).

This game has been around for a little while (the first version was created in 2000). I has a following with people competing to build the most minimalist or strongest bridges.

The game can be found here.

A good fansite can be found here.

Fire it up and wave goodbye to your free time.

Google Documents Basics

Yay! Rob Wall has been at it again! He has created two more screencasts showing how to use Google Documents.

Here they are:

Using Google Docs, Part 1 and

Using Google Docs, Part 2 (Formatting)

Google Documents is an excellent FREE web based set of office tools (word processor, spreadsheet, presentations). The nice thing about them is that you can access your files from any computer with an internet connection.

Part 1 of Rob's screencast is the basics of opening, using, and saving documents in Google docs. Part 2 shows how to use formatting options like alignment, text fonts, and text colours. If you are familar with other word processors than Part 2 will seem a little elementary but that is ok.

What I am waiting for is for Rob to get to adding collaborators to a Google document - that way multiple people can work on the same document at the same time! Lots of possibilities for us teachers!

Good work Rob. (And thanks for letting me post them here. Blogging is so much easier when you don't actually have to make up anything yourself.)