teaching students with explosions

I had lunch the other day with the Buffet o’ Blog staff, and we always have some crazy conversations.  (If only more of them made it to the blog… perhaps we need an secretary to keep notes.)  Somehow we got on the topic of those secret messages in spy movies that at the end say:

“This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds.”

What if we applied that concept to learning in school?  Say once a student learning something, the message would explode, whether it was a paper, book, or chalkboard.  That would make learning fun!  Kids would be excited about learning new stuff then!

Obviously public school aren’t going to apply this technique because of “safety concerns” and cost.  So maybe we need to start our own private school where we teach with explosions and cool weapons.  It would be prohibitively expensive, and the disclaimer would be quite extensive (even more so than the disclaimer for this blog!).  But the students would be excited about going to school.

I’m convinced that people enjoy learning if you make it fun and interesting.  (I could’ve worded that “people enjoy learning if you make it enjoyable”.)  School should be more fun, I think.  I certainly learned more with the fun teachers . We would also use video games to teach students — some school is already doing that successfully.  If they can learn something while saving the world, everyone wins.

Where’s the posts?

More posts are coming... Such antics aren't necessary... Really, quit, because you're scaring me.

For the regular readers here, you may be wondering where all the new posts are.  Don’t worry, for they are still in the pipeline.  The R&D department continues to send along e-mails full of randomness.  It’s just that I format and publish it all, and I’ve been crazy-busy the past 2 weeks with my recording studio.  Things should be back to normal this next week.

There are posts coming up about trains, trucks, prison, and rain.  Hmm, sounds like it should be a country song!  There are also upcoming posts about explosions.  Y’know, there should be more songs about explosions.  At least the music video would be awesome!  (Do people still watch music videos anymore?)

I just wanted you to know what’s up.  The upcoming posts queue is filling up, and soon there may be a deluge of new content, so hold on.

caption contest, people on porch watching wildfire

I figure you can’t have too many caption contests that have fire in them, can you?  Either way, this week’s episode does.

It you want actual context, this is a fire on Mount McLean in Canada.  But of course, you are welcome (and encouraged) to make up your own story / backstory for this.  There’s lots of potential here, with a group of people sitting on their back porch watching a raging wildfire.  What are they talking about?  What will they do?  Who is responsible for this catastrophe?

(To see our other caption contests, click on the “Say What?” category in the sidebar.)

video of Soundwave breakdancing

Here is a cool video of Soundwave breakdancing — this is what you call doing the robot.  🙂  (If you don’t know, Soundwave was one of the Decepticons of Transformers lore; his Earth disguise mode was a jambox / cassette player.)

Supposedly this was initially put on YouTube in 2005, before YouTube was big, and it got to 15 million hits and crashed their servers.  I saw it back in 2004 on another site.  Think about that — at least 15 million hits, before YouTube was so popular.  That’s a lot of Transformers fans, even before Michael Bay’s “re-imagined”* the franchise for his movies.  Someone said it was made in 2002, and if so, that makes it even more impressive, because CGI was more difficult back then.

* Hey, I just found a soapbox!  I won’t go into the full rant, because I’ve done that before (and I’ve revisited it with video examples of how Transformers could’ve been better), but I will say this — the Transformers universe was very established through hundreds of cartoons and many comic books, and it was a good story with lots of backstory, many great plots, extensive character development — everything you need for a great movie.  Instead of using that, Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg (yes, it’s partly his fault, too) made the movie about “a boy and his car”.  In doing so, they made Transformers be more about how a teenage boy has to save the world instead of the huge civil war going on between robots that are more intelligent than we are.  Instead of making what could’ve been one of the greatest sci-fi stories ever, with characters you admire for their principles and a philosophical side that gets you to thinking — while keeping the great action scenes, we ended up with just the action scenes and lots of explosions.  I’m not saying the movies weren’t entertaining at all, but I keep thinking what could’ve been…