In a homeless shelter in Manhattan, an 8-year-old boy is walking to his room, carrying an awkward load in his arms, unfazed by screams from a troubled resident. The boy is a Nigerian refugee with an uncertain future, but he is beaming. He can’t stop grinning because the awkward load is a huge trophy, almost…
When student athletes were asked how much they care about athletics, they rated their interest a healthy 8.5 on average, on a scale of 1 to 10. But when asked the value they place on academics, the result was higher than 9 on average. If anything, the average student athlete cares more about his studies than his…
Social media platforms are full of people who complain “the media is biased” against whatever side they support. When my students repeat this claim, I ask them to supply an example. They usually point to a meme that supplies a biased headline to a real news story. The story itself is fine, but the text…
Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. The first of (far too) many “trapped on the holodeck” episodes. Exhausted while preparing for a high-stakes diplomatic ritual, Picard takes a break in a virtual-reality simulation of a 1940s detective novel. I remembered enjoying Brent Spiner’s portrayal of Data adapting to the noir setting,…
I had a complex model that I created in Blender 2.79, and imported (with some tweaking) successfully to Unity 2018 a few months ago. When I switched to Blender 2.8 and Unity 2018.2, I found big problems with my model. Blender 2.8b tells me that all the normals are exactly what I expect — the…
It seems YouTube will soon discontinue the text-based “annotation” feature that made interactive videos like this possible.
As a kid, I remember studying my CRT displays with a microscope. Each pixel that I could control with BASIC on my TRS-80 or Atari 800 or Commodore-64 was made up of tiny arrays of red, blue, and green dots that I could not control directly. There was one display mode of the Atari 800…
I’m having my students play Adam Cadre’s text-only, command-line interactive fiction game “9:05.” Over heard, from a student playing the early part of the game with a peer: “Did we just kill someone? We did something bad!”
A recent video that shows a kid in the bleachers bobbling a foul ball, and a man picking up the ball and presenting it to the woman next to him, doesn’t show what it seems to show. Julian Green of the Cubs said in a statement, “Unfortunately, a video that was quickly posted and unverified…
In Suzanne Bradbeer’s play FULL BLOOM, Jesse (played by Seton Hill’s DeShaun Herzog) owns a prized Hank Aaron Rookie Card. The girl he likes from school, Phoebe (played by Carolyn Jerz), has always wanted the rookie card of her personal hero, Roberto Clemente. As Phoebe goes through a tough emotional struggle in this play, how…
One of the benefits of working at Seton Hill is they provide me with a MacBook Air and an iPad. I turn them in every few years for an upgrade. The computer the kids use for gaming is a Mac Mini that I bought in 2011, with a virtual machine that runs Windows. It has served…
I enjoyed watching this chess-themed coming-of-age, based-on-a-true-story movie with my son today. Good storytelling and cinematography. I liked the bit during the closing credits when we saw the real people alongside the actors who portrayed them.
A student in my “American Literature: 1915-Present” class used the medium of a 2D graphic adventure game to deliver her multimodal final project. (Students also wrote a traditional term paper.) You are the cameraman of a new TV show based on Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth.” But things quickly go downhill when a…
Peter looks forward to his Wednesday evening visits to the Monroeville Chess club. (Last one until mid-January.)
Here is the transcript the girl provided, of her pun battle with my former student and Stage Right’s resident lyricist & character actor Greg Kerestan.
