It’s still half-term, so time for another random “what can I do with the kids that’s vaguely science-y and only needs stuff that we have around the house”.
We made an evaporograph.
No, I’d never heard of it before, either.
But it was pretty cool which is why I’m blogging it myself instead of leaving Grace to write it up 😉
I didn’t really know what a voicebox was beyond knowing that Ned on South Park used one.
But it’s half-term week, so Grace and I tried to make our own out of straws, tape and a balloon. And it sort of worked!
Here’s how it worked…
A few years ago, I wrote a post about how you can make a font based on a sample of your own handwriting.
I did it to help Grace, at the time aged three, to make a font of her writing as part of a present for Amy.
Graham suggested doing this every year, and as it turns out, that is what I ended up doing.
It’ll be a nice thing to have when she’s older – a record of what her writing used to be like. And it’s fascinating to see how her handwriting develops year-on-year.
We’ve got a few of them now, so time to share how it looks so far.
Today is Amy’s birthday – which means that I’ve been helping the kids with present making.
Grace’s idea for a homemade birthday card was particularly geeky, so I thought it was worth a quick post.
The idea was that she’d design an e-card, and record a variety of voice clips, which would be played when you clicked on various bits of the card. She did after-school French lessons last term, and she hears some Greek from my mum, so she’s kind of interested in the idea of other languages. So we came up with the idea of a card with a Happy Birthday message in lots of different languages.
It turned out that my multi-lingual efforts to assist her were a bit lame, so I convinced her to scale it down from “Happy Birthday” in dozens of languages to “I love you” in nine langauges. We settled on a design with a bunch of flags – clicking on a flag plays Grace’s voice saying “I love you” in that language.
It looked like this, but click through here for the live version.
It was pretty simple, but I thought I’d share a few comments about how we did it.
Last Wednesday, Grace and I went up to the NEC in Birmingham for Gadget Show Live.
Overview
A bit of science fun for Grace. We made a battery out of zinc washers and copper coins.
(more…)
This is a video that my (at the time) five year old, Grace, made last summer.
It was in the school holidays when I was looking for things that would keep her occupied for a couple of days – and I suggested that she might want to do some filming. She decided to make a documentary about the town where we live.
I would have posted this at the time, but it all got a little out of hand and ended up over twenty minutes long – which made it too long for me to upload to YouTube. But today, my YouTube account got approved for posting longer videos, so I thought that (even if five or six months late!) it’d still be worth sharing.
Grace was, unsurprisingly, in charge of everything – acting as presenter, director, narrator, location scout, and all-around bossy boots. My job was to point the camera where I was told in the bits where she wanted to talk. 🙂
It was all filmed using a normal digital stills camera that happens to let you record video clips. So the quality isn’t great (the microphone in particular doesn’t handle the wind well!).
