Greetings! This time around I have a double dose of computer activities for you. The audio engineering website Soundation and the 1990 classic MS-dos video game: Prince of Persia.

​Lets Start with Soundation. It is a free sound library and mixing tool that you can use to make your own musical compositions. I was going to tell the kids about time signatures and beats per minute but all of the knew all that stuff already. Musical education!

There was about a dozen kids who decided to try their hand at arranging and the results were surprising to say the least. We had a whole block of students who created medleys of Hip Hop beats and orchestra strings, two students who created what can best be described as experimental noise, and a note accurate recreation of Smash Mouths 90's era hit: All Star.
Again this website is free to mess around with. I suggest you go mess around with it yourself (I know I did) 

The VERY NEXT DAY. I took a slightly smaller group (somewhere around a morons dozen (9)) back up to the computer lab after the Starbucks walking field trip to play a classic video game from my youth: Prince of Persia.

I 100% forgot how good the music is in this game. A midi sensation. Needless to say a few computers were left on maximum volume when we left the computer lab. 

This game is AH-mazing. Literally it's a bit of a maze. Jokes, but it does teach an important lesson. Since the game is so punishingly and sometimes unfairly difficult the player has to make friends with the idea that failure is part of the process of progressing through the game. A concept I feel is sorely lacking in most modern video games. 

We had about an hour with the game total and only a few managed to withstand being killed by the game over and over again. When the hour was up we had made it about a fourth of the way through level 2. This game is hard Blogateers! If you want to check it out for yourself we use a website called classic reload that has a whole library of extra old video games on it. (also free!)

Blogateers, it was my birthday recently, so we made some cupcakes. As a group we headed down to the LRC kitchen and made some white cupcakes before snack time. After snack we headed back down and the kids all tried to decorate the best dang cupcake they could.

As you can see the cupcakes could barely handle the amount of decorations the kids put on them. At times seeming to be just a vehicle for more refined sugar.

This snowman constructed with marshmallow was particularly impressive. not sure how it stayed together, the crushed Oreos probably helped.

Not sure what is going on here but it looks like cookie monster going out to a dance club. In the end it was a very messy and incredibly fun time for all and I will be less afraid of baking in the future.

Blogateers, I don't know about you but I love cooking. Yesterday we all got together in the PLMS commons and cooked some fwench toast on some griddles I stole from BLMS impact.

When I do cooking projects I like to just set some ground rules, explain the recipe and then let the children sink or swim. I must say that we have some whisking experts here at PLMS. 

There were only a few finished products that I myself would not have happily eaten. Mr. Derek ate two right after he broke a ping pong paddle.

Finally, last week one of our students had their retainer thrown into the trash on accident. But we finally found it!

Until next time Blogateers!

Blogateers, we had ourselves and Egg drop. The video above is the final stage of that. It shows one of the teams of engineers throwing their final design off of the PLMS sky bridge. Each team had 35 minutes to put together a contraption to protect their egg from cracking and then we did a test drop.

I asked each team to make predictions about what would happen to their egg. Each team got to watch all the other egg drops, so as the tests when on everyone became more and more confident that the eggs would survive.

I did not provide any examples  or let the kids go online to see what other people had done in the past. ever design was an original PLMS creation. 

 Because everyone was so terrified of their eggs cracking on impact often the most dangerous part was unwrapping the whole creation to check.
As a side note I was asked so many times to let the kids walk out on the roof. I would never do that.

I had never seen someone just matryoshka balloons around and egg before. It was totally spit BTW, that egg was fine.

These girls might have over prepared more than anyone else. As they said themselves, they wrapped the egg in an entire roll of toilet paper.

They finally got it unwrapped and the egg is totally fine. my ears are still ringing from that scream. Well blogateers, until next time this has been the  excellent thing we did this week that I was able to record in some way!

Galaxy Canvases!

Perpetual Calendars

Graveyard Cups!