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Elyse Klaidman, after 22 years at Pixar leading creative and educational programs, is now the CEO of X IN A BOX, where she leverages her background as an artist, educator and leader.Prior to co-founding X IN A BOX in 2020, Tony DeRose led the computer graphics research group for much of his 23 years at Pixar. He is passionate about project based learning and has been very active in the Maker Movement.Brit Cruise, Chief Learning Officer at X IN A BOX and creator of educational content and products, launched his career with the YouTube channel Art of the Problem, leading to working at Khan Academy and partnerships with NASA, Google, and Disney/Pixar.Dennis Henderson, VP of Education and Strategy at X IN A BOX, leverages his role as Executive Director of Manchester Youth Development Center to drive social justice through project-based education, promoting social mobility and economic opportunities.Recommended Resources:
It's been such a wonderful season on the Rebel Educator podcast! I'm so excited to share these highlights from your all-time favorite episodes. Thank you for tuning in and supporting us in this journey to reimagine education and build a better future for all learners. Keep challenging the status quo Rebel Educators! IN THIS EPISODE, WE COVER: Meaningful Learning with Raheen Fatima (ep. 35) The Intersection of Inclusion, Diversity, and Ableism with Heather Clarke (ep. 47) Designing Learning Frameworks for a Changing World with Chris Menage (ep. 44) Experiential Online Learning with Tony DeRose (ep. 50) Vitality Centered Education with Jenny Finn and the Springhouse Community School (ep. 30) RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Listen to the full episodes here Check out my bestselling book Rebel Educator: Create Classrooms Where Impact and Imagination Meet: amzn.to/3AcwlfF Learn more about Rebel Educator, explore our professional development opportunities for educators and students, sign up for a webinar and check out our project library Visit us at UP Academy to learn more about our personalized and inclusive learning environment Connect with Tanya and UP Academy on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram and learn more about her journey here Enjoying the show? Leave us a rating and review and help more people find us! bit.ly/RebelEducatorApplePodcasts Have a topic you'd like to hear discussed? Fill out this form: forms.gle/JcKHf9DHTZnYUmQr6 Interested in being on the Rebel Educator podcast or want to recommend a guest? Fill out this form and we'll reach out to you if we think you'd be a great fit for an upcoming episode. forms.gle/zXR2KGPK3WEmbrRZ6 Want to learn more about opening your own UP Academy? Check out the Rebel Educator Accelerator: www.rebeleducator.com/courses/the-accelerator MORE ABOUT THE REBEL EDUCATOR PODCAST: In each episode of the Rebel Educator podcast, I deconstruct world-class educators, students, and thought leaders in education to extract the tactics, tools, and routines that you can use as teachers and parents. Join me as we discuss how to shift the classroom, the learning environment, the mindset, and the pedagogy, to resist tradition, reignite wonder, and re-imagine the future of education. This podcast is dedicated to all of the educators who work thankless hours to make our next generation the best it can be. It was designed to begin conversations on how we can redesign education for the future of work and the success of our students. It is meant for teachers, students, administrators, homeschoolers and anyone who interacts with and teaches youth.
Tony DeRose is currently Chief Content Officer and co-founder of X in a Box, LLC. In partnership with innovative companies, X in a Box (xiab.org) creates world-class lessons that connect the classroom to the real-world. Prior to founding X in a Box Tony was a Senior Scientist at Pixar for 23 years, and for most of that time he led Pixar's Research Group. In recent years he has contributed to several initiatives to help make math, science, and engineering education more inspiring, primarily for middle and high school students. These initiatives include the Science Behind Pixar museum exhibit, co-founding the Maker Education Initiative (makered.org), as well as creating Pixar in a Box and Imagineering in a Box (both available on Khan Academy). He has received two Scientific and Technical Academy Awards (c) for his work on the mathematics of surfaces, as well as the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award. He earned a B.S. in physics from UC Davis and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the UC Berkeley. Join us for this eye opening conversation about Tony's journey to creating X in a Box, the multidisciplinary nature of the real world, and math in movies. IN THIS EPISODE, WE COVER: Tony's journey to creating X in a Box The multidisciplinary nature of the real world Project-based and experiential learning What the future of education should be How Tony's work creates a framework for online learning 2.0 Where Tony's interest and love for math began The crucial role of mathematics in the making of animated films RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Connect with Tony and X in a Box on LinkedIn Visit xiab.org to learn about their work to create authentic learning experiences Check out storyxperiential.com to see past projects and join the waiting list for future classes. Learn more about Rebel Educator, explore our professional development opportunities for educators and students, sign up for a webinar and check out our project library Visit us at UP Academy to learn more about our personalized and inclusive learning environment Connect with Tanya and UP Academy on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram and learn more about her journey here We'd love it if you could take a few minutes to fill out this survey to let us know how we can bring you the best possible content: https://forms.gle/JcKHf9DHTZnYUmQr6 Enjoying the show? Leave us a rating and review and help more people find us! https://bit.ly/RebelEducatorApplePodcasts Interested in being on the Rebel Educator podcast? Fill out this form and we'll reach out to you if we think you'd be a great fit for an upcoming episode. https://forms.gle/zXR2KGPK3WEmbrRZ6 Want to learn more about opening your own UP Academy? Check out the Rebel Educator Accelerator: https://www.rebeleducator.com/courses/the-accelerator MORE ABOUT THE REBEL EDUCATOR PODCAST: In each episode of the Rebel Educator podcast, I deconstruct world-class educators, students, and thought leaders in education to extract the tactics, tools, and routines that you can use as teachers and parents. Join me as we discuss how to shift the classroom, the learning environment, the mindset, and the pedagogy, to resist tradition, reignite wonder, and re-imagine the future of education. This podcast is dedicated to all of the educators who work thankless hours to make our next generation the best it can be. It was designed to begin conversations on how we can redesign education for the future of work and the success of our students. It is meant for teachers, students, administrators, home schoolers and anyone who interacts with and teaches youth.
Elyse Klaidman and Tony DeRose join us to discuss the intersection of art, technology and science as they experienced it throughout 22 years working for Pixar (3:47). Tony was a Senior Scientist at Pixar (8:29), Elyse was an art instructor and director of archives and exhibitions (12:25), and their two worlds collided when they created Pixar in a Box, an online resource exploring the academic concepts that go into creating Pixar films, including art, math, science and engineering (16:39). They dive into why Pixar in a Box is an important educational tool for younger generations (22:25), discussing how art and science came together for creative problem solving at Pixar (29:03). Of course, this was all part of the positive culture within the company, in general (32:43), which they believe other businesses can and should emulate (38:48). Finally, they reveal their hopes for the future of art, technology and storytelling, and how they'll continue working toward that vision (43:05). For More, Follow Us Here: Pixar in a Box: https://www.pixar.com/pixar-in-a-box Elyse KlaidmanLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elyseklaidman/ Tony DeRoseLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tony-derose-7538b32/ Fritz NelsonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fritznelson/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/fnelson Grow WireLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/grow-wire/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/GrowWire Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/growwire/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GrowWire/
这周我在美国奥斯汀的西南偏南上。前半周参加了西南偏南的教育峰会(SXSWedu),之后的两三天会参加科技峰会(SXSW Interactive)。 在本期的节目中,你会听到这场会议上演讲嘉宾关于教育各种观点,看看关于教育创新,美国人在聊些什么,以及这对中国的教育者,教育创业者,家长和学生有什么借鉴。 在这期节目中你能够听到 在今年的 SXSWedu 现场,人们在讨论哪些教育议题,有哪些不同于以往的论述 为何感觉教育创新的脚步正在放慢,遇到了什么问题 除了越来越多地在课堂中使用科技产品以外,教育创新还意味着什么 科技已深刻地改变了整个世界,这为教育提出了哪些新的要求 如果想直接跳到各个音频重点 00分17秒 来自 SXSW 现场的故事:为什么非洲卡丁部落要拔掉小孩的牙齿,而这个故事和教育又有什么关系 3分29秒 为什么说一些科技教育创新言过其实?什么是更为根本的问题? 5分38秒 教育创新难在哪里? 7分12秒 技术之外的教育创新尝试之一:评分体系改革的尝试 10分09秒 技术之外的教育创新尝试之二:基于探究(Inquiry-based)的教学模式 12分53秒 卡耐基梅隆大学人工智能教授带来的一个例子:人工智能会如何改变世界,这为教育提出了哪些新的要求 15分18秒 技术创新对教育创新哪方面意义重大:皮克斯高级科学家带来的皮克斯与可汗学院的例子 精彩片段 说实在,这不是我所预料的会要听到的主题演讲。这是我第三年参加这个会议。在前几年,这个会场都有着一种教育即将被颠覆,而科技在其中举足轻重的氛围。大家讨论如何通过技术来实现个性化学习,如何通过技术让学习变得像游戏一样好玩,如何利用各种应用程序让学生学得更好。所以我在这场会议上,本来期待听到更多的关于科技会如何推动教育改革的谈话。现在,这显然出乎我的意料。 很多人觉得,理想的学校是有高科技,感觉科技用得越多越好。但他们其实是躲在了高科技的这把大伞之下,而没有去思考更好的教学方法。他觉得这些科技掩盖了教育本身存在的问题,将复杂的问题简单化了。—— 哥伦比亚大学教师学院副教授 Christopher Emdin 但是,人工智能帮助人们或专家做出决策,这会是接下来几年发生的一个巨大变化。所以人们要如何搜集数据,要如何分析数据,这些都需要数学,但这些和微积分无关,而是和概率有关,和数理统计有关。这些都不是我们学校在教的那些—— 卡内基梅隆大学计算机科学系副院长/教授 Mark Stehlik 现场 哥伦比亚大学教师学院副教授 Christopher Emdin 的主题演讲照片 https://pic.36krcnd.com/avatar/201703/09174607/damxedjfes25tltp.jpg!1200 畅销书作者,硅谷投资人Tim Ferris的现场主题访谈 https://pic.36krcnd.com/avatar/201703/09174718/qwk4t9bccjmm48ra.jpg!1200 一个老师展示的通过建筑来教小朋友人文地理世界文化的课程; https://pic.36krcnd.com/avatar/201703/09173842/2efguk0a3ah34p2l.jpg!1200 现场的一个实验性装置,EXPLO这家机构想要在现场通过和老师教育者们的胡同,得到更多灵感 (https://pic.36krcnd.com/avatar/201703/09173849/nugh1p1t3drr83ss.jpg!1200) 节目中提到的人物 Christopher Emdin:哥伦比亚大学教师学院副教授 Kate Walsh:美国全国教师质量委员会(National Council on Teacher Quality)主席 Ben Riley:美国教师培训机构 Deans for Impact 创始人 Shayne Evans:芝加哥大学特许学校(University of Chicago Charter School)校长 Diana Laufenberg:Inquiry Schools 创始人及执行总监 Jaime Casap:Google “教育布道者“(Education Evangelist )、Inquiry Schools 董事会成员、Phoenix Coding Academy 协助创立者之一 Mark Stehlik:卡内基梅隆大学计算机科学系副院长、教授 Tony DeRose:皮克斯公司高级科学家 相关阅读 美国教育的焦虑与创新 (https://www.zhihu.com/pub/book/19551056) 那些TED上的少年们 (https://www.yicai.com/news/2539690.html) 这个乱哄哄的教室 (https://www.yicai.com/news/2539690.html)
Generations of Americans have grown up with Walt Disney shaping their imaginations. In 1955, Disney mixed up some fairy tales, a few historical facts, and a dream of the future to create an alternate universe. Not just a place for fun, but a scale model of a perfect world. “Everything that you could imagine is there,” says one young visitor. “It's like living in a fantasy book.” And not just for kids: one-third of Walt Disney World’s visitors are adults who go without children. Visiting the parks, according to actor Tom Hanks, is like a pilgrimage—the pursuit of happiness turned into a religion. Futurist Cory Doctorow explains the genius of Disney World, while novelist Carl Hiaasen even hates the water there. Kurt tours Disneyland with a second-generation “imagineer” whose dead mother haunts the Haunted Mansion. We’ll meet a former Snow White and the man who married Prince Charming—Disney, he says, is “the gayest place on Earth. It’s where happy lives.” (Originally aired October 18, 2013) Special thanks to Julia Lowrie Henderson, Shannon Geis, Alex Gallafent, Nic Sammond, Steve Watts, Angela Bliss, Todd Heiden, Shannon Swanson, Katie Cooper, Nick White, Marie Fabian, Posey Gruener, Jason Margolis, Chris DeAngelis, Jenelle Pifer, Debi Ghose, Maneesh Agrawala, and Tony DeRose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
ABOUT THE EPISODE SIGGRAPH 2018 Technical Papers Chair Mathieu Desbrun is joined by Ed Catmull (co-founder, Pixar Animation Studios; president, Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios) and Tony DeRose (senior scientist, Pixar Animation Studios) to talk about the history and future of computer graphics research. MUSIC Podcast theme, "SIGGRAPH," composed by Julius Dobos. LINKS *Episode* http://www.creativityincbook.com/ http://graphics.pixar.com/ https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/pixar http://makered.org/youngmakers/ *Social Media* http://blog.siggraph.org/ https://www.facebook.com/SIGGRAPHConferences https://twitter.com/siggraph https://www.instagram.com/acmsiggraph/ "siggraph" on Snapchat *Conference Website* http://s2018.siggraph.org/
Tony DeRose and Michelle Hlubinka discuss Young Makers, a collaboration between Pixar, the Exploratorium, and Maker Media to connect kids with adult mentors to develop projects for the Maker Faire (May 19-20, 2012 in San Mateo). www.youngmakers.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. We are speaking with Dr Tony Rose who got his graduate degree from cal and is now the head of research at Pixar [00:01:00] and Michelle who Banka the educational director for our Riley and maker media. They are here to discuss the young makers program, this collaboration between Pixar mic magazine and the exploratorium teams, young people with adult makers to create and construct amazing projects for the maker fair. Each year they'll talk about the program and what you might expect to see from the teams that this year's maker fair at the San Mateo Fair gowns on May 19th and 20th how you might get involved next year and about the future of educating and encouraging more young people to make more things in the [00:01:30] physical world. And please stay tuned for a chance to win tickets to the maker fair after this program. Tony and Michelle, thanks for joining us. Thanks. It's nice to be here. Yeah, thank you. And can you tell us a little bit about the young makers program? Sure. I can start. The Speaker 4: program was based, at least in part on my own family's experience where several years ago, my older son who's always loved to build things, grew out of Legos and we realized there was nothing for him to really graduate into until we discovered maker fair in 2006 [00:02:00] so we went to maker fair a couple of times as spectators and then starting in 2008 we started creating our own projects to share and we had such a great time and we all learned so much that the young makers program is an attempt to try to bring that sort of experience to other kids and other families. Speaker 5: Tony came to us, uh, make and make are fair and was also having a conversation with our collaborators, Mike and Karen at the exploratorium about potentially doing some work that could get more kids [00:02:30] excited about science and technology. We all agree that this is something that really needs to be done and we're all excited about working together. Let's do it. So that can was 2010, right? We launched a pilot and we had 20 kids come create projects, which they exhibited at maker fair that year. Everything from a hamster habitat that functions also as a coffee table to a fire breathing dragon, all things that the kids came up with of their own design and worked with [00:03:00] mentors to create over the space of a few months leading up to maker fair. Speaker 4: So Michelle said in the pilot run in 2010 we had about 20 kids. Last year we had about 150 participants total. About a hundred were cads and a hundred were adult supporters in various roles, mentors and club managers. This year we have about 300 so we're growing pretty rapidly and what we're trying to do now is start to think about how to scale beyond the bay area and help to create similar efforts and at least other metropolitan regions, if not, you know, even rural [00:03:30] regions Speaker 5: nationally or eventually internationally. Eventually internationally. There's nothing that would constrain this to the U s we're already international. I think we have a group in Calgary, Alberta. Right. That's started up. And do you see an advantage or disadvantage? Young makers is mostly outside of schools. Speaker 4: It started mostly outside of schools, but we're really looking for early adopter kind of teachers like Aaron at the lighthouse school to see if we can adapt it to in school. School curriculum is a really complicated thing, so we don't want [00:04:00] to be gated on, you know, widespread immediate adoption. So we're trying to develop a lot of models and materials and resources and best practices in whatever setting we can run the fastest, which happens to be informal out of school after school. But I think a lot of the materials that we're developing will hopefully be usable by teachers address toward academic curriculum during the school day. Speaker 5: Hmm. I'm just to follow up on the lighthouse charter school. Sure. So we're hoping they're going to be [00:04:30] a part of a project that we're doing to get more making back into high schools. So I'm sure you know that a lot of schools have been getting their technical arts programs, technical education, really. They've got lots of vocational ads. They've also been calling these, we're trying to reverse that trend and we got some funding from DARPA to work on getting, making back into schools and it's called the makerspace project. So we are trying to find 10 schools in California this year and then a hundred the following year and then a thousand the year after that [00:05:00] all around the country have thousand and this is to try to create those kinds of shop spaces. So this kind of thing is happening at lighthouse charter school already, but we'd like to see a lot more of it happening. Are there other corporate sponsors that are interested in joining the program? Yes, there has been a lot of uh, corporate interest in getting involved with the maker movement. And so as part of that we are starting the maker education collaborative. Do you want to say something about that Tony Speaker 4: w [00:05:30] what are the motivations for the, the collaborative is w w we began to realize that there are so many different ways to connect kids with making the young makers program is, you know, out of school typically more ambitious, middle and high school level. But you could change all those traces to be in school younger. And so there's a whole bunch of variations and probably so many variations that no one company or no one organization could, could do it. But if you look at the [00:06:00] various different programs that could be created, there's a lot of overlap in the, in the needs and the resources and so one of the things the collaborative is trying to do is pull together a common platform so that as companies or organizations want to launch something, they don't have to start from dirt. There's a big network that they can plug into and you know, get off and running really quickly. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: you are listening to the spectrum on k a l ex [00:06:30] today we are talking with Michelle [inaudible] of maker Media and Tony de Rosa Pixar about the young makers program that promotes young people to make fantastic things. Speaker 5: Maker fairs, this really family friendly event. Tony came with his family and what we love about the family model is that it's a really nice way that people have been able to engage and get closer and work together with their kids. [00:07:00] In the way that I think we imagine happened back in the Norman Rockwell era a lot more than it does today. Now that we're much more in a screen-based society. But part of our job is getting kids to either get away from the screens or only use those screens when they need to find out what they need to do to get back off the screens again. What's certainly interesting coming from someone from Pixar who makes it relatively passive entertainment, right? Speaker 4: Right. But if you think about the, the, the kinds of people that we have now and that we [00:07:30] want to continue to hire, they're, there are people that know how to learn on their own. They work really well in groups. They're highly multidisciplinary. And those are, those are exactly the attributes that, that the young makers program is designed to develop. And the kids that participate have those traits. We're just trying to, you know, help, help them grow in all those ways. And one of the nice things about the, this more ambitious project that we have this year is it's not just our family, it's, it's five families working together. So it becomes really a community building [00:08:00] activity. And you know, the neighbors that walk by, you know, get drawn in because they see all this crazy stuff going on in the driveway and it, so it's just a really wonderful healthy thing that everybody can contribute to and feel good about. So you touched upon the kinds of people that Pixar is interested in. Are there other things that set Pixar and O'Reilly and exploratory in that part that make them natural fits for sponsors? Well, for one thing, we're not afraid to make mistakes. So when we started working on this program and none of us [00:08:30] knew how this was going to work, so in true maker spirit we just sort of jumped in and were figuring out stuff as we go. Yeah, we all appreciate, yeah, the Speaker 5: learning by making, I think all of us appreciate story in a different way. Mike and Karen, especially at the exploratorium, are very good about documenting the work that they do and sharing that story and helping other museums explore that same theme. Tony, obviously I Pixar, they're in the business of making stories and we're all about hunting out those stories and sharing them with others. Speaker 4: What do you think of [00:09:00] creativity in digital environments? I think we're all fans of creativity in whatever form it takes. My younger son is really into Minecraft right now. One of the things you can really see is his facial reasoning has become incredibly honed. He can go into one of these environments that he's built and you know, they're very extensive. He can, he can navigate through those. Those amazes very quickly. It has become a community thing too. So he has friends that, you know, get out and play together. [00:09:30] You know, I think you can take anything too far and so we have to work to dial that back a little bit. But I think our point of view is that there are lots of burgeoning virtual opportunities for creativity. Minecraft is one video editing, web design, but the opportunities to express creativity in physical form is diminishing. And that that's the trend we're trying to reverse. Speaker 5: What kinds of things did you make when you were younger? Uh, well I am well known in my circle of friends for making calendars [00:10:00] of all things. I had a character named to Bianca, obviously a pseudonym for Mays who went on adventures around the world and then I tried to pack in as many facts into this calendar as I could. So I did oodles a research trying to find something related to my theme every year. So one year it was being, it goes to ancient Egypt, it goes to the art museum and so I tried to find facts for every single day of the year to share with people. Part of the reason I left those calendars though is [00:10:30] because I was getting more and more excited that we learn in a hands on way. And so the kind of pedagogical stance of this fact filled trivia based calendar had nothing to do with hands on learning and so I've been trying to resolve them. Speaker 5: What do you think makes for a good project for the young makers? I think the most important thing for a project to have is that the person making it has a passion about it and is excited [00:11:00] to make it. Usually the more successful projects also have something a little bit quirky or unusual about it. Sometimes bringing together two disparate things that nobody has put together before. So I'm trying to think of a great example of that habitat combat for example of bringing together a need for a base for a hamster to live and wanting it to be an attractive centerpiece [00:11:30] of a living room in the form of a coffee table. If that would be an example of a quirky approach to solving your problem. Speaker 4: I think a couple of other attributes that make a project, you know really worthwhile as to is for the team to pick a project that is just beyond or maybe even a little bit further than just beyond their current abilities so that when they complete it they really feel a sense of accomplishment. It's not a done deal going in. There's, there are all sorts of twists and turns and one of the challenges that the mentors are posed [00:12:00] with is how do I assess the skills of the team and help to dial in so that you hit that, that sweet spot that's just, it's ambitious but not too ambitious. It's just a natural part of the process to hit failures and roadblocks and our approach is learn from the failures and figure out how to get around the roadblocks and pick up the pieces and go on. So for us, failure isn't something to be avoided. It's something to be embraced and, and learn from. Speaker 5: And are most of the projects finished to completion? [00:12:30] We were, we've been doing Speaker 4: very surprised the, my expectation anyway was we might get completion rates of maybe 30 to 50% something like that. And we've seen typically more like 80% completion rates. So Speaker 5: it's amazing how motivating a deadline is. Is it? A lot of that completion has to do with, we work very hard to help them find the mentoring that they need in order to complete it. I remember last year, something that seems like it was going to be pretty simple. [00:13:00] A couple of girls will not, the project wasn't simple, but finding them a mentor seemed like it would be simple. They wanted to create a pedal powered car. So we tapped into some of our bike networks because as you can imagine, the bicycling network and the network of people who are excited about making overlap pretty heavily sent out email after email. And then we discovered that part of the problem was that these girls were making it at their school, Lighthouse Charter school here in Oakland. They're working on their project at school, but they don't have the facilities for fabricating [00:13:30] and doing the welding there. And so it's also a matter of trying to get the kids to the fabrication facility or get that convinced that bike guy to haul all the welding stuff probably on his bike to lighthouse charter school. So those are the kinds of things that we're trying to figure out in these first few years when we're doing the mentor matching. You're listening to the spectrum on k a l, X. Today Speaker 6: we're talking with Michelle Lupica of maker Media and Tony de Rosa Pixar [00:14:00] about the young makers program that encourages young makers to team with adult mentors to make fantastic projects and show them off at the maker. Speaker 5: Okay, and do you think the kids who don't finish still get a lot out of the program? Oh yeah, so they, they did finish, I want to say they did finish it. It was a beautiful pink pedal powered bike, but what it meant is that, you know, as we were getting closer and closer to that deadline of maker fair, we had to work harder and harder to persuade someone to come and [00:14:30] work with them and help them achieve what they were trying to do. But they of course I think also had to scale back a little bit. That's a big part of this is setting real expectations for what can be accomplished in time for it. One thing that we're very excited about this program in contrast to other programs is that we really put an emphasis on exhibition of our competition. This is an where you know whether you have succeeded or failed based on how you interact with others and how they can understand [00:15:00] what motivated you and what the project is all about and kids know whether or not their project worked or not. Speaker 4: One of the other things that distinguishes the program from a lot of other activities right now is that the projects aren't in response to a challenge that's posed by adults or organizers. The project visions come from the kids themselves, so they're very open ended. They're very broad. They're often extremely multidisciplinary, you know, combining in very natural ways, various branches [00:15:30] of science, engineering, art, music, and there's this unifying vision that pulls all those disciplines together. And I think the non-competition and open-endedness is one of the reasons that we see a higher percentage of girls than a lot of other programs. We're about 40% girls right now where I think a lot of other activities, science fairs and competitions are much more male oriented. Speaker 5: Is the way that the girls and boys approach a program different in any way? Speaker 4: Yes, there are a few gender [00:16:00] differences. I think that that that tend to occur, and not universally of course, but one is that the boys often want to work in small groups or alone, whereas the girls tend to want to work in larger groups. How large is large? Three or four is the typical size. Speaker 5: We had one group I think last year with about seven girls working together on a water totter. It was a pump that was powered by us. You saw, Speaker 4: I think another gender difference we've seen echoed in a number of projects. Has girls tend to want to work on things that are [00:16:30] socially beneficial and kind of right or or the hamster habitat. Whereas the boys often gravitate towards something that is a little edgier or more dangerous spits out fire. Yeah, fire is a good one. Yeah, and that's okay. One of our mottoes is, you know, anything cool is fair game. Do something cool, do something you're passionate about and it'll probably fit right in. Speaker 5: And how do you guys help recruit and improve mentors for this program? Speaker 4: Well, for recruiting, we've tapped into our [00:17:00] own social networks, so there are a lot of participants. For Pixar for instance, that are sort of natural born makers themselves. [inaudible] are interested in teaching. Speaker 5: Yeah. This upcoming maker fair I believe is our 13th event and at each one we have 600 to a thousand makers. So often what we'll do is we'll say a kid has a specific question, we'll try to find a mentor some times local, but sometimes they're okay with asking and answering questions from farther away. When the makers [00:17:30] would sign up for maker fair, we would ask them, would you be willing to mentor? I think for this round we actually took that question out because we found that most makers, again, because of that generosity of spirit that characterizes the bay area, and I think makers in any place, they don't say no when you ask them a question because they're for there to be more people like them that have this innate curiosity. So they're, they're happy to fuel that. Speaker 4: We also get people finding the website and you know, hearing stories like this [00:18:00] and they are drawn into the program through those means as well. Speaker 6: You are listening to spectrum on k a l LX today. We're talking to Tony Darrow's, a Pixar and Michelle Lupica of maker media about the young makers program that helps students create an exhibit, their projects and maker fair. Speaker 4: Another great example is a boy in Arizona, Joey Hoodie. So we got to talking with Joey, created a project, brought it to maker fair. It was a pneumatic marshmallow cannon and we'd come to find out that [00:18:30] Joey suffers from Aspbergers syndrome, but he's just flourishes in the making community. So he came to maker fair. He had a great time. I think they've been to basically every making event in every city since then. And it was really exciting to see him invited to the White House who was a wonderful picture of Joey and the president and this, it's the most wonderful you probably just off camera. Yeah. But the, the look on President Obama's face is just priceless. You know, his, his jaw dropped basically. So it was just, [00:19:00] I think it'd been a life changing experience for Joey and, and hopefully can be for a lot of other similar kids. Speaker 5: The kids at the next table. Two are in the New York Times picture kind of cowering in horror. They watch him launch this marshmallow into the wall of the state room. I'm also interested in if any of the young makers who have made projects before are interested in coming back and being mentors. Are they sort of Gung Ho about continuing the program? Speaker 4: We don't have a long enough track record to have kids that have graduated, come [00:19:30] back as mentors. Most of them that graduate go off to college. Typically studying engineering programs. What we have seen as some of the more advanced and older young makers mentoring some of the younger young makers in the program. And that's another reason that the club model is really nice because there's not only enter age learning, but we've seen intergenerational learning. In fact, we had one team last year where there was a young maker, the father was the main mentor and the grandfather was also participating. The grandfather was kind of an old school electrical [00:20:00] engineer and the project was to build police car instrumented with various sensors and sounds. So the grandfather's first reaction was, you know, let's build custom circuits for each of those functions. And somebody in one of the blessings sessions suggested looking at Ardwino, which is a, an embedded microprocessor system. And so they ended up adopting Ardwino for the project. The, the young maker ended up teaching the grandfather about embedded micro control software. [00:20:30] And so the, the learning goes both ways. How can people get involved with young makers next year? If you're interested in participating in the 2013 season of young makers, go to young makers.org there's a signup link on the left margin. We'll get you on our mailing list and we'll let you know as the season starts to spin up and can people expect Speaker 7: from maker fair in a couple of weeks. Speaker 5: So maker fairs coming up May 19th and 20th Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Expo Center. It's this fun filled weekend of DIY. Do it yourself. Technology and art is a little bit like burning [00:21:00] man without the drugs. Sandstorms and unity. The team that was working on the water totter. They were thinking of making a three hump lump from Dr Seuss, but scaled back. I think the original is a seven Hump Hump. We have everything from the Coke Zero Mentos fountains and that architect, which is a performance of Tesla coils and heavy rock music, which is fantastic to [00:21:30] 600 other people showing off their projects and arts, crafts, engineering, green design, music, science, technology, rockets and robots, felting, beekeeping. We've got it all. If you want more information, go to maker fair.com that's m a k e r f a I r e.com. Don't forget the e. It's the greatest show and Chow on earth. Thank you both for joining us. [00:22:00] Thank you for having us. It's been great. Thanks. Speaker 6: A regular feature of spectrum is a calendar of some of the science and technology events happening in the bay area. Over the next two weeks. We say Katovich and Brad swift join me for this. Speaker 8: One of the most fundamental questions in biology is why we age. On Monday May 7th the Department of Molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley will present the seminar cellular metabolism, aging and disease from four to 5:00 PM at the Lee Ka-shing Center. [00:22:30] The featured Speaker is Donica Chen from Berkeley Center for nutritional science and toxicology. Chen will address the aging process and therapeutic targets to slow down aging,Speaker 7: putting water online. On Wednesday May 9th the floating Sensor Network Team will conduct a major experiment. They will launch the complete 100 unit floating sensor fleet and introduce the fleet and its realtime sensing capabilities to the public. Wednesday morning. The fleet will be launched [00:23:00] from Walnut Grove, California and cycled through the Sacramento River Georgiana SLU environment for the rest of the day at 4:00 PM in sweetheart or dye hall and the UC Berkeley campus. There will be around table discussion and public seminar. During the round table discussion, water researchers will explore the implications of this emerging sensing technology on the future of California's water management challenges. For more information or to RSVP for the event contact Lori Mariano. [00:23:30] Her email address is laurie@citrus-uc.org the general meeting of the bay area and Mycological Society is on Thursday May 10th from seven 30 to 9:30 PM in room three three eight of UC Berkeley's Kaushal and hall. At Speaker 3: this free event, you can have your mushrooms identified and then listen to an 8:00 PM presentation by Alan Rockefeller on the mushrooms of Mexico. He discusses his extensive fieldwork from his most recent format strip as well as other trips over the past five years in seven [00:24:00] Mexican states. He'll show images of the edible poisonous in psychoactive mushrooms. Yes collected DNA sequences, phylogenetic trees, micrographs, and mushroom food. For more information, visit www.bayareamushrooms.org nerd night. San Francisco is celebrating their second anniversary soon. We all have the organizers on spectrum. On June 15th they host a monthly gathering of nerds with three presentations and drinking on the third Wednesday of every month at the rickshaw [00:24:30] stop, one 55 fell street at Venice in San Francisco. The 24th installment will be an audio show on May 16th doors at seven 30 show at eight and mission has $8 I'm excited to have two of my friends give me in Texas time around UC Berkeley. POSTDOC Brian Patton discusses atomic magnetometry. Megan Carlson talks about [inaudible] the art of super cute and Logan Hesser weighs in on the vagaries of the English language. For more information, visit sf.internet.com that's [00:25:00] s f dot. Nerd and ite.com and now for some science news headlines. Here's Lisa Katovich and Brad Swift. Speaker 8: A study presented at the experimental biology conference in San Diego in April reported that migraine sufferers are more likely to experience brain freeze by bringing on brain freeze in the lab and volunteers and studying blood flow in their brains. Researchers from the Department of veteran affairs, the National University of Ireland in Galloway and Harvard Medical School [00:25:30] found that the sudden headache seems to be triggered by an abrupt increase in blood flow in the anterior cerebral artery and disappears when the artery constricts. The findings could eventually lead to new treatments for a variety of different headaches. This dilation. Then quick constriction may be a type of self defense for the brain because the skull is a closed structure, the sudden influx of blood could raise pressure and induced pain. This vessel constriction may be the way to bring pressure down in the brain before it reaches dangerous levels. Drugs that block [00:26:00] sudden vessel dilation or target channels involved specifically in the vessel. Dilation of headaches could be one way of changing a headaches course and that would be good news for the approximately 10% of the population that suffers from migraines. Speaker 3: Will Johnson sent in an ars technica summary of an April 22nd nature physics article by Zau Song, Ma and others from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Quantum entanglement is a process by which 14 one particle into a given state can make a second particle go into [00:26:30] another given state, even if it is far away. Ma's team has shown experimentally that through a process known as delayed choice entanglement swapping, the result of a measurement may be dependent upon whether entanglement is performed after the measurement. They use the pulse ultraviolet laser beam and Beta [inaudible] boray crystals to generate two polarized entangled photon pairs, we'll call them photons one and two and photons three and four photons one in four have their polarities measured. Photons two and three are each delayed [00:27:00] and then subjected to either an entangles state measurement or a separable state measurement, but the choice of this measurement determines what was measured for photons. One in for this quantum steering of the past challenges, the ordinary notion of space time, Speaker 7: DNA traces cattle back to a small herd domesticated around 10,500 years ago. All cattle are descendant from as few as 80 animals that were domesticated from wild ox in the Near East some 10,500 years ago. According to a genetic study reported by science daily [00:27:30] and international team of scientists from the National Museum of Natural History and see n r s in France, the University of man's in Germany and UCL in the U K we're able to conduct the study by first extracting DNA from the bones of domestic cattle excavated in Iranian archeological sites. These sites. Date two not long after the invention of farming and are in the region where cattle were first domesticated, the team examined how small differences in the DNA [00:28:00] sequence of those cattle as well as cattle living today could have arisen given different population histories using computer simulations. They found that the DNA differences could only have arisen if a small number of animals approximately 80 were domesticated from wild ox. The study is published in the current issue of the journal of molecular biology and evolution Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 2: [00:28:30] Okay. Speaker 9: The music you heard during today's program was by lost Donna David from his album folk and acoustic. It is released under creative Commons attribution only. License version three point here. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 9: spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick Carnesi, and by Brad Swift Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 9: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible]. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Tony DeRose and Michelle Hlubinka discuss Young Makers, a collaboration between Pixar, the Exploratorium, and Maker Media to connect kids with adult mentors to develop projects for the Maker Faire (May 19-20, 2012 in San Mateo). www.youngmakers.orgTranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 3: Hi, I'm Rick Karnofsky. Brad swift and I are the hosts of today's show. We are speaking with Dr Tony Rose who got his graduate degree from cal and is now the head of research at Pixar [00:01:00] and Michelle who Banka the educational director for our Riley and maker media. They are here to discuss the young makers program, this collaboration between Pixar mic magazine and the exploratorium teams, young people with adult makers to create and construct amazing projects for the maker fair. Each year they'll talk about the program and what you might expect to see from the teams that this year's maker fair at the San Mateo Fair gowns on May 19th and 20th how you might get involved next year and about the future of educating and encouraging more young people to make more things in the [00:01:30] physical world. And please stay tuned for a chance to win tickets to the maker fair after this program. Tony and Michelle, thanks for joining us. Thanks. It's nice to be here. Yeah, thank you. And can you tell us a little bit about the young makers program? Sure. I can start. The Speaker 4: program was based, at least in part on my own family's experience where several years ago, my older son who's always loved to build things, grew out of Legos and we realized there was nothing for him to really graduate into until we discovered maker fair in 2006 [00:02:00] so we went to maker fair a couple of times as spectators and then starting in 2008 we started creating our own projects to share and we had such a great time and we all learned so much that the young makers program is an attempt to try to bring that sort of experience to other kids and other families. Speaker 5: Tony came to us, uh, make and make are fair and was also having a conversation with our collaborators, Mike and Karen at the exploratorium about potentially doing some work that could get more kids [00:02:30] excited about science and technology. We all agree that this is something that really needs to be done and we're all excited about working together. Let's do it. So that can was 2010, right? We launched a pilot and we had 20 kids come create projects, which they exhibited at maker fair that year. Everything from a hamster habitat that functions also as a coffee table to a fire breathing dragon, all things that the kids came up with of their own design and worked with [00:03:00] mentors to create over the space of a few months leading up to maker fair. Speaker 4: So Michelle said in the pilot run in 2010 we had about 20 kids. Last year we had about 150 participants total. About a hundred were cads and a hundred were adult supporters in various roles, mentors and club managers. This year we have about 300 so we're growing pretty rapidly and what we're trying to do now is start to think about how to scale beyond the bay area and help to create similar efforts and at least other metropolitan regions, if not, you know, even rural [00:03:30] regions Speaker 5: nationally or eventually internationally. Eventually internationally. There's nothing that would constrain this to the U s we're already international. I think we have a group in Calgary, Alberta. Right. That's started up. And do you see an advantage or disadvantage? Young makers is mostly outside of schools. Speaker 4: It started mostly outside of schools, but we're really looking for early adopter kind of teachers like Aaron at the lighthouse school to see if we can adapt it to in school. School curriculum is a really complicated thing, so we don't want [00:04:00] to be gated on, you know, widespread immediate adoption. So we're trying to develop a lot of models and materials and resources and best practices in whatever setting we can run the fastest, which happens to be informal out of school after school. But I think a lot of the materials that we're developing will hopefully be usable by teachers address toward academic curriculum during the school day. Speaker 5: Hmm. I'm just to follow up on the lighthouse charter school. Sure. So we're hoping they're going to be [00:04:30] a part of a project that we're doing to get more making back into high schools. So I'm sure you know that a lot of schools have been getting their technical arts programs, technical education, really. They've got lots of vocational ads. They've also been calling these, we're trying to reverse that trend and we got some funding from DARPA to work on getting, making back into schools and it's called the makerspace project. So we are trying to find 10 schools in California this year and then a hundred the following year and then a thousand the year after that [00:05:00] all around the country have thousand and this is to try to create those kinds of shop spaces. So this kind of thing is happening at lighthouse charter school already, but we'd like to see a lot more of it happening. Are there other corporate sponsors that are interested in joining the program? Yes, there has been a lot of uh, corporate interest in getting involved with the maker movement. And so as part of that we are starting the maker education collaborative. Do you want to say something about that Tony Speaker 4: w [00:05:30] what are the motivations for the, the collaborative is w w we began to realize that there are so many different ways to connect kids with making the young makers program is, you know, out of school typically more ambitious, middle and high school level. But you could change all those traces to be in school younger. And so there's a whole bunch of variations and probably so many variations that no one company or no one organization could, could do it. But if you look at the [00:06:00] various different programs that could be created, there's a lot of overlap in the, in the needs and the resources and so one of the things the collaborative is trying to do is pull together a common platform so that as companies or organizations want to launch something, they don't have to start from dirt. There's a big network that they can plug into and you know, get off and running really quickly. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 6: you are listening to the spectrum on k a l ex [00:06:30] today we are talking with Michelle [inaudible] of maker Media and Tony de Rosa Pixar about the young makers program that promotes young people to make fantastic things. Speaker 5: Maker fairs, this really family friendly event. Tony came with his family and what we love about the family model is that it's a really nice way that people have been able to engage and get closer and work together with their kids. [00:07:00] In the way that I think we imagine happened back in the Norman Rockwell era a lot more than it does today. Now that we're much more in a screen-based society. But part of our job is getting kids to either get away from the screens or only use those screens when they need to find out what they need to do to get back off the screens again. What's certainly interesting coming from someone from Pixar who makes it relatively passive entertainment, right? Speaker 4: Right. But if you think about the, the, the kinds of people that we have now and that we [00:07:30] want to continue to hire, they're, there are people that know how to learn on their own. They work really well in groups. They're highly multidisciplinary. And those are, those are exactly the attributes that, that the young makers program is designed to develop. And the kids that participate have those traits. We're just trying to, you know, help, help them grow in all those ways. And one of the nice things about the, this more ambitious project that we have this year is it's not just our family, it's, it's five families working together. So it becomes really a community building [00:08:00] activity. And you know, the neighbors that walk by, you know, get drawn in because they see all this crazy stuff going on in the driveway and it, so it's just a really wonderful healthy thing that everybody can contribute to and feel good about. So you touched upon the kinds of people that Pixar is interested in. Are there other things that set Pixar and O'Reilly and exploratory in that part that make them natural fits for sponsors? Well, for one thing, we're not afraid to make mistakes. So when we started working on this program and none of us [00:08:30] knew how this was going to work, so in true maker spirit we just sort of jumped in and were figuring out stuff as we go. Yeah, we all appreciate, yeah, the Speaker 5: learning by making, I think all of us appreciate story in a different way. Mike and Karen, especially at the exploratorium, are very good about documenting the work that they do and sharing that story and helping other museums explore that same theme. Tony, obviously I Pixar, they're in the business of making stories and we're all about hunting out those stories and sharing them with others. Speaker 4: What do you think of [00:09:00] creativity in digital environments? I think we're all fans of creativity in whatever form it takes. My younger son is really into Minecraft right now. One of the things you can really see is his facial reasoning has become incredibly honed. He can go into one of these environments that he's built and you know, they're very extensive. He can, he can navigate through those. Those amazes very quickly. It has become a community thing too. So he has friends that, you know, get out and play together. [00:09:30] You know, I think you can take anything too far and so we have to work to dial that back a little bit. But I think our point of view is that there are lots of burgeoning virtual opportunities for creativity. Minecraft is one video editing, web design, but the opportunities to express creativity in physical form is diminishing. And that that's the trend we're trying to reverse. Speaker 5: What kinds of things did you make when you were younger? Uh, well I am well known in my circle of friends for making calendars [00:10:00] of all things. I had a character named to Bianca, obviously a pseudonym for Mays who went on adventures around the world and then I tried to pack in as many facts into this calendar as I could. So I did oodles a research trying to find something related to my theme every year. So one year it was being, it goes to ancient Egypt, it goes to the art museum and so I tried to find facts for every single day of the year to share with people. Part of the reason I left those calendars though is [00:10:30] because I was getting more and more excited that we learn in a hands on way. And so the kind of pedagogical stance of this fact filled trivia based calendar had nothing to do with hands on learning and so I've been trying to resolve them. Speaker 5: What do you think makes for a good project for the young makers? I think the most important thing for a project to have is that the person making it has a passion about it and is excited [00:11:00] to make it. Usually the more successful projects also have something a little bit quirky or unusual about it. Sometimes bringing together two disparate things that nobody has put together before. So I'm trying to think of a great example of that habitat combat for example of bringing together a need for a base for a hamster to live and wanting it to be an attractive centerpiece [00:11:30] of a living room in the form of a coffee table. If that would be an example of a quirky approach to solving your problem. Speaker 4: I think a couple of other attributes that make a project, you know really worthwhile as to is for the team to pick a project that is just beyond or maybe even a little bit further than just beyond their current abilities so that when they complete it they really feel a sense of accomplishment. It's not a done deal going in. There's, there are all sorts of twists and turns and one of the challenges that the mentors are posed [00:12:00] with is how do I assess the skills of the team and help to dial in so that you hit that, that sweet spot that's just, it's ambitious but not too ambitious. It's just a natural part of the process to hit failures and roadblocks and our approach is learn from the failures and figure out how to get around the roadblocks and pick up the pieces and go on. So for us, failure isn't something to be avoided. It's something to be embraced and, and learn from. Speaker 5: And are most of the projects finished to completion? [00:12:30] We were, we've been doing Speaker 4: very surprised the, my expectation anyway was we might get completion rates of maybe 30 to 50% something like that. And we've seen typically more like 80% completion rates. So Speaker 5: it's amazing how motivating a deadline is. Is it? A lot of that completion has to do with, we work very hard to help them find the mentoring that they need in order to complete it. I remember last year, something that seems like it was going to be pretty simple. [00:13:00] A couple of girls will not, the project wasn't simple, but finding them a mentor seemed like it would be simple. They wanted to create a pedal powered car. So we tapped into some of our bike networks because as you can imagine, the bicycling network and the network of people who are excited about making overlap pretty heavily sent out email after email. And then we discovered that part of the problem was that these girls were making it at their school, Lighthouse Charter school here in Oakland. They're working on their project at school, but they don't have the facilities for fabricating [00:13:30] and doing the welding there. And so it's also a matter of trying to get the kids to the fabrication facility or get that convinced that bike guy to haul all the welding stuff probably on his bike to lighthouse charter school. So those are the kinds of things that we're trying to figure out in these first few years when we're doing the mentor matching. You're listening to the spectrum on k a l, X. Today Speaker 6: we're talking with Michelle Lupica of maker Media and Tony de Rosa Pixar [00:14:00] about the young makers program that encourages young makers to team with adult mentors to make fantastic projects and show them off at the maker. Speaker 5: Okay, and do you think the kids who don't finish still get a lot out of the program? Oh yeah, so they, they did finish, I want to say they did finish it. It was a beautiful pink pedal powered bike, but what it meant is that, you know, as we were getting closer and closer to that deadline of maker fair, we had to work harder and harder to persuade someone to come and [00:14:30] work with them and help them achieve what they were trying to do. But they of course I think also had to scale back a little bit. That's a big part of this is setting real expectations for what can be accomplished in time for it. One thing that we're very excited about this program in contrast to other programs is that we really put an emphasis on exhibition of our competition. This is an where you know whether you have succeeded or failed based on how you interact with others and how they can understand [00:15:00] what motivated you and what the project is all about and kids know whether or not their project worked or not. Speaker 4: One of the other things that distinguishes the program from a lot of other activities right now is that the projects aren't in response to a challenge that's posed by adults or organizers. The project visions come from the kids themselves, so they're very open ended. They're very broad. They're often extremely multidisciplinary, you know, combining in very natural ways, various branches [00:15:30] of science, engineering, art, music, and there's this unifying vision that pulls all those disciplines together. And I think the non-competition and open-endedness is one of the reasons that we see a higher percentage of girls than a lot of other programs. We're about 40% girls right now where I think a lot of other activities, science fairs and competitions are much more male oriented. Speaker 5: Is the way that the girls and boys approach a program different in any way? Speaker 4: Yes, there are a few gender [00:16:00] differences. I think that that that tend to occur, and not universally of course, but one is that the boys often want to work in small groups or alone, whereas the girls tend to want to work in larger groups. How large is large? Three or four is the typical size. Speaker 5: We had one group I think last year with about seven girls working together on a water totter. It was a pump that was powered by us. You saw, Speaker 4: I think another gender difference we've seen echoed in a number of projects. Has girls tend to want to work on things that are [00:16:30] socially beneficial and kind of right or or the hamster habitat. Whereas the boys often gravitate towards something that is a little edgier or more dangerous spits out fire. Yeah, fire is a good one. Yeah, and that's okay. One of our mottoes is, you know, anything cool is fair game. Do something cool, do something you're passionate about and it'll probably fit right in. Speaker 5: And how do you guys help recruit and improve mentors for this program? Speaker 4: Well, for recruiting, we've tapped into our [00:17:00] own social networks, so there are a lot of participants. For Pixar for instance, that are sort of natural born makers themselves. [inaudible] are interested in teaching. Speaker 5: Yeah. This upcoming maker fair I believe is our 13th event and at each one we have 600 to a thousand makers. So often what we'll do is we'll say a kid has a specific question, we'll try to find a mentor some times local, but sometimes they're okay with asking and answering questions from farther away. When the makers [00:17:30] would sign up for maker fair, we would ask them, would you be willing to mentor? I think for this round we actually took that question out because we found that most makers, again, because of that generosity of spirit that characterizes the bay area, and I think makers in any place, they don't say no when you ask them a question because they're for there to be more people like them that have this innate curiosity. So they're, they're happy to fuel that. Speaker 4: We also get people finding the website and you know, hearing stories like this [00:18:00] and they are drawn into the program through those means as well. Speaker 6: You are listening to spectrum on k a l LX today. We're talking to Tony Darrow's, a Pixar and Michelle Lupica of maker media about the young makers program that helps students create an exhibit, their projects and maker fair. Speaker 4: Another great example is a boy in Arizona, Joey Hoodie. So we got to talking with Joey, created a project, brought it to maker fair. It was a pneumatic marshmallow cannon and we'd come to find out that [00:18:30] Joey suffers from Aspbergers syndrome, but he's just flourishes in the making community. So he came to maker fair. He had a great time. I think they've been to basically every making event in every city since then. And it was really exciting to see him invited to the White House who was a wonderful picture of Joey and the president and this, it's the most wonderful you probably just off camera. Yeah. But the, the look on President Obama's face is just priceless. You know, his, his jaw dropped basically. So it was just, [00:19:00] I think it'd been a life changing experience for Joey and, and hopefully can be for a lot of other similar kids. Speaker 5: The kids at the next table. Two are in the New York Times picture kind of cowering in horror. They watch him launch this marshmallow into the wall of the state room. I'm also interested in if any of the young makers who have made projects before are interested in coming back and being mentors. Are they sort of Gung Ho about continuing the program? Speaker 4: We don't have a long enough track record to have kids that have graduated, come [00:19:30] back as mentors. Most of them that graduate go off to college. Typically studying engineering programs. What we have seen as some of the more advanced and older young makers mentoring some of the younger young makers in the program. And that's another reason that the club model is really nice because there's not only enter age learning, but we've seen intergenerational learning. In fact, we had one team last year where there was a young maker, the father was the main mentor and the grandfather was also participating. The grandfather was kind of an old school electrical [00:20:00] engineer and the project was to build police car instrumented with various sensors and sounds. So the grandfather's first reaction was, you know, let's build custom circuits for each of those functions. And somebody in one of the blessings sessions suggested looking at Ardwino, which is a, an embedded microprocessor system. And so they ended up adopting Ardwino for the project. The, the young maker ended up teaching the grandfather about embedded micro control software. [00:20:30] And so the, the learning goes both ways. How can people get involved with young makers next year? If you're interested in participating in the 2013 season of young makers, go to young makers.org there's a signup link on the left margin. We'll get you on our mailing list and we'll let you know as the season starts to spin up and can people expect Speaker 7: from maker fair in a couple of weeks. Speaker 5: So maker fairs coming up May 19th and 20th Saturday and Sunday at the San Mateo Expo Center. It's this fun filled weekend of DIY. Do it yourself. Technology and art is a little bit like burning [00:21:00] man without the drugs. Sandstorms and unity. The team that was working on the water totter. They were thinking of making a three hump lump from Dr Seuss, but scaled back. I think the original is a seven Hump Hump. We have everything from the Coke Zero Mentos fountains and that architect, which is a performance of Tesla coils and heavy rock music, which is fantastic to [00:21:30] 600 other people showing off their projects and arts, crafts, engineering, green design, music, science, technology, rockets and robots, felting, beekeeping. We've got it all. If you want more information, go to maker fair.com that's m a k e r f a I r e.com. Don't forget the e. It's the greatest show and Chow on earth. Thank you both for joining us. [00:22:00] Thank you for having us. It's been great. Thanks. Speaker 6: A regular feature of spectrum is a calendar of some of the science and technology events happening in the bay area. Over the next two weeks. We say Katovich and Brad swift join me for this. Speaker 8: One of the most fundamental questions in biology is why we age. On Monday May 7th the Department of Molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley will present the seminar cellular metabolism, aging and disease from four to 5:00 PM at the Lee Ka-shing Center. [00:22:30] The featured Speaker is Donica Chen from Berkeley Center for nutritional science and toxicology. Chen will address the aging process and therapeutic targets to slow down aging,Speaker 7: putting water online. On Wednesday May 9th the floating Sensor Network Team will conduct a major experiment. They will launch the complete 100 unit floating sensor fleet and introduce the fleet and its realtime sensing capabilities to the public. Wednesday morning. The fleet will be launched [00:23:00] from Walnut Grove, California and cycled through the Sacramento River Georgiana SLU environment for the rest of the day at 4:00 PM in sweetheart or dye hall and the UC Berkeley campus. There will be around table discussion and public seminar. During the round table discussion, water researchers will explore the implications of this emerging sensing technology on the future of California's water management challenges. For more information or to RSVP for the event contact Lori Mariano. [00:23:30] Her email address is laurie@citrus-uc.org the general meeting of the bay area and Mycological Society is on Thursday May 10th from seven 30 to 9:30 PM in room three three eight of UC Berkeley's Kaushal and hall. At Speaker 3: this free event, you can have your mushrooms identified and then listen to an 8:00 PM presentation by Alan Rockefeller on the mushrooms of Mexico. He discusses his extensive fieldwork from his most recent format strip as well as other trips over the past five years in seven [00:24:00] Mexican states. He'll show images of the edible poisonous in psychoactive mushrooms. Yes collected DNA sequences, phylogenetic trees, micrographs, and mushroom food. For more information, visit www.bayareamushrooms.org nerd night. San Francisco is celebrating their second anniversary soon. We all have the organizers on spectrum. On June 15th they host a monthly gathering of nerds with three presentations and drinking on the third Wednesday of every month at the rickshaw [00:24:30] stop, one 55 fell street at Venice in San Francisco. The 24th installment will be an audio show on May 16th doors at seven 30 show at eight and mission has $8 I'm excited to have two of my friends give me in Texas time around UC Berkeley. POSTDOC Brian Patton discusses atomic magnetometry. Megan Carlson talks about [inaudible] the art of super cute and Logan Hesser weighs in on the vagaries of the English language. For more information, visit sf.internet.com that's [00:25:00] s f dot. Nerd and ite.com and now for some science news headlines. Here's Lisa Katovich and Brad Swift. Speaker 8: A study presented at the experimental biology conference in San Diego in April reported that migraine sufferers are more likely to experience brain freeze by bringing on brain freeze in the lab and volunteers and studying blood flow in their brains. Researchers from the Department of veteran affairs, the National University of Ireland in Galloway and Harvard Medical School [00:25:30] found that the sudden headache seems to be triggered by an abrupt increase in blood flow in the anterior cerebral artery and disappears when the artery constricts. The findings could eventually lead to new treatments for a variety of different headaches. This dilation. Then quick constriction may be a type of self defense for the brain because the skull is a closed structure, the sudden influx of blood could raise pressure and induced pain. This vessel constriction may be the way to bring pressure down in the brain before it reaches dangerous levels. Drugs that block [00:26:00] sudden vessel dilation or target channels involved specifically in the vessel. Dilation of headaches could be one way of changing a headaches course and that would be good news for the approximately 10% of the population that suffers from migraines. Speaker 3: Will Johnson sent in an ars technica summary of an April 22nd nature physics article by Zau Song, Ma and others from the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Quantum entanglement is a process by which 14 one particle into a given state can make a second particle go into [00:26:30] another given state, even if it is far away. Ma's team has shown experimentally that through a process known as delayed choice entanglement swapping, the result of a measurement may be dependent upon whether entanglement is performed after the measurement. They use the pulse ultraviolet laser beam and Beta [inaudible] boray crystals to generate two polarized entangled photon pairs, we'll call them photons one and two and photons three and four photons one in four have their polarities measured. Photons two and three are each delayed [00:27:00] and then subjected to either an entangles state measurement or a separable state measurement, but the choice of this measurement determines what was measured for photons. One in for this quantum steering of the past challenges, the ordinary notion of space time, Speaker 7: DNA traces cattle back to a small herd domesticated around 10,500 years ago. All cattle are descendant from as few as 80 animals that were domesticated from wild ox in the Near East some 10,500 years ago. According to a genetic study reported by science daily [00:27:30] and international team of scientists from the National Museum of Natural History and see n r s in France, the University of man's in Germany and UCL in the U K we're able to conduct the study by first extracting DNA from the bones of domestic cattle excavated in Iranian archeological sites. These sites. Date two not long after the invention of farming and are in the region where cattle were first domesticated, the team examined how small differences in the DNA [00:28:00] sequence of those cattle as well as cattle living today could have arisen given different population histories using computer simulations. They found that the DNA differences could only have arisen if a small number of animals approximately 80 were domesticated from wild ox. The study is published in the current issue of the journal of molecular biology and evolution Speaker 9: [inaudible].Speaker 2: [00:28:30] Okay. Speaker 9: The music you heard during today's program was by lost Donna David from his album folk and acoustic. It is released under creative Commons attribution only. License version three point here. Speaker 2: [inaudible]Speaker 9: spectrum was recorded and edited by me, Rick Carnesi, and by Brad Swift Speaker 2: [inaudible].Speaker 9: [00:29:00] Thank you for listening to spectrum. We are happy to hear from listeners. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via email. Our email address is spectrum dot k a l s@yahoo.com join us in two weeks at this same time. Speaker 2: [inaudible] [00:29:30] [inaudible]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Many movie animation techniques are based on mathematics. Characters, background, and motion are all created using software that combines pixels into geometric shapes which are stored and manipulated using the mathematics of computer graphics. Software encodes features that are important to the eye, like position, motion, color, and texture, into each pixel. The software uses vectors, matrices, and polygonal approximations to curved surfaces to determine the shade of each pixel. Each frame in a computer-generated film has over two million pixels and can have over forty million polygons. The tremendous number of calculations involved makes computers necessary, but without mathematics the computers wouldn.t know what to calculate. Said one animator, ". . . it.s all controlled by math . . . all those little X,Y.s, and Z.s that you had in school - oh my gosh, suddenly they all apply." For More Information: Mathematics for Computer Graphics Applications, Michael E. Mortenson, 1999.