Category: creativity
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Martian Perchlorates in Minecraft Education
My middle school computer science students are wrapping up the last project in our “Minecraft Mars” or Coding Mars” unit this month. (In April 2025) In this unit, my 6th, 7th and 8th graders use Microsoft MakeCode for Minecraft to make a “robot” (their “agent”) autonomously farm different kinds of plants, build protective glass domes…
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Our Family: Ghibli Style
Wow, the Substack article, “The Colors Of Her Coat” by Scott Alexander taught me several new things: For deeper reading see “Welcome to the semantic apocalypse: Studio Ghibli style and the draining of meaning” by Erik Hoel. Via Ethan Mollick’s March 30th Substack article, “No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation – When Language Models Learn…
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Media Kit Lesson
Today in my middle school web design class, we wrapped up a multi-week unit and project I call our “Image and Video Media Kit.” In this post I’ll summarize the unit and share the techniques I used for student presentations this semester, which went smoothly. You can access this full lesson (including sample media kits…
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Coding Mars
This is an audio recording and the presentation slides from “Coding Mars with Minecraft Makecode and Scratch,” my presentation on March 25, 2025 at the NCMLE ‘Middle School Matters’ Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. The session description was: Build a Mars Colony In Minecraft with Robots and Code? YES! In our middle school computer programming class,…
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NFC Sticker Automation
Here’s a geeky tale for you. We have an old Bluetooth stereo in our car that does not support CarPlay, and it irritatingly connects automatically to my iPhone in the mornings before school when I start the vehicle to warm it up. This evening I successfully configured a NFC sticker (37 cents each in a…
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NotebookLM Introduces Me
Tonight’s Jason Neiffer #edtechSR inspired AI experiment: I asked Google’s NotebookLM AI model to take my bio, resume, vitae, portfolios, etc and create a “deep dive” podcast, sharing an audio introduction of me for a diverse audience. It’s 12.5 minutes long, and surprisingly insightful. I added it to my “About” page and posted it to…
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AI Created Video Clips
One of the powerful ways artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms can be used by media creators is to identify short clips in longer videos which are potentially engaging for audience members, and then facilitating the process of making those clips into shorter videos that can be shared on social media. In this post I’ll highlight how…
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Scratch Coding Resources
I received an email earlier this year from a teacher in South Africa who is interested in starting a school and including coding in the curriculum. I finally responded to that message (yikes!) asking for links to CODING RESOURCES I use and have shared, including resources for using Scratch coding from MIT. These are the…
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Favorite Digital Utilities
What are the websites, web services, and software applications you use regularly and can’t imagine doing without? I call these my “favorite digital utilities,” and today I created a specific webpage for them on my curriculum / lesson sharing website which is built with Google Sites. As an example, I used the website Flickr to…
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Visualizing Off-Planet Habitats
My middle school computer programming students are continuing to work on our “Coding Mars” unit, in which they are using Minecraft MakeCode to simulate the 3D printing of structures and habitats which Icon of Austin, Texas, is under contract with NASA to do first on the moon / the lunar surface and (ultimately) on Mars.…