Category: creativity
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Scratch Animation Reverse Engineering
A teacher friend in Oklahoma sent me the following video clip, which I converted to an animated GIF via Adobe. Her question to me was, “How did the student code this in Scratch?” Apparently the student did NOT save the project, so the actual code is not available for inspection and analysis. This is a…
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Interactive Fiction Database and CYOA Video Stories
I grew up in the 1980s and loved reading “Choose Your Own Adventure” (CYOA) stories. From time to time, as an advocate of “Playing with Media” and “Show What You Know with Media” pedagogy and learning, I’ve created my own CYOA stories and helped others create them too. Today I learned about the “Interactive Fiction…
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Google Sites Comment Magic
For a long time, I’ve wanted a simple way for my students – in this case, my adult Sunday School class participants—to share comments directly on a webpage I’ve made with Google Sites. Google Sites doesn’t include a built-in commenting system in its “new” version which debuted in 2021. Commercial commenting widgets like Elfsight can…
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Creating YouTube Shorts with Descript.com
I recently created and published a series of shorts for YouTube (videos less than 60 seconds long, all formatted with a portrait (9 x 16) rather than landscape aspect ratio from the 8 minute video of my speech at the No Kings rally, in Charlotte, North Carolina, on June 14, 2025. In this post, I…
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Vibe Coding with AI
Today I facilitated the webinar “Vibe Coding with AI” for the MediaEd Club of the Media Education Lab. I mainly shared stories of two of my recent vibe coding projects, “Packet Defender 2.0” and my “DIY Federated Reader.” Both of those projects are shared on my GitHub. Check out the recorded session video and session…
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Packet Defender 2.0
Back in January of 2025 I used ChatGPT to “vibe code” a project I named “Packet Defender.” This project was and is my attempt to use HTML and JavaScript to create a simple, text-based and web-based game to help my middle school web design students learn some of the basic terms and concepts about how…
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Vibe Coding for Flickr CC 4.0 Attribution
I’m excited to share a little “vibe coding” project I worked on today, building on the awesome work of Alan Levine and with a healthy dose of AI-powered assistance from ChatGPT 4o. If you’ve ever needed to generate properly formatted attribution for Creative Commons licensed images on Flickr, you probably know about tools like ImageCodr.org…
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RSS Converter for MastoFeed
In this post I’d like to share a way I’m streamlining sharing of my podcast recommendations to Mastodon, following the innovative lead of Alan Levine. (CogDog) Striving to imitate (some of) Alan’s digital breadcrumbs on Mastodon, I’m now using using Pinboard to collect and organize links, including a dedicated tag for podcasts I recommend. It’s…
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Inspired by George Couros
This morning, I watched George Couros’ recent video from two weeks ago, How I Lost 120 Pounds & Changed My Life: Health, Confidence & Lessons in Self-Leadership. It’s about 20 minutes long, and I definitely recommend it: I watched this for several reasons. First, I’m continuing my own health journey alongside my spouse, and we’ve…
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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…