Sunday, April 24, 2011

Nepal Micro Hydro

The distribution of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) into the developing world including places without mains power or internet, raises the question of appropriate power technologies. A selection of small hydro schemes in Nepal below are particularly interesting in that none have road access.

Water wheel grinding cornflour

This one below Ghandruk, in the Annapurna region. There are many water mills in the region.




1 kW approximately micro hydro
Provides power for the tea house at Deurali Pass, near Ghorepani.




10 kW approximately micro hydro

This provides power for the village of Ghandruk.








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Windows errors in public places

My collection of Windows errors in public places:

Buenos Aires


Kathmandu
Vancouver

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Friday, April 08, 2011

Turtle division drill

Source

Challenge:
This could be turned into a 2 player online game. Writing to the screen is shared in a shared session. Add a score display and displace one player left and the other right.
Hint: you cannot remotely erase the other player's screen but you can draw a blank rectangle.

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Wednesday, April 06, 2011

TurtleArt die or spinner


Enter the number of faces (2-9) and then it tosses the die when you press a key.
source

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Monday, April 04, 2011

Fractions and decimals 4th grade maths

Fractions
TurtleArt project to meet outcomes 4N3 to 4N6 in the 4th grade math curriculum. Enter a single digit numerator and denominator to hit a target which is expressed as a decimal 0<1.

Open the source and paste into TurtleArt.
Could be improved with rewards and score.

Multiplication version
Source

Counting
Enter the number of balloons. If the turtle hits the top balloon, all are popped.

Source

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Sunday, April 03, 2011

Turtle flip and rotate, 4th grade maths

An activity in Turtle Art to meet the 4th grade curriculum item "4.G.7 Describe and apply techniques such as reflections (flips), rotations (turns), and translations (slides) for determining if two shapes are congruent"

A number of shapes are randomly generated (in this prototype just a right angle triangle and a trapezium) unrotated and unflipped on the left and randomly rotated and flipped on the right. The student flips and rotates to match the two polygons.

In boxes (variables) 11 to 19, the trapezium is stored, distance, rotation, distance, rotation ... and terminated buy -1. Similarly, the triangle is stored in variables 21 to 27.

poly is a random number, either 10 for the trapezium or 20 for the triangle. Rotate is a random number, (0-7) x 45 and flip is either -1 or 1.

The program loops, waiting either a 'F' key, 102 or a 'R' key, 114. The polygon is drawn once on the left unflipped and unrotated (netflip =12 and netrotate =0) and drawn once on the right flipped and rotated (netflip = flip x userflip and netrotate = rotate + userrotate)

drawpoly draws the polygon specified in box 11-19 or 21-27 terminating on a -1 value, the polygon has rotation and flip specified in netrotate and netflip.

The activity could be improved with a score or reward system, sideways translation, more polygons and randomly congruent and incongruent pairs

Source

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