Well, this is fairly addictive: The Travel IQ Quiz from TravelPod
I’d love to have every kid in the class with a computer to take this thing, or pieces of it, to drill on it, and I’d love the ability to add new stuff to it.
How’d you do? What do you think — are there classroom possibilities here? (I’ve tried to make the widget work, below . . .)
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(The Life of Reason, vol. 1: Reason in Common Sense)
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump:
Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control. My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it. BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub
Love this! Thanks!
It has now taken up many an hour at more than a few workplaces, as I have passed it around and received many a response with “scores.”
It turns out I don’t know my African countries very well…
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I drew Upper Volta one year for Model UN. It’s now known as Burkina Faso, which is sorta near Benin, which should be familiar to all long-time readers of Doonesbury; I can sorta place it on a map. Senegal always throws me for a moment.
But so far, nothing in Mali. Which reminds me — wasn’t the big rock festival in Mali this past week? I had a post planned back there, somewhere . . .
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I always get places in Africa that I’ve never heard of. I just guess that its around the little part that looks like it fits with South America, most of the countries in Africa are there anyway.
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First time I tried it, I made it to the 12th level. Not since. It’s like bowling. I bowl a 189 game after five years away, then a 60, then a 50 . . .
But I can improve with practice. I fell to 9th level, now usually just miss the 12th. Map study in between sessions.
And guessing. It keeps naming cities in China I’ve never heard of. I pick a place far from the places I know, it usually works.
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I can’t get past the second to last level….famous places – very hard. My high score is just over 400,000 though. Everyone in my house loves this game. Thanks for posting it. Have you beaten it yet Dad?
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Hey! Glad you like our game. You can chat about strategy and compare scores with other Traveler IQ addicts in our discussion group at http://www.travelpod.com/forums/index.php?showforum=118
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Evolution is an old science, random mutation however is a relatively new perspective on evolution. For more through understanding, Evolution is very much like Newton laws. They are statement of observation, proven immediately from intuition and constant verification. Evolution theory is not a theory on how different species came to existence, rather it is a statement that different species can derived from other species.
Unlike, the game however, in real life, information are measured by bits. The great thing about bits is that no matter how you modify them it still make sense unlike langguage. When, random mutation is discussed for DNA, it is the information they are talking about, the sequence mutate just a little. More importantly, there are several constraints that must considered, thus the so called random mutations isn’t truly random at all.
As an anecdote, the creation of most particles from electron to heavy molecules has been deciphered and proven. As physicist gain more perspective, we find that coincidence has a huge part but if constraints are taken into account, we find that it is the most obvious routes.
More correctly, it is the natural selection that guides random mutations and not the other way around. So, if the game were to truly immitates evolution, it must have constraints. For example, words can only be replaced by random words not letters or only the structures can be changed and so on. As you can see, random mutation is sensible if natural selection is there to guide by setting in constraints.
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I always wanted to teach with this find–
Random Mutant Intelligent Evolution Quick Guide, http://www.randommutation.com/
Actually, it is a good visualization of how small changes in the pool of letters beget major differences, even over a small piece of time. Even better, Mr Marshall’s statement reflects selection against some results so he doesn’t see new “information” (English words/sentence).
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Try the Native Access to Engineering Programme which has a newsletter and lists of useful “games”
http://nativeaccess.com/mailman/listinfo/nae_nativeaccess.com
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I tried this quiz last week some time since I have an online job which isn’t too busy over the holidays. I shared it with a colleague in Uruguay who loved it. In our school district, I’ll run an idea by everyone–e.g., I’m thinking of adding educational games to the library website. What do you think? Do you have any suggestions? One person will write back with suggestions that are on a gaming site that has non-educational games as well. I decide, no one cares, so I’ll do what I want until someone tells me I can’t. So far I’ve come up with 3 geography games, several word games, two anatomy games, and http://www.freerice.com. Thanks for reminding me about this one because now I’ll remember to add it on Monday. I’ve found lots of potentially useful games on this ESL’s teacher’s site: http://larryferlazzo.com/english.html He blogs as frequently as you do.
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Mike Huckabee congratulates Canada on its “national igloo”
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/05/mike-huckabee-congra.html
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“Geography 101
“In light of what is happening in Pakistan it ought to give us pause as to why are so many illegals coming across these borders.”
Mike Huckabee on immigration. Associated Press, December 28th”
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10445566&fsrc=RSS
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I fell just short of getting past the world capitals – hard. I had 289000 points and needed 300000. Some of the countries, I had never heard of. In other cases, it was a matter of being able to be precise enough to pinpoint.
You will be proud to know that I only missed Dallas by 35 km, but I hit Houston when I intended to hit New Orleans.
Thanks for the diversion.
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