teaching machines

Prior Art

A year ago I made a little widget for visualizing the additive color mixing of RGB triplets. I had been teaching a course on front-end web development, and I wanted a tool to illustrate mixing that was easier to access than the traditional many-chambered Venn diagram. Just this week I discovered that my widget is […]

RGB Widget

I was sitting in a talk today when something made me think of how we represent colors in terms of red, green, and blue intensities. We often illustrate how these components mix together with a Venn diagram of three circles. The intersection of red and green is yellow, the intersection of green and blue is […]

Morse on Arduino

A few months ago, my seven-year-old son and I took a long car trip together. To redeem that time of extended idleness, we listened to The Mysterious Benedict Society, a novel about four orphans who team up against a mad scientist trying to take over the world. They regularly communicate with Morse code. My son […]

Comparing High-dimensional Objects

Lots of researchers have studied children’s perceptions of the size of multidimensional objects. Children compare two lines with reasonable accuracy, but how about comparing two rectangles of differing aspect ratios? Or two containers of liquid, one short and squat, the other tall and narrow? Based on a some experiments I read in Duckworth’s The Having […]

Combining Temperatures

I’ve been reading Eleanor Duckworth’s The Having of Wonderful Ideas, and I can’t go a page in the book without reading about an experiment that I want to try on my children. Last night I tried one about combining temperatures on my older sons, who are seven and five years old. Knowing that my seven-year-old […]