The Rubik's Cube Cookbook

It has been some time since my last blog post; I've been spending the past few months deeply ensconced in the student teaching engagements that make up the very last part of the work that I have to do in order to earn my elementary and secondary teaching credentials from the State of Virginia through the FAST TRAIN program.

But in the midst of all the lesson planning and delivery, I took some time out to write up a 30-page manual on how to solve a Rubik's cube. My wife, Lora, and I have been sponsoring a weekly after school activity entitled, "Math Games, Puzzles, and Fun" (for students Grades 2 through 4), and we promised the students that we would do a special focus on the Rubik's Cube. Not finding a clear, concise, and age-appropriate set of Rubik's Cube instructions on the Internet, I undertook to write my own after teaching myself how to solve the Cube by watching some very good YouTube videos (which are blocked here in China).

So, here is the fruit of my labors:

The Rubik's Cube Cookbook, version 1.0

It may still not be age-appropriate for the youngest kids that we were teaching (second graders), but it did serve as a useful guide to me as I talked some of them through the various algorithms for solving the Cube. It was slow-going for a few weeks, but two of the second-graders I was working with finally completed solving the Cube last Tuesday (April 27).

If the "Cookbook" might be of use to you, please feel free to download it for yourself or your students!!

Follow-up to "My First Take on Ubuntu"

As I was sitting in a Starbucks in Tianjin this morning doing some quick research on the "Schools Interoperability Framework" (my background in the data integration world makes me naturally curious about such things), I also ran across two recent well-written blog postings regarding the possibilities for widespread adoption of Ubuntu, one decidedly pro (by Christopher Dawson) and one unwaveringly con (by Jason Hiner).

While it is unwise, particularly in the realm of competing computer technologies, to say that a particular technology will never succeed, at this point in the game both my personal experiences with Ubuntu and the hard stats presented in the graph in Jason Hiner's posting indicate to me that the broad introduction of Ubuntu into a primary/secondary school environment is not currently a good idea (although I always want to regularly keep my finger on the pulse of alternatives to both Windows and Mac operating systems). It remains unfortunately true that FREEWARE ISN'T FREE -- the total cost of ownership is more than just the dollars and cents entailed in license fees.

Action research into metacognition development

As we are "reporting" on our Professional Portfolio website, my wife, Lora, and I have been doing some interesting work with her Grade 2 students in developing their reading skills (or more importantly, their ability to oversee the development of their own reading skills).

As we say on our site:

In working with the Grade 2 students at the International School of Tianjin, we have discovered a straightforward yet quite effective use of Flip camera technology in the classroom for development of metacognition skills in the language arts program.

Check out the full descriptive text and the accompanying documentary videos (showing of few of Lora's students in action) on our website.