CREATE Lab

Door Prize: 1 Finch Robot donated by birdbrain technologies.

 Dear Educators, 

Dear Educators, 

Kyempapu is a grassroots non-profit organization that is committed to community development, environmental management, and poverty alleviation in Kirinda, Uganda and its surrounding communities. Kyempapu was founded in 2009 and works out of Kirinda, Kitanda sub-county, about 140 kilometers from Kampala. 

Kyempapu would like to welcome volunteers from all over the world.

Accommodation is free and you can apply here www.kyempapu.wordpress.com 
We work with schools, communities ,youth groups and women in the fields
of education, sports, health and social work so whoever is interested
should contact us.
Below are some of the pictures of our students.
Kindly contact me in case this information is not enough to bring it out clearly.

Kind regards,

Sylvia Namukasa
Director
KYEMPAPU
www.kyempapu.wordpress.com

Sylvia was introduced to CREATE lab through one of our gigapan Dialogues teacherAlejandra Lorenzo-Chang, International Program Coordinator at the Waldorf School of Baltimore. Sylvia and her team is working to implement gigapan in the Uganda area and asked us to post this information to our blog. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me Clara Phillips clara@cmu.edu or Sylvia Namukasa:sylviabofry@gmail.com

Mathias demonstrating  the Gigapan to some KYEMPAPU volunteers.

(download)

Click here to download:

volunteer-opportunity-in-uganda-gmpsHzAzpvvDqrkqtsyh.zip (15.72 MB)

Taiji and Sage installing the first WaterBot.

Hello CMU Create Lab! I was involved in the installation of WaterBots in Frick Park, and was asked by Jessica Pachuta to write an entry for the blog. I hope this is okay!

On Saturday March 24^th, after being delayed by torrential downpour and flood warnings, we were finally able to install the final 5 WaterBots in the 9-mile run watershed. Jessica from CMU’s CREATE lab, Taiji from PPC, and myself (Sage, a high school student externing at PPC) spent the entire afternoon setting up the bots. The adventure took 5 hours of tromping through the creek in (leaky) waders, countless zip-ties, and a pit stop at McDonalds, but the weather was great and we all enjoyed being outside!

I’m a senior at the Ellis School, and this year I had the opportunity to have an externship with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. This spring, in addition to being a crew leader at several of the PPC’s volunteer work days, I am going to collect data and monitor the WaterBots. So far, there have been some technological issues which hopefully have already been solved! A far more concerning issue is the missing WaterBot. WaterBot 0009 has mysteriously disappeared, though fortunately all the others are exactly how we left them. Hopefully a reason other than theft will present itself, but considering how well it was anchored down, other explanations seem unlikely. But despite this dilemma, I'm very excited to get to work with the CREATE Lab's WaterBots this spring!

-Sage Lincoln

Dear Educators,

I would like to invite you to a Hands-on Gigapan Training

on April 10, 2012 from 6pm - 9pm 

Please RSVP below by: April 6, 2012 

If you would like to receive ACT 48 credit, please note in your RSVP 

We run this class once a month so if you cannot make to this one, please sign up for our mailing list HERE and I will keep you posted when another class is scheduled.

CREATE lab also holds on site trainings for team of educators so if you are interested please contact us: clara@cmu.edu

Class Location: 

http://create.posterous.com/pages/newell-simon-hall 

Carnegie Mellon University

Newell Simon Hall - NSH 3305

 During the three hours training, you will learn: 

-The basics settings on camera and gigapan

-Take your own gigapan image

-Stitch and upload at least one image to the gigapan.org site

-Explore gigapan.org 

-See the variety of ways people are using gigapan technology to empower others

Expectations:

-Share your knowledge with others.

-Create meaningful snapshots. Find out what this means in class!

Class Requirements:

-create a free gigapan account: //gigapan.org/createAccount.php 

-watch at least one of the video tutorials: http://create.posterous.com/gigapan-beta-video-tutorials 

Looking forward to seeing you in class.

Best,

Clara Phillips

CREATE Lab Community Outreach Coordinator

Carnegie Mellon University

Robotics Institute

5000 Forbes Ave

Pittsburgh, PA 15213

clara@cmu.edu

tel:   (412) 268-2568

in a guest post by Prof. Illah Nourbakhsh

"Six counties are preparing to take on WaterBot on a larger scale in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, epicenters of the Marcellus Shale drilling controversy. As schools and citizen groups take this on, adopting local waterways, measuring them and sharing the data using Fusion Tables, we believe citizens’ abilities to directly impact policy will be greatly amplified, armed as they will be with real data that is easy to visualize and communicate in powerful ways." read the full post

The Marshall University Early Education STEM Center is one of the Professional Development Schools piloting the Arts and Bots project.  The project, originally started for middle school girls, has expanded to include both genders as well as other ages.  This is the first time the project has been used in elementary grades as well as pre-k. Many thanks to graduate assistant Lee-Dorah Wokpara for taking on this task and being creative and flexible with the curriculum. Children were encouraged to make a plan and draw a design before creating their robot.  We can't wait to see what the children come up with! 

(download)

Click here to download:

arts-and-bots-robotics-in-pre-k-vJFEADtsFCFDjqeBfFEp.zip (23.54 MB)

This gigapan by Clare M. shows Caroline with three legs! We were shooting street scenes in East Liberty and the East Liberty Presbyterian Church; we are slowly but surely gathering images of places of worship along with other various landscapes and urbanscapes.

Karen Kaighin
Ellis School