Location, location, location...

Boy of boy, time really flew tonight. At least the mystery location was revealed . I was impressed. We had quite a few accurate calculated guesses.

But first, the agenda:

• Mystery location
• Brainstorm
• Places of interest
• Useless but cool

Mystery Location
I asked the question: Where would we end up if we were to dig straight down into the ground right here where we're standing in Port Elizabeth and keep tunneling through the Earth? And the answer is... Hawaii!!!. Map tunneling tools freely available on the internet - like this one - show us that we actually end up in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean. That point is pretty much surrounded by the USA. We have California to the right, Alaska at the top, and Hawaii at the bottom. Since Hawaii is the closest landmass to our exit point we will attempt to contact a school in Hawaii and Collaborate with them.

Brainstorm
We spent some time on the carpet and brainstormed a couple of things to do with the Hawaiians. Some of the ideas we came up with are: to try and have a Skype session with them at some point (even though they are 12 hours behind us); Write a letter (old school) and mail it off to them and and see how soon we receive our reply (This could be a nice way of demonstrating the usefulness of email over snail mail); compete in a real time online educational game; dress up one of our club members as we traditionally think of Hawaiians (that will be funny); do "a day in the life of an Hawaiian" as a small play; create a tour of SA using Google Earth and Google Maps. The idea is for us and the Hawaiians to do the same activity for each other.

Places of Interest
The SCC club members were given some homework. Each person have to nominate a place of interest here in South Africa which we will use in our virtual tour. It could be a natural place like our wonderful Table Mountain or a man made place like uShaka. Club members don't need to provide information about the place but they must at least be able to say where in SA it is.

Useless but Cool
I checked out some rather useless websites courtesy of Larry Ferlazzo. Although these websites don't serve much of an educational purpose I thought we can let our hair down a bit after our wonderful Strange & Unusual Jobs project.

One such site is Burger King's Subservient Chicken. Basically it is a man dressed in a chicken suite who carries out basic instructions you type into a space provided. Things like sit, walk, run, jump, sleep, and even split are accepted and the chicken pretty much allows you to make a fool of him by obediently doing what you say. Like I said - no educational value but its just a bit of fun. You can play corporal to your own chicken by clicking here.

Another website is Free Rider. They say this site is supposed to teach you about physics. I guess the fact that you need to understand how gravity and momentum works could have some value but I definitely would not classify this website as being educational. That said, I was hooked for about 2 hours. You start off with a man on a mountain bike which you can change to a unicycle, hot air balloon, helicopter, 4 X 4, etc. You then draw a line on which the man will ride his bike. You have to be aware of how he reacts to uphills, downhills, bumps, etc. You can try it out by clicking here.

Lastly I showed the members an online version of the popular game Pictionary. It's great fun because you can play with people from all across the world in real time however I think that adult supervision might be necessary which is why I'm not even going to provide a link to it here.

Well, that said, it's time to sign off.

Diary
I next club meeting should be on Monday, 29 August but I will confirm with you closer to the time.

Until next time.