How can I use this tool in our homeschooling curriculum?

1. Brainstorming. Do your students write short stories, novels, poems, letters, reports, or blogs? Every writing assignment begins with brainstorming. Lists for Writers gets your reluctant writer writing! By scanning various lists like Seven Basic Plots, for example, your writer may be able to hone in on a plot for his story. Developing outlines for the main characters in the story can be as easy as picking random character traits from the various character lists, or browsing for ideas or suggestions and carefully selecting something that fits.
2. Spelling and Vocabulary.Spelling or vocabulary lists could be extracted from the lists for further exploration. Most of the lists do not provide definitions (the phobias list is an exception), so that could be an additional level of study.
3. Geography. Use the lists of U.S. and World cities to match cities to states and countries by quizzing one another.
4. Drawing. Practice your artistic skills by drawing a person and outfitting them from items on the clothing list! This could get crazy! Another interesting drawing exercise: draw a picture utilizing one or more of the colors from the colors list.
5. Nature Study. Find natural occurring objects (plants, animals, minerals) that contain colors from the list of colors. Draw in a nature journal and write a description.

These are just a few ways you can use Lists for Writers in your daily homeschooling life!

Do you have an idea? Please share in the comments section! We love a good brainstorming session!

We’ve been working very hard over here at Gifted Homeschooling on our new startup: Thinkamingo! It’s been a very interesting venture going through the incorporation process, and more importantly, the iOS app development process. We are a family business that designs and develops educational apps for mobile platforms.

Our first app – Lists for Writers – was recently approved (yesterday!) and is now available for purchase in the iTunes App Store. We like it, our kids like it, and we think you will like it, too!

We are very excited to be on this journey as an entrepreneurial family! Yes, indeed, the kids are involved. Are they employees? Not really, but they do a number of tasks including: research and development, marketing, concept brainstorming, content writing, illustration, and testing. They have some other duties that are much less intellectual and creative like tidying up the employee breakroom (the kitchen table), light janitorial work (emptying trash bins), and other miscellaneous tasks related to the mailroom, gadget charging, etc. They have been very involved in the naming, corporate identity, and app idea brainstorming. Nurturing creative and skilled entrepreneurs seems to be the direction we’re going with our school goals.

It’s the real world out there and in here, at our kitchen table. Welcome.

Kids aged 10 1/2 to 14 can go on a learning adventure with VANISHED, a new game from The Smithsonian Institution and the MIT Education Arcade, funded by the National Science Foundation. The centerpiece of the game is using critical thinking skills to solve a mystery. Museum education, applied science, and online interactivity with experts at the Smithsonian are just a small part of this experience!

You can read more about it at Smithsonian.com and register at http://vanished.mit.edu/user/register. The fun starts on April 4, 2011, so don’t delay! Get signed up today! It’s free!

Storymatic is a box of 500+ cards with character and story ideas.

Rory’s Story Cubes is a set of six dice with different idea icons.

Dropbox

Dropbox also saves revisions of files. If you save your work regularly (or use auto-save), you can go back to an earlier version of the file. This can save you from wiping out your work in Word or even recover an accidently deleted file.

Dropbox also does file sharing. My wife and I also have Dropbox accounts and it was easy to set up one folder that’s shared with the entire family. Now when our daughter wants to show us something, instead of emailing it to us, she can just copy the file to the Family folder and we all get a copy on our computer. We also use it to copy files to the one computer that’s connected to the printer, since I haven’t gotten around to figuring out what’s wrong with the printer sharing on our network.

Dropbox can also share files online. By default, all your files are private and encrypted. But if you copy a file to your Public folder, you can right-click on the file and copy a web site link to that file.

Dropbox comes with a free 2 gigabytes of storage. You can upgrade to a paid account to get 50 or 100 gigabytes. If you use my referral link, we both get an extra 256 megabytes for free.

1. Take it easy on them. You don’t want to let them get away with making bad moves (that won’t improve their chess), so don’t just pretend to not see things. But you should intentionally make mistakes of your own and help them see how to take advantage of them.
2. Remove pieces from the stronger player. This is a traditional way to play chess with a handicap. You can remove as little as one pawn (and different pawns cause different problems) or as much as both rooks and the queen. This makes for a challenging and interesting game for the stronger player.
3. Switch places. Play through the opening and switch places once you get into the middle game. A good time to switch is right after they make a big mistake. Switch sides and let them figure out how to take advantage of their own mistake.
4. Let them make more moves to start the game. Give them two, three or four moves to start the game. They shouldn’t be allowed to move past the 4th rank as white (or 5th as black).
5. Use a clock. Give the stronger player 10, 7, or even 5 minutes while the weaker player has 30 minutes or more. Kids will still stress out and try to play fast moves, so you will constantly have to remind them to slow down and think.

But whatever you do, don’t let them take back moves. That’s a bad habit to start. They should still have to take back illegal moves, such as where a piece moves incorrectly or if the move results in check or doesn’t get them out of check.

For more ideas, Wikipedia has an entire article on chess handicapping.

[photo courtesy striatic]

The game is getting quite old, but it runs well on Windows XP. It does have some occasional glitches and it crashes on my PC about once every dozen combat rounds, but I’ve never lost a robot design or anything. I just have to fight a battle again.

The computer’s artificial intelligence (AI) for your computer-controlled opponents is fairly weak except for one particular robot, Emergency. Older kids and grown-ups will find good attack patterns that work over and over again against all the bots. This doesn’t take too much away from the game, but it is an oddity. The one tough bot, Emergency, is quite a challenge and shows what the game could have been. There are some hacks available on the web that will add more difficult AI for the other bots, but we haven’t tried them yet.

The multiplayer mode is difficult to keep working. We’ve had a lot of times where we just could never get connected multiplayer. Even if we get connected, the game often lags or loses connection. It’s bad enough that we rarely even try to run multiplayer any more.

The design and construction of the robots is the real winner in the game. The designer starts by drawing out the shape of the robot. Then components are added, usually starting with motors and wheels followed by weapons and batteries. Then the whole thing has to be wired up to work with the remote control system.

There are several types of motors, wheels, batteries, and different linking parts. Each has a tradeoff like weight versus power or strength. The different motors draw different amounts of electrical power so working out what type of batteries and how many of them is also a factor.

The weapons include ram plates, spikes, circular saw blades, hammers and axes. There are also pneumatic actuators powered by compressed air so a weapon can quickly thrust, if you have room for the air tank.

There are THREE different weight classes in the game which is how bots are categorized. Cost isn’t considered so you have an unlimited budget. In each weight class you face a different set of computer controlled robots, with different strengths and weaknesses.

It’s a great game for robot enthusiasts and even has some educational value.

1. Play with a clock. For some reason, kids love playing chess with a clock. A real clock is best, but in a pinch there are quite a few software clocks you can download for a laptop or PDA/smartphone.
2. Play Blitz. With only 5 minutes for each player, there is very little time to think. You get to play a lot of chess in a short period of time and get to make lots of mistakes to think about.
3. Play “the pawn game”. Only play with pawns, starting from their usual spots. Win by promoting a pawn or capturing all the opponent’s pawns.
4. Practice endgames. Set up just a couple of units in random spots around the board and play until a draw or checkmate. King vs. king and two rooks is a good starter, or a king and a couple pawns on each side.
5. Play Crazyhouse. On their turn, instead of moving, a player can add a new piece to the board to match ones taken from the other player. (Bughouse is a popular four-player two-board chess variant played at many kid chess club meetings.) There’s some debate about how much chess players learn from this, but it beats not working on chess at all.

[Photo via gadl.]