Month: December 2017

OTR Links 12/29/2017


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Your own coat of arms


2017 is rapidly coming to an end and Canada 150 with it.

If you’ve been paying attention, there has been so much to learn about our history and culture this past year.  There have been so many events that were positive and also a great deal of learning from our past that not everything has been perfect.  Hopefully, we’ve learned from the past and will be better going forward.

Now, if your family is big into history, you may well have a very complete understanding of your past and you might even have your own Coat of Arms.  I’m thinking that, if you do, you have it engraved on silverware, hung on the wall, and emblazoned on your housecoat.

If you’re like me, you have “none of the above”.  Well, my housecoat has something on it that came when it was purchased…

If you feel like you are missing something historically, then you’ll be excited to know that Global Television has a Coat of Arms generator just for you.  You answer a few questions and one is created.

Here’s mine.

coat-of-arms

Of course, if your mood changes, you can go back in and create a new one.

Want to make your own?

Click the “Get Started” button here.

OTR Links 12/28/2017


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Three Dice


I have to thank Vicky Loras for bringing this idea to my attention.  It’s a perfect little game to play with your kids over the holidays.  Put away those electronics and all of the other Christmas gifts and bring out three dice.  (But play this example first)

 

three

Now, if you have difficulty in finding dice, maybe you could bring out just one device to play this game and head over here to roll some virtual dice.

Dice

The game is simple enough and for those of you who complain that your kids are not getting enough of the basics, you’ll love it.  All that you have to do is use the basic arithmetic operators + – × ÷ between the dice to see how many results that you can get between 1 and 10.  That’s it!

I played around a bit with it and before I knew it, I had played the concept way too long.  You see, I had done a number of other things

  1. I solved the answer in the original post
  2. I then played by the rules and the three dice site and generated results
  3. I put the results in a spreadsheet so that I could keep track of them
  4. Then, I tried to force myself to find the answers “in order”.  i.e. 1 first, 2 second, 3 third, etc.
  5. I programmed my Micro:bit to generate and light up the numbers
  6. I wrote a Scratch program to generate the numbers and then modified it to do the various calculations and display the results

It was fun.

But then I stepped back and looked at the six things that I had done.  And, you know what?  My satisfaction level was with playing the original game with pencil and paper.

Technology isn’t always the answer.

OTR Links 12/27/2017


Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.