Looks like it’s time for TRWP Connect to wrap up Make Cycle 4 and wrap up another year skidding through the intersections between poetry and science. That doesn’t mean it’s time to lock up your microscopes and pencils; it just means it’s time for you to level up in your own time, in your own way. So good luck with that.
Our Coding Experience
We spent the beginning of April discovering how so much of our existence is encoded in microscopic strands of DNA. We finished out the month writing a little code of our own. (Take that, DNA!)
On April 25, Mozilla’s Chad Sansing talked with us about the value of learning to write computer code and the steps Make the Web is taking to help people empower themselves in digital spaces.
But before we were ready to dig into html, we thought about codes as tools for encryption. Jennifer Smyth’s students populated a digital landscape with their names coded in binary with Legos, while Taylor Lucas hosted a bead coding hack jam and Suzanne Moses challenged our decoding skills with a wingdings-encrypted message.
We also toyed with the idea of poetry as code. Josephus Thompson from The Writing Project treated us to a video about hacking haikus. Rob Puckett’s students hacked sites with Thimble to create their own Earth Day poems, as Ashley Hutchinson’s students captured themes from Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children in six-word poems.
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This slideshow requires JavaScript.
All of this–all of these intersections between poetry and science–beg us to keep moving, keep making. They ask us to be careful observers of the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds we live in. They ask us to study. To dig deeper. To know more. And to keep making meaning we can share with others.
Keep on posting your ideas, comments and makes in the G+ Community, and apply for the badges below to recognize the learning and making you did this academic year. Go to Credly, create a free account, and use the indiclaim codes to apply. Upload a picture, a video, a file, or a link to something you made during each make cycle to earn them all!
Claim Code:4CF-68A9-6B7
Claim Code:26D-0330-FC2
Claim Code: 24C-B5BF-803
Claim Code: 97B-CA96-115
We hope to see you again next year! In the meantime, contact Stephanie West-Puckett with questions, comments, or ideas of how you, too, can get involved!
Welcome to the final make cycle of 2015-16 Remix, Remake, Curate! At the beginning of the month, we explored DNA’s amazing way of coding the lives of every living thing. We will spend the remaining two weeks in April examining the idea of coded language in poetry and technology.
Think about the power of coding as a method of communicating a message. Bees encode messages about the location of fresh pollen in an articulate aerial dance, as early Homosapians once encoded stories of a successful hunt in glyphs on cave walls. The Navajo code talkers encrypted messages that aided American Marines’ success during WWII, just as today’s computer codes are powerful enough to give life to the World Wide Web. The ability to write these codes and decipher them is, indeed, empowering.
For this make cycle, you will begin with solving a code before progressing to creating your own low-tech/no-tech code, encoding a message in poetry, and hacking computer code with your poetic message.
You could even create an old-school cipher or use binary code to code the letter of your first name. Or, you could use beads to code your name, or a word that is important to you. If you would like to work with a friend, consider trying the “My Robotic Friend” activity. You could code your message into the stacked cups and then “solve” each other’s code. Just be sure to provide a “key” so that we are able to decode your message!
Make 2: Poetic Code
Poetry is another way of coding meaning. Part of what makes poetry poetry is the way it takes an idea or thought or experience and presents it in images and metaphors. The images and metaphors are what we read, but when we look more closely, those ideas come together. For this make, we’re going to ask you to create your message to the world. What message do you wish everyone around you could hear you scream out loud? What thought do you wish you could plant in people’s minds? We’re going to write just a single line of poetry to convey that message. Then you can share that message with the world when you remix your poem in HTML for our challenge make. Check out the video below.
Make 3: Remix Computer Code
Back in Make 2 you wrote your message to the world in poetic code. Now it’s time to publish it on the web by coding it in html.
To encode an idea in poetry relies on the selection and order of words and symbols and images that communicate emotion and thought. Coding in a computer language, such as html, isn’t much different. HTML, or hypertext markup language, uses a specific set of terms in a specific order to communicate a message. That html code becomes all the colors and fonts and images and information on a web page. If you want more details, Mozilla explains in greater detail how it all works. This make will take place after our hangout with Chad Sansing, so if you feel like you want extra support, be sure to join or view the hangout.
For this make, we challenge you to publish your message to the world on the web using Mozilla Thimble. Watch the introductory video below; then open our message to the world, click Remix, and get started. Play with it. Take risks. Have fun. Also, check out some of the resources below to add background patterns, or change colors and fonts. And don’t forget to share your work on Google+.
Level Up/Level Out
If you enjoyed messing with Thimble, level up by remixing Chad Sansing’s Homework Excuse Generator. This one adds a little javascript into the mix, but if you work through the tutorial, you can make something really clever. Try remixing it into a random story generator or a random compliment machine. Or come up with your own idea.
Or try hacking your poetic message into a news article using Mozilla’s X-Ray Goggles. It’s a relatively simple tool, but it introduces html in a creative way. This tutorial should help you get started.
What are your ideas for Leveling Up with codes and computer coding?
Materials and Inspirations
Computer with Internet access
Legos, pipe cleaners or yarn, beads, foam blocks or any manipulatives
Using Thimble? Use the links below to find pattern, color, and font codes you can plug into the CSS.
On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #imakesci.
If you have a blog, you can make and create in your own digital space and share to the community on twitter with the #imakesci hashtag or the G+ community
Join us for a Twitter ChatThursday, April 21 from 7:00-8:00 pm EST by following the hashtag #imakesci to talk about codes and coding.
Hear it from an expert! Join us on Tuesday,April 25 at 11:30 am EST as we host a Google Hangout with Mozilla’s Chad Sansing, who will answer our questions about the World Wide Web, coding, and the value of making the web. Send us an email (flinchm@pitt.k12.nc.us) if you want to participate, or look for the link in our G+ community to observe.
Now that you’ve thought about who you are both in body and your digital presence, what is your digital footprint? What are you leaving “out there” in cyberspace? Is this presence something you are proud of? Is it something you want other people to see today? In five years? What would your grandmother or future employers think of the web version of you? What power do you have to make and remake your digital footprint?
We wrote poetry, individually and collaboratively, during our Twitter chat, in making DNA poem sculptures, and by extracting poems from articles about DNA.
And, towards the end of this make cycle, we started exploring the ethical implications of working with DNA by imagining gene-spliced animals (is it a kion or a langaroo?) and crowdsourcing topics for articles on ethical issues in DNA.
DNA might be the path to it, but rest assured, we have no plans for this:
Rob Puckett’s Strawberry DNA meme.
As a reminder, here are some places to share and connect:
On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #imakesci hashtag. Keep using #imicro if you’re continuing to explore DNA. We also sometimes post pictures to Instagram under #imakesci or the tags for each make cycle.
If you have a blog, you can make and create in your own digital space and share to the community on Twitter with the #imakesci hashtag or the G+ community Remix, Remake, Curate.
Explore the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site for ways to connect digital media with writing and learning.
Reach out to us with questions or suggestions in the G+ Community.
Coming up
Feel free to keep extracting DNA, sharing poems, posting pictures, and slicing genes in our G+ community at any time! Feel free to jump in on this cycle if you are new or just keep going with it. Be on the lookout for the next make cycle, on HTML coding and web making, which starts this evening.
Thanks for participating – your contributions are inspiring, and it’s been exciting to know that we’re exploring a really complex scientific concept, like DNA, with participants from elementary school all the way to college and beyond.
Sincerely,
Welcome to Week 3 of our second year of Remix, Remake, Curate! For the next two weeks, we will explore DNA. We will focus on DNA coding, which allows for the massive storage of information on a cellular level. It can be surprising to discover how much data, or information, is stored in our own bodies. You will get a chance to extract DNA , a technique used by scientists who work with DNA regularly (such as crime lab technicians).
As with the last make cycle in this MOOC, you are welcome to join in where you can, tackle the makes that appeal to you, get out of your comfort zone and try something new, or show off skills you already have.
Make with me
During this make cycle, we suggest the following activities to guide an investigation of DNA.
The North Carolina Biotechnology Center also provides links to interactive resources about DNA, including information about the Human Genome Project:
Part 1: DNA Extraction
In the video below, Deb Bailey and Christy Flint, of the NC Museum of Natural Science’s Micro World Investigation Lab, walk us through the process of extracting DNA from strawberries. You can extract DNA from all kinds of living things – wheat, strawberries, and bananas are among the easiest.
If you’d like a written walk-through of the process, that’s available here. Show us what the DNA you extracted looks like by sharing a picture of your results through a tweet or post on our Google+ community.
If you would like to try a more challenging extraction, follow the directions in this YouTube video produced by NOVA to a very, very small amount of your own DNA by using a scraping from the inside of your cheek. Don’t forget to share your results or some more ideas by posting them on our Google+ community. To learn more about the DNA molecule, check out this DNA Factsheet from the National Institute of Health’s National Human Genome Research Institute.
Part 2: Extracted Poem
The process of extracting DNA from strawberries is much like the process of pulling a found poem from longer text. Check out these found, or extracted, poems on Pinterest – some of them are creating interesting images (as well as using interesting imagery).
As you examine these poems, consider the following questions:
How do you think the authors of these poems are deciding what words to keep?
How do the words they choose express a theme or central idea?
What strategies can we borrow from the authors of these poems?
In what ways do the images drawn on the page reflect the central idea of the poem?
What images might we use to reflect our ideas about DNA?
We invite you to create your own found poems using articles about DNA coding (for articles, check out the Resources section below). You can print paper copies of the articles to work with, or you can use digital tools to make a found poem by taking screenshots of the articles and using a drawing or image application, like MS Paint, GIMP, Pixlr, PicMonkey, Finger Draw, or You Doodle to isolate text and create an overlaying image. We’re pretty sure you know of some tools that we’re not aware of yet, and can’t wait to see what you use to make your found poems. If you find a new tool, make sure you share it in our Google + community.
Part 3: DNA Coding
Your DNA houses the information that made you, that shaped your development and continues to shape your interactions with the world around you on a biological level – those instructions are complex, and there’s a multitude of information in each cell of our bodies. In order to be stored in such a small space, that information gets encoded (much like the information stored in our computers is encoded, represented by 1s and 0s).
To decode the information stored in a cell’s DNA, the cell must first transcribe the DNA into a molecule called RNA (ribonucleic acid). The RNA then gets translated into a protein, which is made up of a sequence of amino acids. There are 20 different amino acids and proteins are made up of unique combinations of these amino acid building blocks. Amino acids are coded for by sequences of three DNA or RNA nucleotide bases, known as codons. There are 64 possible codons, so some amino acids are coded for by more than one codon.
You can experiment with using this kind of coding by translating your name into DNA onlineor with paper and pencil. You can post comments to our Google+ community in DNA code, and read others’ comments by copying them and translating them back to plain text. For further exploration, check out this Transcription and Translation Tool to translate RNA, DNA, and proteins. If you want a low-tech, paper and pencil version of the code, we also have one of those. See what the text of your found poem looks like in DNA code, or write a new poem and publish it in DNA code – the possibilities are endless! Be sure you share your DNA-coded writing in our Google+ community.
Part 4: Collaborative DNA Poems/Sculptures
For our collaborative DNA Poems/ Sculptures, you’ll work with others to write and assemble a poem that will serve as a three-dimensional model of DNA. Materials like sentence strips, dowel rods, cardboard, hot glue guns, duct tape, or any other materials you can think of will prove useful here.
Step 1: Punnett Squares
Trey Gass, of the Poetry Project, walks us through this step in the video below.
If you don’t have access to sentence strips, card stock, index cards, or chart paper can also work.
Step 3: Codons and DNA Models
Part of the fun is collaborating to make the model stand on it’s own – we can’t wait to see the solutions you engineer for your own poems!
We’ll continue posting links to articles, resources and other materials throughout the make cycle, so be on the lookout for more information in our Google+ community.
Materials and Inspirations
Camera or phone
Computer with internet connectivity
DNA Extraction:
One zipper-style sandwich bag
¼ cup water
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon unseasoned meat tenderizer
1 teaspoon Lemon Joy liquid dish soap
1 fresh, ripe strawberry or one frozen strawberry (allow enough time to thaw a bit) or one 2-inch piece of ripe banana or 1 teaspoon raw wheat germ
One 9-oz clear plastic cup (or any clear container that will hold at least 1 cup)
One spoon
2 tablespoons of cold 91% Isopropyl Alcohol (rubbing alcohol) – keep in freezer until needed
One paperclip, unbent into the shape of a hook
If extracting strawberry DNA:
an extra 9-oz cup to collect strawberry pulp
If extracting banana DNA:
One coffee filter
One funnel (or one rubber band and an extra 9-oz cup with a large hole in the bottom)
On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #imakesci.
If you have a blog, you can make and create in your own digital space and share to the community on twitter with the #imakesci hashtag or the G+ community
Want to know more about DNA coding? Join us on Friday,April 8 at 12:30 pm EST as we are hosting a Google Hangout to explore DNA coding with Dr. Christy Flint, coordinator of the Micro World Investigate Lab at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences.
We would also like to invite you to join us for a Twitter Chat throughout the day on Tuesday, April 12 (9:15-9:30; 10:45-11:00; 12:30-12:45; 2:00-2:15)where we will be writing a collaborative DNA-themed poem.
The posts just keep coming in! We hope to see them continue, but since it has been three weeks since we began our Bug Body Hack, we want to take a moments to celebrate the awesome creations our participants have made! We encourage you to keep making, hacking, sharing, connecting, commenting, and reflecting, and we encourage you to continue learning or thinking about something that you haven’t noticed or considered before– something about poetry, insects, making, the natural world, or learning in a diverse, open online community.
We started this make cycle by asking participants to use this handy chart to create a bug of their own using any found materials that they wanted to use. After viewing a couple of videos, we began by hosting an incredible Google Hangout with Dr. Colin Brammer, an entomologist with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. In case you missed it, you can view the hangout here:
The hangout inspired us to get going and create some very interesting arthropods. Although we focused on insects and spiders, some participants created and wrote about centipedes that played basketball or scorpions that lost legs! Although they were all amazing, a few highlights from our Google+ Community can be seen below:
Check out Violet’s original composition “I Wish I Was a Butterfly” as well as some bug hacks and amazing butterfly pics here.
First Graders Jack, Caleb, and Alyssa posted about their arthropods on our G+ Community. They used a tree map to help them get their stories going but were excited to take the story wherever they wanted it to take them and boy did it take them places!
Our friends at the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) annual meeting in Montreal last week made bugs from leaves gathered from the sidewalks around the conference center and remixed the cycles with some dialogic poems and some awesome rhythm circles. See more in this Storify summary.
We we rolling on the floor laughing at our bug personification ideas during our Twitter chat on October 15th. You can read some of our poetic contributions by checking out our Storify summary of the chat. Feel free to “steal” some of these ideas for a story of your own!
As a reminder, here are some places to share and connect:
Join our Google+ Community, Remix, Remake, Curate. Post your thoughts, questions, ideas, and especially your young people’s work here. Hack an arthropod body and take it to the next level with circuitry or a motor, record student poetry or stories, share their experiments, let them see what other kids are doing, and share feedback to their work.
On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #imakesci hashtag. Keep using #inatsci if you’re continuing to hack bug bodies or #icitsci if you’re continuing to visit your porch light and make observations and/or poetry.
If you have a blog, you can make and create in your own digital space and share to the community on Twitter with the #imakesci hashtag or the G+ community Remix, Remake, Curate.
Explore the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site for ways to connect digital media with writing and learning.
Reach out to us with questions or suggestions in the G+ Community.
Coming up
You are more than welcome to continue hacking or creating bug bodies, writing stories or poetry about your bugs, or even remixing Make Cycle 1 and 2 and sharing them in our G+ community at any time! Feel free to jump in on this cycle if you are new or just keep going with it. Be on the lookout for new programming coming in April 2016 during! We hope you’ll explore DNA Life-Making Code along with HTML coding and web making with us then.
Finally, thanks for participating in our Bugfest make cycles! We are thrilled with the response and the content you have created throughout both cycles and the way several participants are mixing them together. We are more motivated than ever to continue to find ways to explore the intersections between science, writing, and art thanks to your creative contributions!
Sincerely,
Welcome to Week 2 of our second year of Remix, Remake, Curate! For the next two weeks, we will explore the natural world of bugs. We will focus on two major classifications of bugs that most people commonly know: insects and spiders! It can be surprising to discover how little we know about them when we live with them almost every day. You will get a chance to remix the bugs that you saw in Bugfest 1 or explore your world to find new ones to make your own Bug Body Hack.
As with the last make cycle in this MOOC, you are welcome to join in where you can, tackle the makes that appeal to you, get out of your comfort zone and try something new, or show off skills you already have.
Make with me
During this make cycle, we suggest the following activities to guide an investigation of two types of arthropods: insects and arachnids (spiders).
Learn from the experts. Observe the insects and arachnids around you. If you can’t find any insects or if you just want to learn more, watch the video below of Dan Babbitt, manager of the Smithsonian’s Insect Zoo. Babbitt shows why the name of the zoo is a little imprecise. The Insect Zoo is home to all five major groups of arthropods—insects, arachnids, crustaceans, millipedes, and centipedes—all of which Babbitt defines. You might consider using one of the bugs you see in the video for Part 1 of this make cycle.
Here are some of the materials you might use to make your bugs. We will add leaves and twigs next week – to help our bugs blend in – when it is a little less soggy outside.
Part 1: Bug Body Hack or Remix your bug. Create your own bug using found items from cotton ball to leaves or some of the items you see in the images below. You can remix your bug any way you like, but keep in mind what makes a bug an “insect” versus an “arachnid.” Click here for a helpful Bug Body Hack Fact Chart. All five classifications of insects are listed on the chart, but we will focus only on insects and arachnids. As always, you can create your bug however you would like. Even in the arachnid world, they have remixed themselves and although they are usually spiders, arachnids also include ticks and mites! Show us what creative bugs you have hacked by sharing a picture of your bug through a tweet or post on our Google+ community.
If you would like to amp up your bug, you could add a motor from a toothbrush to make your bug move, add paper circuitry lights or solar lights, or share some more ideas by posting them on our Google+ community.
Part 2: Personify your Bug. Consider the personality that emerged from your bug. Consider how your bug may be different from you and similar to you. Jha’Mai from the Poetry Project also explains this part in the video below. You might find it useful to use the Bug Body Hack Fact Chart from Part 1 to help you follow along with the information on the body parts.
Click here for a template of a chart for higher levels that you might use to help you document and create a story/poem to personify your bug. For a simpler template using a thinking map, click here. Feel free to do these on chart paper or make your own if you are inspired to do so! For some ways to level up this lesson, you can take your bug on an adventure or write a story or poem from a different perspective (the tree, the chair, the predator, etc.). You can share your story through images, video, create a stop motion, or use any digital tool of your choice. For example, you could make a vine, make an interactive image using thinglink, or try out wevideo, just to name a few.
Part 3: Personify your bug with poetry and Twitter. Still need some inspiration? Watch this video from Nat Geo Kids for a quick reminder of the some of the differences and similarities between bugs and humans. You will get a chance to personify your bug with poetry by joining our Twitter chat on Thursday, October 15th using the hashtag #imakesci. Be on the lookout for more information on this live interactive experience in our Google+ community.
Materials and Inspirations
Bug Body Hack Chart
Bug Story/Poem Template Chart OR Bug Story/Poem Template Thinking map
Camera or phone
Computer with internet connectivity
Variety of found materials. Some ideas might include: cotton balls, pipe cleaners, leaves, empty water or soda bottles, plastic forks, twigs, felt, craft sticks, paper towel and toilet paper rolls, strips of paper, bottle caps, paint, wood scraps, tissue paper… and glue
On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #imakesci.
If you have a blog, you can make and create in your own digital space and share to the community on twitter with the #imakesci hashtag or the G+ community
Want to know more about the difference is between spiders and insects? Join us on October 7th at 8:30 am EST as we are hosting a Google Hangout to explore the diverse world of arthropods with Dr. Colin Brammer. Dr. Brammer is an entomologist and Co-Coordinator of Natural World Investigate Lab at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences.
We would also like to invite you to join us for a Twitter Chat on Thursday, October 15th at 12:30 am EST where we will personify our bugs using poetry.
Explore the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site for ways to connect digital media with writing and learning.
Reach out to us with questions or suggestions in the G+Community.
Finally
We hope you delight in using what you have learned about arthropods to create your own unique bug, and we hope you enjoy creating a story or poem to share your creation with others.
Wow! Our first make cycle is almost over! It’s been a fun two weeks and we’ve enjoyed seeing all of the great content you all have created during our cycle. We had some interesting weather that meant that the insects and other creatures coming to lights varied quite a lot during the last two weeks, but that’s part of what makes science interesting and exciting! Things change over time and it’s fun to be able to see that change first hand.
In case you missed it, we asked people to turn on a light at night and make some observations about what they saw and draw their favorite of the insects they saw. Participants then wrote poems (we focused on dialogic, or two voice, poems for this cycle) about their observations. We had some great responses! These are some of our favorites from our G+ community:
Chelse Lassiter did a superb drawing of a moth. The detail on this one was impressive!
David Greenwell shared an awesome poem performed with two voices that focused on one of the tiny moths that are common at lights in our area, but people rarely pay attention to.
Abigail Jones shared a wonderful audio recording of her poem about a conversation between a ladybug and a longhorn beetle.
Johnita Mitchell posted a hugely entertaining performance of her poem about a ladybug and a spider. The hand gestures and facial expressions make this one so fun to watch!
Lawson Marsh shared a great drawing of a moth with the group early in the make cycle. Lots of great detail in this one!
Breanna Alligood gave a live performance on our Google Hangout of her insightful poem that she wrote about the complex interactions between bugs and humans.
We had a great Twitter chat on September 24th that saw a lot of people contributing to the discussion. You can review the conversation by checking out our Storify summary of the chat.
And just today we discussed porch light insects, poetry, and science communication in our Google Hangout! If you missed it, you can watch the Hangout here:
As a reminder, here are some places to share and connect:
Join our Google+ Community, Remix, Remake, Curate. Post your thoughts, questions, ideas, and especially your young people’s work here. Record student poetry, share their experiments, let them see what other kids are doing, and share feedback to their work.
On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #imakesci hashtag. Keep using #icitsci if you’re continuing to visit your porch light and make observations and/or poetry.
If you have a blog, you can make and create in your own digital space and share to the community on Twitter with the #imakesci hashtag or the G+ community Remix, Remake, Curate.
Explore the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site for ways to connect digital media with writing and learning.
Reach out to us with questions or suggestions in the G+ Community.
Coming up
You are more than welcome to continue visiting your porch lights, writing poetry about the things you see, and sharing them in our G+ community at any time! We’d love for anyone who got excited about this make cycle to keep going with it. However, next week we’re moving on to make cycle 2. In it, you will examine the differences between spiders and insects. If you participate in this make cycle, you’ll be able to take a lot of what you learned and observed into the next two weeks.
Thanks for participating in our first make cycle! We are thrilled with the response and the content you have created throughout this cycle. It was a real pleasure interacting with you all and we hope that you learned some exciting and interesting things as you explored the intersections between science, writing, and art with us!
Welcome to Week 1 of our second year of Remix, Remake, Curate. For the next two weeks, we’ll be getting up close and personal with some of the inhabitants of the natural world who come out at night. We’ll be making field journals, poems, sketches, and more involving the creatures we observe at night, so turn on your porch light, and let’s get started!
With each Make Cycle in this MOOC, you are welcome to join in where you can, tackle the makes that appeal to you, get out of your comfort zone and try something new, or show off skills you already have.
Make with me
During this make cycle, we suggest the following activities to guide a study of natural night life:
Get to know the nightlife around you. Observe insects around a light at night. Turn porch light on and wait 30 minutes and visit the light to see what’s there. No porch light? No problem. Visit a building light or street light with a wall nearby.
Document what you see with words and images. Describe what you see during your observation. You might use this field journal template to help guide what you write, or you might branch out and chart observations in another way that makes sense to you. Need some help identifying what you see? Click here for a guide to insects that are attracted to light.
Use your phone or camera to photograph or videotape the insects you see during your observation. You might choose to do a real time video, a time lapse sequence of photos, a slow motion video, or a slide show of photos. Think about your most intesting observations and consider tweeting about them during our Twitter chat on Wednesday, September 23rd at 11:45am by following and tweeting with the hashtag #imakesci.
Here’s what Chris Goforth, head of citizen science at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science, saw when she set up a blacklight sheet to watch insects:
Make a visual remix. Now that you’ve seen some night time creatures through the lens of a camera, create your own visual interpretation of what strikes you about those images. You might choose to make a watercolor painting or sketch of one insect, or you might consider exploring scale and representing how one insect looks in comparison to another. You might even choose to draw or paint what the insect sees instead of how you see the insect. Show us what you come up with by sharing a picture of your image through a tweet or a post to our Google + community.
Remix Perspective Through Poetry. Consider what stood out to you in your observations, photographs, video, or drawings, and use this to compose a poem that has two voices. Double-voice poems are meant to give two perspectives, and those voice really come to life through performance. The idea is to consider what those two voices have in common and what separates them. What two voices will you choose? Your own and an insect’s? A moth and a flame? A spider and a fly? What did you see that deserves a voice? What is the relationship between these two voices?
These poems are meant to be performed and shared, so you might find a partner to perform your poem with you and give life to your words. We’d love for you to post your performances on our Google + community!
Want to collaborate with a class or group? Check out Katherine’s videos about how to make a collaborative bug poem. Here’s her guide for performing your bug poetry.
Materials and Inspirations
Field journal template
Camera or phone
Watercolor paints
Computer with Internet connectivity
Writing materials- paper, pen, etc
Paul Fleischman’s Joyful Noise, a book of poems for two voices
Places to Share and Live Events
Just a reminder, here are the handy links to places we’ve been using to share and connect.
On Twitter, we encourage you to follow and use the #imakesci.
If you have a blog, you can make and create in your own digital space and share to the community on twitter with the #imakesci hashtag or theG+ community
On Thursday, September 24th at 11:45am EST, join us on Twitter for a chat about night time observations, images, and more!
We will be hosting a Google Hangout to show off some of our nighttime insect discoveries and do a little writing on Thursday, October 1st at 9am EST.
Hi, everyone and thanks for signing up to join Year Two of Remix, Remake, Curate!
Spoken word poets Tre and Micah help last year’s participants turn observations into poetry in a YouTube video tutorial.
Our Fall 2015 programming starts next week, and we are excited that you will join us to explore the intersections of science and poetry in the world around us! Starting next Saturday, September 19, you’ll receive a newsletter like this one that provides you with a set of activities that you can follow along with in your classroom, your youth group, or on your own over the next two weeks.
Together, we’ll explore a particular scientific concept and practice and produce science and science media that you can share in our Google Plus community and on Twitter at the hashtag #imakesci. We’ll also host one “event” each week, either a Twitter chat or a Google Hangout, so that you and your young people can connect with the scientists, poets, and facilitators in real time. You are welcome to do as much or as little as you like with us as you adapt these events to your context and your goals as an educator or a learner. Overall, we hope that you learn something new about science and about poetry, do something creative with your learning, and have a ton of fun as you do it!
Preparing for the MOOC
Over the next week, you’ll want to get ready to make the most of this experience for yourself and the young people participating with you. Depending on the ages of the youth you work with, you’ll want to have them set up a Google Plus account and a Twitter profileOR set up a class or group profile for Twitter and Google Plus where you or other adults monitor young people’s content and postings. Last year many of our elementary and middle school participants set up class profiles to connect with us and most of our high school students engaged with their own accounts.
In addition, some of our groups participated only on Google Plus or only through Twitter. We’ll stream information through each channel so you can stay connected either way. Finally, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with both Google Hangouts on Air and with Twitter chat procedures if you want to connect directly with poets, scientists, and teachers over the two weeks. We’ll send out invitations to participate, and you can join us live or watch/read the archived videos or chats later in the week. Remember that you can reach out to local technology facilitators for help, and don’t hesitate to contact our own project director Stephanie West-Puckett (westpucketts@ecu.edu) for virtual assistance anytime.
Sneak Preview of Make Cycle One
Get ready to become a citizen scientist and study the night-time insects in your backyard or neighborhood! During Make Cycle One (September 20- October 2), we’ll ask participants to flip on their porch lights or find an existing wall or street light and observe and document what they see. Participants might take photographs, draw or sketch particular insects, describe them using words, or combine these ways of documenting to gather as much information as possible. You might do this for one night or for a week or more–it’s up to you! Facilitators will share guides and how-to’s for creating scientific field notes and for creatively representing and sharing their “findings.” There will be opportunities to get help identifying species as well as leveling up both scientifically and poetically depending on age level and interest.
And Finally…
Thanks to everyone who helped us create this cool sci-poem last week at the NC Museum of Natural Science’s educator open house! We borrowed a post on antlions from The Dragonfly Woman, Chris Goforth’s wonderful insect blog and collaboratively selected and deleted words to make a blackout poem that turned a scientific non-fiction text into a scientific poem. What emerged was this:
Educators Deborah and Sarah contribute to the black-out poem at the NCMNS Educator Open House.
Black Out Science Poetry
Entomologist.
Prairie Ridge antlions at work
moving about. There are hoards.
Hoards!!
For a moment, digging.
Abdomen, thorax, head.
Disappeared.
Mouth-parts for a moment.
Antlion.
Like the Sarlaccc in Star,
Sci-fi lover. Antlion pits.
Little craters. Monster.
Rawwr!
Predators wait.
Unsuspecting victims slip into the cone-shaped pits,
Tumble to the bottom.
Loose sand.
Down.
Whole larva swallowed by the sand,
Cone-shaped pit, sand all over the place.
Lurking.
Hapless ant, it’s next meal.
Antlions are crazy cool.
Larvae, they roll. Ball.
Damselfly-like antlion. Same species.
Ant.
As that antlion lying in wait,
Jaws poised,
Just below the surface,
Hidden.
Sight. Life. Over.
Series of photos, re-burrying itself.
Larvae crawl backwards,
Butt first, bewildered.
Larvae hooked the easiest
Misidentification pet.
Feel.
Meet the dragonfly woman, our poets, and teachers and learners across the state online in Remix, Remake, Curate next week! If you’re able, you might also visit the NCMNS’s hugely popular BugFest Event on Saturday, September 19! We’d love to hear about your experiences.
Your DNA houses the information that made you, that shaped your development and continues to shape your interactions with the world around you on a biological level – those instructions are complex, and there’s a multitude of information in each cell of our bodies. In order to be stored in such a small space, that information gets encoded (much like the information stored in our computers is encoded, represented by 1s and 0s). 
Remix, Remake, Curate 