ohhey[blog]

Book Giveaway – Thanksgiving Edition

The first major break of the holidays is upon us, and I’m in the mood to do some giveaways. Over the last 18 months, I’ve contributed (along with t... Read more

Are We Already in a Tech Dystopia?

Featured image creative commons licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Wonderlane I apologize for the click-baity title, but I think it helps get t... Read more

Protein Permutations

Proteins are some of the most varied, complex, and mind-bending models studied in biology. Built from our genetic code, proteins have multiple leve... Read more

Down the Rabbit Hole with Alice

I read Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture when I was in college. In it, Randy talks about developing Alice and how it impacted his career and his view... Read more

Flipping so Kids Can Rewind May be a Bad Idea

There are times where I wish I could go back, rewind what happened, and listen again. Daydreamers, you know what I’m talking about. Even though it’... Read more

Why Net Neutrality Matters to Schools

A little history Big, important ideas can often be overlooked because of how boring they sound to the average listener. Remember SOPA and PIPA a fe... Read more

New Layout, New Title, Refined Focus

I’ve iterated on this blog a lot over the years. I started by focusing on chemistry, and then switched over to teaching and learning in general. La... Read more

New Adventures

I lost my job on Friday. It sucks, but life moves on. I’ve started applying for schools, but it isn’t really a good hiring time right now. So, in t... Read more

Where’s My Muse?

This piece of the series is aptly placed after our interviews with creative people. It’s a good reminder that everyone can be creative, not just th... Read more

A Few Feet

Our feet are built to be durable. Bones arranged to bear weight1, thick pads of skin, and fine motor control of each individual toe2 allow us to wa... Read more

The New Education Economy of “Free”

Have you ever been leading a session and been faced with the statement, “That’s great, but what does it cost?” The new economics of education rely ... Read more

Scratch is the Hardest Thing I’ve Done in a While

I’m not going to lie – I found this week’s assignment really, really difficult. More on that later. Nearly all of the coding I’ve done has been in ... Read more

Timing is Everything

When you touch something hot, the nerves in your hand will immediately fire a signal up toward your head to make a decision about what to do about ... Read more

More Attribution Done Just for You

I’m expanding on a post I wrote a week or two ago in which I added automatic Flickr attribution to header images on the blog theme I’m working on. ... Read more

Bathoughts

I’m on bath duty each night. After dinner, the water runs, and Meredith gets really, really excited. The tub is full of boat, plastic chains, and f... Read more

Functional Patterns

Structural patterns exist all around us, especially in living systems. A common example in the biology classroom is bone structures which show evol... Read more

Creative Roots

“My work isn’t always incredibly creative, it’s just different than the way other people think about the same things.” Vicari Vollmar Creative work... Read more

Grim Pictures

Since early this year, the WHO has been calling for international aid in response to a burgeoning crisis in west Africa. There had been a confirmed... Read more

Abstraction

The essence of abstraction consists in singling out one feature, which, in contrast to other properties, is considered to be particularly important... Read more

If You’re Not Going to Use Attribution, I’ll Just Do It For You

It’s important to use attribution online. When you pull a picture, make sure you tell other people where it’s from. Some sites make it easy for you... Read more

A Second Look is Often More Revealing

Sometimes the simple challenge to think concretely about abstract concepts can be effective. Sparks of Genius, p. 64 Perception is how our mind int... Read more

Perception

We cannot focus our attention unless we know what to look at and how to look at it. Sparks of Genius, p. 42 There's a concept in biology which says... Read more

Loops, Algorithms, and Headaches

Loops When I got into coding, loops were one of the more difficult tasks for me to get the hang of – especially iterating through conditions. Part ... Read more

Prototypes and Constructing Models

Each year teaching chemistry, I made it a point to my students that everything they learn over the course of the year is based on observation and b... Read more

Game Theory and Computational Thinking

Game Theory Games and learning go hand in hand. Children learn social interaction, communication, and even motor skills through playing. Remember, ... Read more

My Better Third Is One

This time last year, I was writing about increasing my household population by 50%. In the blink of an eye, a year has already gone by, and we went... Read more

Veja Du

Trying to represent a familiar object in abstract ways is harder than you’d think. The goal of this particular assignment was to take three photos ... Read more

Computational Thinking, Revisited

This is a follow up to my first post on Computational Thinking. For a background, go check it out before reading further. I’m often victim to my ow... Read more

There Are 10 Kinds of People in This World

Those who can read binary and those who can’t. Te first activity we ran through for my Computational Thinking course was learning how to translate ... Read more

Computational Thinking

I’m a scientist. I think in terms of what I can see and manipulate. Part of my training included a large amount of time making changes in systems, ... Read more

Why You Shouldn’t Care When Schools Throw iPads Away

In case you missed it, there were two big stories in the past two weeks about schools selling or destroying their student devices. The Atlantic pos... Read more

You’ve Got the Wrong Idea

Do a quick Google search for “disrupt education.” It seems 2013 in particular was a boom for companies looking to disrupt the current education sys... Read more

Improving Questions, Part 2

Before starting this post, please go back and look at Part 1 to get the research justification for the outline below. In an effort to make research... Read more

Improving Questions, Part 1

I’ve been thinking over an idea since I saw this tweet from David Wees which linked a very well-written article defending the Common Core standards... Read more

Sound for the Eyes

I read an article recently on the need for an “Instagram of Sound” – the idea being that I can record a short audio clip and then immediately share... Read more

Get in touch

Comments are always open. You can get in touch by sending me an email at brian@ohheybrian.com