Posts by Dave
Litro & IGGY Young Person’s Short Story Competition 2011
Last Wednesday (12th October 2011) I had the pleasure of attending the award ceremony for the 2011 Litro and IGGY Young Person’s Short Story Competition 2011 held at the 3i offices in London. This is the second year this competition has run, and the prize to the winner was a substantial cheque, and their story published in the Sunday Times and on the London Underground! I don’t envy the job of the judges, who between them had hundreds of entries to get through, but for a less daunting task, the six shortlisted stories are online here. They are all inspirational, but there did of course have to be a winner and it was a young lady by the name of Layla, whose story was entitled “La maison de Dieu”. As part of the ceremony an excerpt of the story was read out by Peter Blegvad a long time collaborator with IGGY, and as always I could spend all night listening to his dulcet tones (in a purely platonic sense, obviously).
The evening was though all about the shortlisted stories, so many congratulations to both the winner, but also to the other writers who made it that far, I’m sure that they will all be very successful at whatever they end up doing in the future and it was only a shame that there couldn’t be more prizes.
For further information the IGGY website can be found here, and the Litro website at http://www.litro.co.uk/.
Shortened URL: http://go.dave-wood.org/2b
XBugs
Received one of these as a gift fom a graduating tutee, and thought it was so cool it was worth a blog! These bugs come as a flat disc of aluminium, you twist out the pieces, fold and arrange them and then hold it all in place witha single nut and bolt (allen key provided!). As a bonus it comes with some mini bugs too. It’s a bit fiddly, and a little patience is required (not something I have in abundance) but the final product is pretty neat. You can find them on Amazon, or from the manufacturers website touchofginger.com, although I’ll warn you, they do lots of other cool stuff too (including other bugs) and you’ll spend ages looking through the pages. (more…)
Shortened URL: http://go.dave-wood.org/r
Second Life Maths Sculptures
August 18, 2011
This post is to highlight the various sculptures scattered around the Second Life “Warwick University Maths” island, which can be accessed at this SLURL. There is always a lot of discussion over the impact of education using Virtual Worlds (usually against a backdrop of the bad publicity that always makes the tabloids), but what cannot be denied is that there is a large and vibrant community with involvement from Universities from across the world (with many from the US and UK) carrying out a lot of innovative projects. A good snapshot of the situation in the UK can be found at the Virtual World Watch site. The Warwick island itself was set up using an “Education Innovation Fund” from Warwick University, and has generously been supported by the Mathemtics Department since.
From a mathematical education point of view, one of the great advantages of using virtual worlds is the ability to explore three dimensional objects in an immersive environment, as well as the flexibility to create and script with a very shallow learning curve. As well as the sculptures the island is also host to a number of tutorials to supplement a couple of modules I currently lecture, and I hope in the not too distance future to introduce a module that explores the possibilities of mathematics in virtual worlds in more detail. (more…)
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New Blog Logo
As part of the ongoing updates to this site I decided to update the top logo from the plain Georgia fonted “Dave-Wood.Org” to something a bit more catching and original. This was with some sadness since I have grown very fond of the Georgia font, despite it being designed due to Microsoft funding! But it was due to this fondness that I started reading up on the history of its development and came across www.will-harris.com where he has a nice little article on the font as well as tips and tricks for typography on the web. From here there are also fonts to buy, including sets by Judith Sutcliffe and in particular “Oldstyle Chewed”, a font based on Goudy Oldstyle but with ants! How could I walk away from that… I should also add excellent customer service.
So now the logo looks like this (although I may change it again on another whim!):
Shortened URL: http://go.dave-wood.org/a
