Rather than make a name placard for myself, I decided to make one for my girlfriend to use at her new job at Google.

The base is made of several different colors of acrylic glued together.  There are several holes cut in all but the bottom layer that allow three things to stand up - the actual name,…

It turns out that infrared proximity sensors don’t actually work all that well with either transparent objects (like clear marbles) or round shiny objects (like spray painted marbles).  They really need something to reflect the UV light right back at the sensor, ideally something diffuse and flat.  In version 2 of the Multiplicator I think we would either replace the UV sensors with light sensors or something less prone to missing the marbles fall by, or by replacing the marbles with…

One of the most frustrating things we ran into was the difficulty of debugging problems with the gogo boards.  With no real means of feedback other than simple beeps, it is nearly impossible to figure out why things aren’t working.

The biggest of these was when, for reasons we couldn’t figure out, our code would simply no longer transfer to the gogo board.  We got repeated errors about the transfer timing out, even with very simple code.  I several times tried switching to…

The Multiplicator

If you’re like us – you learned multiplication through a boring process of memorization. Such memorization leads to a really weak understanding of the mathematic process you as a student are performing. The Multiplicator is a unique device that helps students…