OU blog

Personal Blogs

Design Museum

Props

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Monday, 26 Jan 2015, 10:29

 

Fig.1 Mussel shells

Three times a week I teach swimming to kids age 7-12. All classes run for 45 minutes. Each week we work on a different stroke or school. Every time include some fun in the session rather than having them bash up and down the pool doing drills or parts of the stroke. The fun brings them back. At this age make it a drag and they either play up or don't show.

I do this thing called 'sea otter'. For one length, 25m, they have to pretend to be a sea otter. I don't need to show them a picture. Most can visualise it from a natural history film. The sea otter swims into the kelp and pulls up mussels. They bring a rock to the surface too, then lay on their backs, breaking open the shells and eating the content. I take them through the actions: long armed doggied paddle, duck dive to the bottom of the pool, onto their backs at the surface, a gentle flutter kick while they break open the shells, eat the contents, throw away the shell pieces then roll onto their fronts and repeat the exercise. I expect them to do this four to five times as they swim the length of the pool. Some like to make squeaking noises. All grin. All take their improvisation seriously and do a great job.

I tick off the long armed doggie paddle, the duck dive, the push off the bottom, the flutter kick on their back, and developing fluency and love for the water as all worthwhile. From this they improve their front crawl and back crawl, they make steps towards a tumble-turn and even diving (several don't, none do well) and they have fun - always deserved after 15/20 minutes of 'real' swimming: lengths up and down the pool to warm up, kicking with a float or on their back.

I play other games. Maybe three such interludes for a couple of minutes at most across the session.

Six years of doing this with this club and the teenagers laugh about 'otter' some even insisting once in a while to add it to their coached session where they are swimming over 2200m in an hour. 

Permalink
Share post
Design Museum

What will you look and sound like twenty years from now?

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 3 Jan 2015, 14:08

Fig.1 JV 2013-2033 - from one niece's wedding.

We'll see. My father died young age 71 so I'm less sure I'll make it to 73. Then again my grandfather made it to 96 ... the other to 61 or something. 

I stumbled upon this link courtesy of a fellow OU Student on my very first MAODE module way back in 2010. We're still in touch. It's a fun App from Orange. Take a current grab using a webcam or use an old photo. It generates an Avatar that will then respond to your talking to texting it. Weird.

I've found that if it 'grabs' the image first time it works. What does not work is massively adjusting the settings with an image that gave a bad fit in the first place.

 

 Fig.2. JFV 2014 - 2013 from another niece's wedding. 

And yes, I've already tried old photos of me in my twenties to see how accurate it is and put in friends to see what it does to them. I've had me speaking fluent French too - easier than continuing with L120.

In 20 years time

http://oran.ge/1I4Vjs0 

Permalink
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 11297123