Playing Catch Up

DINNER IS SERVED: Last Saturday night was the fourth Saturday of the month, and that 
usually means you can find us in the University District, serving up 50 or so dinners to homeless and hungry youth. 

I was the feed lead again this month, and on the menu was a burrito buffet. We had plate-sized tortillas, and filled them full of home made rice, beans and meat. Then the diners could choose from four kinds of hot sauce, onions, olives, jalapenos, sour cream, chips and more for toppings. 

At the end of the line we had a custom cupcake station. We had four kinds of cupcakes (carrot, chocolate, white and yellow), and three kinds of soda pop-inspired icing to choose from (orange Fanta, Mountain Dew and root beer). The diners really had fun making choices. Root beer wound up being the most popular, if you were wondering.

Not only did we get to feed dozens of hungry people, the effort paid off for an other non-profit. Through the Points of Light/All for Good project, we were able to earn 10 park hopper passes to Disneyland to raffle off to earn money. So it was a huge win-win for all involved.

By the way, the poster pictured up top was one Annabelle made. 

GAME DAY: On Saturday, CJ, Annabelle, and Kennedy spent some time at the Skyway library, just a couple of blocks from our house, for their monthly game day. 

Annabelle will tell you more about it. ...

The Skyway Public Library holds a small event every month for board and card game developers to playtest their games. Anyone who wants to can come in between 12:00 and 5:00 to try out any of the games they like. This month’s theme was “dexterity games”, where all the games available challenged you in more ways than just dice rolls.

One of the first games we decided to try was A La Carte, which we’ve played before. In A La Carte, you are a chef in a very high-class restaurant, racing to compete some of the gross dishes the restaurant serves before your opponents do! When you play, you have a small oven with a real metal pan and a dial. In the middle of the table are the dishes, printed on small cardboard tokens with the “recipe”, or directions, on the back. 4 small plastic “spice jars” contain irregular pieces of plastic in 4 colors: yellow (lemon zest), red (bell pepper), black (pepper), and green (herbs). The spice jars also contain clear “salt” pieces that can ruin a perfect dish. The game uses dice to determine how you adjust the heating on the stove, and if you aren’t careful, it’s very easy to lose by over-seasoning or burning your dishes!

Another game, one that was open for playtesting, was T.A.G: That Acronym Game. The game includes small square cards with instructions, a 4-sided die (to determine the amount of letters in the acronym) and a 30-sided alphabet die with 4 “wild” judge’s choice spots. The cards are either standard cards (acronyms for anything) or a certain type of acronym. For example, the “Newsflash!” card requires you to make a news headline out of the letters provided. Examples include “Terrifying Attack Gorilla!” for the letters T, A, and G. It’s played somewhat like apples to apples where the winner receives the card, and the first to 10 cards wins.

The two other games available were somewhat simple. Fishing Hole, which the developer says will soon be re-themed into something more fantasy oriented, involved using “bait” cards and tossing them across the table to land on fish. You could collect certain kinds of fish depending on size, and getting a set of 3 would give you an extra point bonus. The one very specific rule about “throwing out your line” (tossing a card) is that you have to be standing somewhere around the table and your hand cannot go past the edge. You are allowed to walk around the table and experiment to see how much the specific table makes the cards glide, meaning each game is slightly different than the last.

Wok on Fire was the last game we played, where you use a spatula card to flip face down ingredient cards in the circular “wok” pool, and create combinations and meals that grant you the most points. The point values and abilities for certain ingredients seemed kind of random, such as the fact that when there’s chicken face-up in the wok, you MUST take all available chicken, but it only counts as one move. The game was already fully developed and released, it was just there for fun as part of the “dexterity” theme. Next month is supposedly focused on cooperative games, so I’m expecting to find some good family games to try!

FACTORING IN: CJ and Annabelle seem ready for some new challenges, so I'm looking at getting them enrolled in college sooner rather than later. In our state, high school students in grades 11 and 12 can participate in Running Start, earning college credits for nearly free.

However, on paper, CJ's just in 9th grade now, and Annabelle's in 7th, and I don't really think they need to wait that long to get started, so we're looking at pathways to earlier enrollment.

One thing is for certain: They'd have to pass entrance exams. CJ has been experimenting on the ACCUPLACER website with online practice tests. He totally smokes the reading/language arts related ones, which is great. So far, he's not done as well on algebra. He passes the tests, but it would be nice to go into it knowing you have a pretty good chance of nailing it.

So, we're working on concepts and challenges that our sorta Swiss cheese approach hasn't covered yet (or, we covered it so long ago, it has kind of been forgotten. One of those instances was absolute values, which he now has a handle on after being reminded. 

Another question involved factoring. We reviewed simple factoring of a single number, but then watched this video from Khan Academy about factoring a polynomial with two variables. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=MZl6Mna0leQ


Unfortunately/interestingly, the problem on the test was super different from the examples in the video above. However, CJ knew enough about how one would factor the equation that he was able to correctly deduce which answer was mostly likely to be correct out of four choices.

I took the opportunity to point out to him that's a good example of not just learning to do the math, but also learning how to effectively take a test.

FREE FALLING: You might want to wear a hardhat this weekend, depending on where you're living. The sky is falling!

Well, not the sky, but a big ol' Chinese space station. Named Tiangong-1, (which translates to "Heavenly Palace-1"), it was launched without anyone aboard on Sept. 29, 2011. For a few years, it maintained an orbit about 217 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth, which is just a little lower than the International Space Station (which averages an altitude of about 250 miles, or 400 km).

Reportedly, Tiangong-1 was designed to keep operating for just a couple of years, and China put its first space station into "sleep mode" shortly thereafter the Shenzhou-10 visit. The original plan was to have Tiangong-1 de-orbit in a controlled fashion, using the craft's thrusters to guide it down into Earth's atmosphere. However, in March of 2016, China announced the space station had stopped sending data back to control, and that a controlled re-entry was no longer an option. So, the station is being pulled down to Earth by atmospheric drag.

Scientists are tracking Tiangong-1's descent. While hopefully the vast majority of the station will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, and any remains will just land in the ocean, there's a chance parts may make it back down to Terra Firma. 

Here's a graphic showing where debris is most likely to hit.

Stay safe out there! :)