In her book “The Right Stuff for Children Birth to 8” (published by the NAEYC), Martha B. Bronson talks about five different ways of playing. Kids progress through all of them depending on ages, stages, gender, cultural context, personal preference and many other factors. The types of play are: * Active Play – physical activity, sports, playing outside * Make-Believe Play – playing with dolls, different types of role-play * Manipulative Play – construction and puzzles * Creative Play – playing music, drawing and painting, crafting * Learning Play – reading books, playing games, developing certain skills (via The Playful Side of Apps | Toca Boca) Found via Geek Dad

“Plastic Galaxy: The Story of Star Wars Toys” is a documentary that celebrates the action figures, play sets, space ships, and props we grew up with as kids – and still collect today. Through interviews with collectors, historians, former Kenner and Hasbro employees, and others, the film explores their history, influence, and continued impact on pop culture.

A lot of occupations that didn’t exist years ago: two college graduate daughters, one a web designer for a financial firm, other works with a company that does social media marketing. Didn’t exist when they were born. Proliferation of new occupations.

Engineers at the University of Southampton have developed an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) whose entire structure has been printed, including wings, integral control surfaces and access hatches. Credit: University of Southampton The plane, called SULSA (Southampton University Laser Sintered Aircraft), was printed on an EOS EOSINT P730 nylon laser sintering machine, which fabricates plastic or metal objects, building up the item layer by layer. Once all the components were printed, assembly took minutes, say the engineers. No fasteners were used and all equipment was attached using ’snap fit’ techniques so that the entire aircraft can be put together without tools. The electric-powered UAV has a wingspan of about 6.5 ft, has a top speed of nearly 100 miles per hour, and runs almost silent when in cruise mode. The team even equipped it with a miniature autopilot. Traditional manufacturing methods are costlier and would have required months to develop a similar plane, whereas the design and fabrication process for SULSA took just a few weeks. Because no tooling is required for manufacture, radical changes to the shape and scale of the aircraft can be made with no extra cost. Professors Jim Scanlan from the University’s Computational Engineering and Design Research group credits laser sintering for the achievement: The flexibility of the laser sintering process allows the design team to re-visit historical techniques and ideas that would have been prohibitively expensive using conventional manufacturing. One of these ideas involves the use of a Geodetic structure. This type of structure was initially developed by Barnes Wallis and famously used on the Vickers Wellington bomber which first flew in 1936. This form of structure is very stiff and lightweight, but very complex. If it was manufactured conventionally it would require a large number of individually tailored parts that would have to be bonded or fastened at great expense. (Source: University of Southampton) (via World’s first ‘printed’ airplane takes to the skies | ZDNet)

The Bitizen Confiugrator enables you to create and customize your very own, unique Bitizen without drawing a single pixel or creating a single shade. With the help of the game’s original graphics, I re-created every single element and accessoire included in the game and put them together in one package. You can choose clothes by toggling the visibility of various categories and change their color through a simple color chooser ― all shading is applied automatically. The layer preview on the right side of the image above displays a part of the available clothing items. A few little tips before you can get started:
♦ For convenience and better visibility, I tripled the image size. If you want to have the ‘real’ size back, change the image size back to 131 x 212 by using Nearest Neighbor as interpolation setting.
♦ To export your customized bitizen without the whole background around it, simply right-click the Bitizen folder inside Photoshop’s layer window and select Convert to Smart Object. Double click the resulting smart object and save the result through Save for Web and Devices. And now, go ahead and create you own, personal Bitizen, the possibilities are nearly endless! Enjoy Please keep in mind that the original graphics are property of NimbleBit; I have simply re-created those as ‘fan artwork’ and do not claim any ownership for the idea or actual Bitizen graphics used in this template.