7/12/2007

3D Learnin'

Check out this series of interactive learning tools that were created to accompany "Prentice Hall's middle grades science program". Apparently, close to a 100 were developed, so this is just a sample which includes things like the solar system and seismic waves. My favourite, though, is the catapult simulator, which taught me everything I needed to know about medieval trajectories.

This kind of makes me wish I was back in elementary school again. In my day, all we had for "interactive learning" was a sharpened stick and a potato.

Ralph Lauren Stories

This is kind of a neat take on user-submitted content from the folks over at RalphLauren.com. To celebrate the company's 40th anniversary, they're asking people to share how the label has played a part in their lives -- "whether it's a story about the first time you wore a Polo shirt or the Ralph Lauren suit you wore to your first job".

I found out about this through their e-newsletter (which, truth be told, they use a bit like a machine gun and could be a bit more selective with) and caught my attention because it didn't fit the usual weekly email template. The site's nicely designed, but the let-down is that it's not actually a site, just a couple of pages where you can upload your story along with an image or video. That's it.

The promise is that somewhere down the road, selected stories will make it onto RalphLauren.com, but it feels like an opportunity missed. Even if they were concerned about some questionable submissions; with a proper moderation step in between, they could allow these things to go live much sooner, adding some potentially interesting content to their site.