This Sunday, April 22nd,  is Earth Day, a worldwide celebration of our beautiful planet Earth. To commemorate Earth Day, many of us plant trees, go for a hike, or volunteer to help clean up a beach. But arguably the most important part of celebrating Earth Day is making a commitment to learn what more we can do on both a worldwide and an individual scale to make our planet a cleaner, healthier place.

In the last couple decades, the growing public concern for the impact we have upon the environment has increased dramatically, and we’ve seen some really positive changes as a result. Cities are implementing comprehensive recycling and composting programs, and there are incentive programs for carpooling to work. Hybrid and other fuel-efficient cars are no longer anomalous, and more and more businesses are “going green” by incorporating environmentally friendly practices into their operational and manufacturing decisions. At Sifteo, we’re also doing our part!

And it’s actually pretty simple to reduce your carbon footprint in everyday life; even small actions add up to sizable results. Making your habits more eco-friendly can be fun as well as easy! Starting this month, for example, I’ll be shopping at the farmer’s market for local, organic produce. What would you like to do this year?

Whatever you decide to do to help the environment this Earth Day, also take a moment to have some fun answering the related trivia questions below. How much do YOU know about going green? Try the questions with your Creativity Kit: Multiple Choice and pass them on to your friends!

1. The first Earth Day was celebrated in which year?

a.  1980

b.  1970

c.  1950

d.  1901

2. This state will soon become the first in the U.S. to ban arsenic-based additives in chicken feed.

a.  Maryland

b.  Oregon

c.  Iowa

d.  California

3. In 2012, which city was named “America’s Greenest City?

a.  Cincinnati

b.  San Francisco

c.  Portland

d.  Houston

4. One fun and easy way of reducing your impact on the environment is …

a.  joining a gym

b.  buying imported fruits and vegetables

c.  drinking bottled water

d.  joining a carpool

5. Which of these bird species is critically endangered, meaning that its population has decreased or will decrease by 80% in three generations?

a.  Emperor penguin

b.  California condor

c.  Dodo

d.  Bald eagle

6. Which country was not named among the greenest in the world in 2012?

a.  United States

b.  Costa Rica

c.  Switzerland

d.  France

7. Where and when were electric cars first used as taxis?

a.  Chicago, 1945

b.  San Diego, 1981

c.  London, 2000

d.  New York, 1897

8. Which of these is not a renewable energy source?

a.  solar power

b.  natural gas

c.  hydropower

d.  biomass and biofuel

9. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which of these fish is overfished or caught in environmentally unsafe ways, and is therefore not recommended restaurant fare?

a.  Dungeness crab

b.  Mahi mahi

c.  Alaska wild salmon

d.  Chilean sea bass

10. Whose research led to a large-scale ban on the pesticide DDT, which was later shown to have been a leading cause of the near-extinction of the bald eagle?

a.  Al Gore

b.  Richard Ellis

c.  Rachel Carson

d.  Dian Fossey

Happy Earth Day!

This past weekend, you may have noticed an abundance of pastel colors, chocolate bunnies, and egg hunts. Yes, Easter was here! And for some, Easter is still around the corner.

 
While Easter is one of the most important religious holidays for Christians, it is widely celebrated around the world as a secular holiday. Some might wonder about the rituals surrounding this springtime celebration. Why is there an Easter bunny and not an Easter chicken? What’s with the eggs? See how much you know about the Easter holiday by answering the trivia questions below! Correct answers will be posted in the comments section later this week.

1.  True or false: Easter is celebrated on the same day every year.

a. True

b. False

2.  The celebration of Easter is connected to which Jewish holiday?

a. Rosh Hashanah

b. Passover

c. Yom Kippur

d. Hanukkah

3.  True or false: Like chickens, rabbits lay eggs.

a. True

b. False

4.  Easter Sunday marks the end of which fasting period?

a. Advent

b. Lent

c. Epiphany

d. Halloween

5.  True or false: All Christians celebrate Easter on the same day.

a. True

b. False

6.  Why are eggs used in Easter celebrations?

a. The chicken is an important Christian symbol.

b. Farmers had an abundance of eggs due to the 40-day fasting period before Easter.

c. Eggs are a universal symbol of good luck.

d. According to the Bible, Jesus gave eggs as gifts to his followers.

7.  True or false: The first Fabergé egg was created as an Easter gift.

a. True

b. False

8.  From which country did the Easter Bunny character originate?

a. England

b. Italy

c. Ireland

d. Germany

9.  Which country is famous for its intricately decorated Easter eggs?

a. Ukraine

b. France

c. Austria

d. Croatia

10.  Which notable event did not take place on Easter?

a. The Easter Uprising began in Ireland

b. Easter Island was discovered by Dutch explorers

c. Harry Potter actress Emma Watson was born

d. The first Star Wars film was released in theaters

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Fireman!” “Doctor!” “Astronaut!” “Pirate!”

Naturally, young children are not pressed to consider the hurdles required to attain their dream jobs.  If little Joey wants to become a fireman, he will have to sit for his county firefighter’s examination. Annie, who dreams of becoming a doctor, faces a succession of standardized tests. After finishing college, she will sit for the eight-hour MCAT, which is only a taste of the examinations to come during medical school. And even Oscar, our up-and-coming pirate, will be subjected to standardized testing at every grade level and will possibly have to sit for the SSAT (Secondary School Admissions Test) before deciding to go rogue and heading out to a life at sea, blessedly free of #2 pencils and the filling-in of bubbles.

But as children grow into young adults, parents and educators have the opportunity to offer creative solutions to learning. As many of us know, formal learning rarely ends once we start working in our professions. Studying and test preparation need not be an meaningless and arduous milestone along the path to a coveted career. Young people especially will have the opportunity to strengthen their grasp on subject matter and even perhaps uncover a hidden talent in math, languages, or writing.

The United States ranks among the highest in the world in terms of the amount of standardized and vocational testing that is required through childhood education and entry into college and/or professional training programs. Effectiveness of standardized testing is fiercely debated today, and there are many strident supporters of change in assessment methods. But for now, the tests remain.

A good friend (who also happens to be an excellent student) once told me, “If you have to do something, you might as well enjoy it.” While he certainly has the right outlook, how does one enjoy the test preparation process?

Personalize or create your own study tools

A recent study showed that students who actively participated in their own learning were among the highest academic achievers. By creating your own questions with the Creativity Kit: Multiple Choice application, you can bring your study sessions to life!

In the example below, I’m using characters from some of my favorite TV shows to help me remember SAT vocabulary.

Find a committed study partner

While some prefer to study alone, studying with peers can be an excellent way to optimize productivity.

Let’s say I want my study buddy, Arthur, to quiz me on GRE vocabulary beginning with the common prefix dis-. He can then create some multiple choice games for me using only these words.

And since Arthur is studying for the AP Biology exam, I can create a game for him that concentrates on terms and concepts related to his subject.

If you are in a crowd of 4, you can switch to the multiplayer option and really get down to business!

If you or your students have an exam coming up, we wish you the best of luck and lots of fun!

Why is St. Patrick’s Day, a religious holiday, so popular around the world? Part of its popularity is due to its commemoration by the Irish diaspora, which is distributed in large numbers on almost every continent. Since St. Patrick’s Day falls in the middle of Lent, the Catholic fasting period, people were traditionally allowed to break their fast for this one day. And since St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland, it makes sense that his feast day has come to represent Irish culture, which is famous for celebrating music, poetry, storytelling, and merrymaking.

We hope you are enjoying the new Creativity Kit: Multiple Choice application! Continuing with our Celtic theme for March, we offer our Sifteo fans some trivia about Ireland and St. Patrick’s Day. Take a look – there are some things about Ireland we bet you didn’t know!

1.)  According to popular legend, St. Patrick drove which creature out of Ireland?

a. Snakes

b. Bears

c. Hamsters

d. Pigs

2.)  The Irish language, also known as Gaelic, is one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn.

a. True

b. False

3.)  Which of the following professionals are not required to pay taxes in Ireland?

a. Doctors

b. Writers

c. Plumbers

d. Software engineers

4.)  On a trip to Ireland, you hear someone say, “Where’s the craic?” What does this mean?

a. Where’s the fun?

b. Where are we?

c. What do you want?

d. Who are you?

5.)  Along with livestock, which insect enjoyed special protection under old Irish law?

a. Fruit flies

b. Crickets

c. Spiders

d. Bees
6.)  Your chances of finding a clover with four or more leaves is …

a. 1 in 100

b. 1 in 1000

c. 1 in 10,000

d. 5 in 100
7.)  Four-leaf clovers can now be grown due to genetic engineering.

a. True

b. False

8.)  The first recorded St. Patrick’s Day parade was held in Ireland.

a. True

b. False

9.)  More Guinness beer is sold in this country than in Ireland.

a. England

b. China

c. Brazil

d. Nigeria

10.)  This group of people in the United States made a significant donation toward Irish famine relief during the 19^th century Great Famine. This act of generosity is still remembered and celebrated today.

a. The Choctaw tribe

b. California gold prospectors

c. Daughters of the American Revolution

d. The City of Philadelphia

Did you know that Sifteo is adding a new Creativity Kit to your cubes?? Within the week, you will be able to use your Sifteo cubes to play with the Multiple Choice application. You will be able to make your own games on any subject and have unlimited possibilities for test prep, trivia night with friends, and other fun social games.

To get you thinking about how you might use the Multiple Choice application, we searched out some interesting facts about cultures and events celebrated during the month of March. See if you can answer the trivia questions below! Answers will be posted on tomorrow.

March is an important month for Celts and Celtic history – not just because of St. Patrick’s Day, although this holiday is the most widely celebrated of Celtic holidays. The feast day of Wales’ patron saint, St. David, falls on March 1. St. David’s Day is celebrated in Welsh communities around the world with eisteddfodau (singing competitions), sporting events, parades, and the wearing of leeks and daffodils.

While Wales and Welsh culture do not evoke the same vivid imagery for folks outside of the British Isles, there are quiet reminders of its influence in the United States and around the world. If your last name is Pritchard, Jenkins, Davies, Williams, or Morgan, you likely have some Welsh heritage in your family.

Let’s go a little further back. Can you guess where the Arthurian legend originated? You got it: Wales! Arthur’s name was first mentioned in a set of poems called the Gododdin in the Old Welsh language.

But the most shocking of all: St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland and figurehead of Irish culture, was not Irish.  He was – wait for it – Welsh.

1. Which of the following Hollywood actors is of Welsh descent? He was born with a distinctively Welsh last name that is not part of his stage name.

a. Brad Pitt

b. Bruce Willis

c. Eric Bana

d. Tom Cruise

2. Where is the largest population of Welsh speakers outside of Britain located?

a. Japan

b. Argentina

c. the United States

d. South Africa

3. Which American university’s name means “Great Hill” in Welsh?

a. Bryn Mawr

b. Colgate

c. Emory

d. Brandeis

4. “Thank you, the name Lloyd, for starting with two L’s. I’m glad both those ‘L’s’ were there because, otherwise, I would have called you ‘Loyd’.” – Jimmy Fallon, Thank You Notes

Is Jimmy Fallon correct in believing that “Lloyd” and “Loyd” are pronounced the same way?

a. Yes

b. No

c. No one really knows for sure.

5. True or False: The longest place name in the world belongs to a Welsh town.

a. True

b. False

6. The official Welsh motto, Cymru am byth, is inscribed on which Washington D.C. monument?

a. The U.S. Capitol Building

b. The Lincoln Memorial

c. The Washington Monument

d. The Library of Congress

7. The terms “Welsh” and “Wales” come from which language?

a. Anglo-Saxon

b. Welsh

c. Latin

d. Greek

8. Everyone in Wales speaks both Welsh and English.

a. True

b. False

9. Which of the following U.S. presidents does not have Welsh ancestry?

a. Thomas Jefferson

b. George Washington

c. John Adams

d. Abraham Lincoln

10. Princess Diana’s wedding ring was made out of this material, mined especially from Wales for the occasion.

a. Platinum

b. White gold

c. Red gold

d. Silver

In honor of the Oscars this year, we have created a sorting game for our Sifteo fans!
Each image below shows a quote from a movie nominated for Best Picture this year.Unscramble each quote and guess which Oscar-nominated film it comes from!

Quote 1

Quote 2

Quote 3

Quote 4

Quote 5

Quote 6

Quote 7

Quote 8

Quote 9

Feel free to leave your guesses in the comments section. The answers will be posted next week.
Enjoy the Oscars!

In a shift from my usual posts on foreign language, I thought to share an experiment I designed integrating the Sifteo cubes and the Creativity Kit with speech delivery and memorization.

Having been interested in joining a Toastmasters group and wanting to improve my Mandarin, I took the opportunity to join a bilingual Mandarin-English Toastmasters group. As one meeting was drawing to a close, I volunteered to be the Table Topics Master for the Mandarin section of the meeting.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Toastmasters meeting format, a Table Topics Master prepares a set of questions and calls on members of the audience at random to deliver impromptu 1-2 minute speeches. Although my Mandarin skills are elementary, I thought I would be able to get away with using simple sentences. Easy peasy.

When I decided what I wanted to ask, however, it became clear that my questions were more complex than I could express with my limited Mandarin skills; they required the use of sentence structures I hadn’t yet learned, not to mention a cornucopia of new vocabulary. In my rush of enthusiasm to become a Table Topics Master, I had bitten off more than I could chew.

But rather than backing out of the role, I decided to design a little experiment for myself. Could I use Sifteo cubes and the Creativity Kit application to help me memorize and effectively deliver some pre-written remarks in Mandarin?

The first step was to decide on my goal. What kind of results could I reasonably expect with my very limited Mandarin skills that had never been used in front of an audience?

More than anything, I wanted my questions to be understood by the audience. The audience’s level of fluency in Mandarin would vary quite a bit, and I knew that only a few members were native speakers. This meant correct and clear pronunciation was imperative.

As any new student of Mandarin will tell you, mastering the five tones is not easy if you’ve never encountered a tonal language before. My ability to distinguish and pronounce distinct tones was lacking, and I needed to improve that quickly. For me, there are few situations more awkward than asking an audience a question and facing a wall of blank, uncomprehending eyes. (Teachers, you know what I’m talking about.)

The second step was to practice delivering these remarks with a natural, confident air, meaning that learning the new vocabulary had to come first. From previous experience, I knew that speaking at length without understanding the content of my words would inevitably produces a clumsy, unnatural delivery that would interfere with the audience’s ability to comprehend my meaning, even if the words themselves were pronounced correctly.

Additionally, I had to remember to slow down. I have an unfortunate habit of speaking quickly, something that has been pointed out by several of my language students. When I get nervous, the speed increases in a desperate bid to finish. Maybe if I talk faster, they’ll understand more quickly! Ridiculous as it sounds, this is actually what floats through my mind at such times.

When I brought my concerns to one of my fellow Toastmasters, she advised me to not race to the finish, but rather to make an effort to speak at an especially measured pace so that the tones and sounds could be fully heard and understood. If you watch films or the news in Mandarin, you will notice that the speakers utter a few words at a time, then pause. I have always found this technique quite elegant and wished to follow this example.

Composing my remarks in English didn’t take too much time. Jenny, a fellow Toastmaster and native Mandarin speaker, helped me with the translation. Looking at the large block of text to memorize was intimidating; it clearly needed to be broken down. With 48 hours left, I decided to process the different parts of the text in layers.

Layer 1: Vocabulary

With a limited amount of time, I first noted the most commonly-used words and phrases along with their tones.

Layer 2: Syntax

Upon examining Jenny’s translation, I could immediately see that the syntax, though unfamiliar, followed a certain logical progression. One sentences with a lot of description depended on a series of nouns and phrases used as adjectives to modify the object noun.

Here is an example of one sentence:

I used the Creativity Kit program to break down the sentences into small units and played the sorting game to rearrange them, reviewing the sentences in 3-4 hour intervals.

Layer 3: Tones

In the snippet below, you can see that I capitalized some words. These words are in the first tone, which I used as a point of reference for identifying and remembering the other words’ tones. This strategy came to me when I thought of harp strings, in which the red and blue strings denote the C and F notes.

Even though the Sifteo cubes’ Creativity Kit doesn’t offer audio feedback, the Sorting program was quite helpful when I was working with the tone component. After a pronunciation coaching session with Jenny, I reviewed each sentence with the Creativity Kit: Sorting program, reciting the words aloud as I rearranged the cubes. Since the content was presented to me by the program, I didn’t have to search through my memory to generate the words themselves. This allowed me to effectively concentrate on and produce the correct stress pattern and tones of each sentence. By creating an individual file for each sentence, I could memorize each line’s pattern and gradually learn the whole sentence.

By the time it was my turn to speak, I had all 12 sentences memorized and the result of my experiment was largely successful. There were a few instances when the person I was speaking to did not quite catch everything I was trying to say. When I registered their confusion, I cheated just a bit and whispered the English translation to them. Despite these occasional misfires, several audience members were very generous in their compliments on my pronunciation and for making a valiant effort.

All told, I’m making steady progress with my Mandarin, and making some great friends along the way. I’ll keep you all posted on any future Sifteo cube – memorization experiments!

Having done a survey among my friends and acquaintances (thanks, everyone!), I’ve compiled a list of holiday expressions in an assortment of foreign languages.  While this is not an all-in-one guide to international holiday greetings, some of these phrases may come in handy at a gathering in the coming weeks.

Just for fun, consider learning one new expression – especially if you know you’ll run into a friend or colleague from abroad. As some of these expressions are tongue-twisters, I’ve included a pronunciation guide with each list. However, don’t let some of these long words intimidate you – your acquaintance will probably be pleased (and/or amused) that you’re making an effort.

Merry Christmas

 

Teach yourself how to say "Merry Christmas" in many languages using Creativity Kit!

Language	Word	How to say it
French	Joyeaux	-eaux rhymes with tough
German	Weihnachten	VIE-nak-ten
Hungarian	Karácsonyt	kuh-RAH-chon-it
Welsh	Llawen	For the double L sound, either  position your tongue at the roof of your mouth and blow pronounce the LL as HL
Polish	Wesołych	VES-oh-wihk
	Świąt	SHVY-unt

 

"Merry Christmas" in Welsh

Happy New Year

Learn to say "Happy New Year" in many different languages with Creativity Kit.

Toasting

Use Creativity Kit to teach yourself how to say "cheers" in many languages!

"Cheers" in Klingon

Days of the Week

China began using the Gregorian calendar in the 20th century, and the government elected to use a numbering system when naming the days of the week. The traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar, while still used for marking holidays like the Chinese New Year and the Harvest Moon Festival, is no longer used as the primary time-reckoning instrument in government, schools, or businesses.

Months

Writing dates in Mandarin

1. Place the larger unit before the smaller one, i.e. year, then month, then day, then time.
2. Place hào after the day

So if I wanted to say “June 15,” I would say, “liù yuè shí wŭ hào” (literally ‘six month fifteen day’)

To practice dates in Mandarin, attach the Mandarin translation to holidays and important dates in your year. If you are working with a partner, ask her when her birthday is.

Sort the event and the date in Chinese Pinyin

Years