The Great Gatsby and CGI

After my article on The Lone Ranger, I thought I would add this post that also relates to movie-making.  A few months ago, I went to see The Great Gatsby movie after re-reading the book (which I have always loved) with my book club.  I thought it was a visually-entrancing and interesting interpretation that did justice to the book.  I loved Toby Maguire, found Leonardo DiCaprio's Gatsby to be a credible version, and found my doubts upon hearing that Carey Mulligan was playing Daisy to be confirmed (however, that may be the hardest role in the book--certainly, the previous attempts I've seen to capture Daisy have been similarly unsuccessful).

Of course, viewing all the Baz Luhrmann excesses of the roaring Twenties would not have been possible without CGI.   But I didn't realize how much that was true until I saw this video by Chris Godfrey, who was the Visual Effects Supervisor for the film.  This video displays some of the scenes as  before and after shots--before CGI, that is.  It is really amazing!  I knew some, even lots, of this stuff was computer generated, but there were other elements that I never imagined weren't there in real life.

Watch it for yourself below:


The Great Gatsby VFX from Chris Godfrey on Vimeo.

Screen Free Week 2012

This week is Screen Free Week, the national effort to spend a week unplugged from our electronic devices and plugged into...each other, the great outdoors, our neglected books and artwork, or whatever else.  It used to be national "Turn Off the TV" week, which seemed to be easier (especially for us, since we don't even own a TV).  But as our children's time has been increasingly taken up with the proliferating electronic devices they use for entertainment, so has the scope of Screen Free Week.

My son and I will be participating in Screen Free Week, although we are still figuring out how to make it work for us.  Some things are easy.  My son has agreed not to play his Wii or his computer games for the week.  But so much of our schooling and working involves the computer, we are not just going to shut those down for a week.  So we are going to try to use the computer for educational, work, and communication responsibilities, but try to refrain from using it for entertainment.  But there is a fine line there, especially for me.  I don't play computer games, but how much of the surfing the web that I do is really necessary for educational purposes, and when does it morph into entertainment?  It's hard to tell.

Nonetheless, it's a great thing to do every year just to become more aware of our computer and other electronics usage.  We are already great readers here, and it's a good time of year to spend time outdoors, so it is great time for us to make a conscious effort to replace electronics with those activities.  And who knows what other realizations may occur to us during this week?  We'll let you know.....

Steve Jobs as Revolutionary

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post on Steve Jobs as a great model for our middle schoolers to use to learn about living life with vision and passion.   But lately, I have been thinking about Steve Jobs as a model for revolutionary change, prompted by two very different events:  reading a blog post by my friend Maria Droujkova of Natural Math, and spending an hour in the Apple Store yesterday.

The post that started me down this road Sunday night was entitled How I imagine change.  You should read the entire thing here, because my interpretation doesn't do it justice, but Maria sees radical change as taking two steps:
Step 1:  Disengage from the old way/system
Step 2:  Build the new way/system

Then yesterday, I ended up in Jobs' living legacy, the Apple Store.  My tale of woe:  last week, when my son was working on some school work on my big Mac computer, the screen got wonky and the program froze.  I advised him to reboot and try again, but the computer wouldn't come up again.  So I scheduled an appointment with the Apple Store self-proclaimed "Genius Bar"--the technical experts who help you resolve issues with your Apple technology (computers, iPhones, iPads, etc.).  Because it is so big and bulky, so it is hard for me to handle, plus the fact that my son and I had classes all day, my husband took it in and returned with the sad news that the hard drive was gone and had to be replaced.  But in only a few hours, the work was done, so I had the computer back that night.  Luckily, I did have a back-up drive, and spent the weekend trying to transfer my backup to the new hard drive using Apple's built-in no-brainer backup software, Time Machine.

Unfortunately, it wasn't working.  So it was back to the Apple Store for another appointment at the Genius Bar.  The guy working on my computer turned out to be Gabriel, which I took to be a good sign--what could be better than having not only a Genius, but an Arch Angel working on your computer?  And work on it he did, while I sat there watching him and eves dropping about the other poor souls coming to the Genius Bar for a fix to their technical problems.  The bottom line ended up being that my backup hard drive had problems as well.  So while Gabriel couldn't do a full restore either, what he could do--that I couldn't--was to transfer my document files off the backup to the new computer hard drive.  I would have to reinstall the software at home.....which is a pain, but not nearly as painful as losing all the lesson plans, documents, photographs, music, movies, and other things that I had created and stored on my previous hard drive.

So once again, after having spent an hour trouble shooting and deciding this was the best solution, we left the computer in Gabriel's capable hands, went home, and returned that evening to find a computer with the operating software reinstalled, all my document files transferred, and all of the Apple iLife and iWorks software loaded on (which, frankly, are the packages I use 90% of the time).  And the fee for the probably two hours that Gabriel spent working on my computer?  Nothing.  I got all that service for free, even though the issue was really an external disc drive that failed that was not Apple hardware.  I have a problem with my Mac, I take it to the Genius Bar, and it gets fixed, usually that day, for no charge (other than fees for equipment, like buying the replacement hard drive).

So if you look at that transaction from the typical business viewpoint, it makes no sense.  Here this highly skilled technician spends two hours of time dealing with a problem that wasn't even Apple hardware for no money.  Who can make a business model like that work?

Only a revolutionary....the kind of multi-millionaire corporate CEO who would say, "Why join the Navy ...if you can be a pirate?" (and that was even before Johnny Depp had made pirates cool again).

Because as I understand the man, Steve Jobs (and the company he founded) was never about the money, and was never even about the product.  Steve Jobs and Apple Computer were about empowering people to create things they never imagined they could do by using technology (Pixar is also all about that, but the focus was on giving great artists great tools to create great movies).  Steve Jobs and Apple Computer were about transformation, not market share.  Steve Jobs and Apple Computer were about revolution.

And look how Jobs followed Maria's two steps.  When Apple came on the market, the big competition was which operating system--Microsoft's DOS or Intel's CP/M--was going to be chosen by IBM for their personal computers and, by extension, dominate the market.  But Jobs and Apple didn't try to get into that game.  Instead, they just did their own thing, building a computer that seemed to eschew any pretense of corporate acceptability--what business executive at the time was going to put in an order for a computer that was called an Apple?  As Jean Louis Gassee, who replaced Jobs as head of the Macintosh development team when Jobs left the company, said about the famous original Apple logo (an Apple with a bite missing and filled with stripes of different colors):

One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn't dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.

Lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy....you almost couldn't pick better words to describe a revolutionary. Or here are some quotes from Jobs in the early years, in which he makes clear that he wasn't going to play the game by IBM or Microsoft or typical business rules--he was making up his own rules as he went along. Plus, his game was so much bigger than just money:

We're gambling on our vision, and we would rather do that than make "me too" products. Let some other companies do that. For us, it's always the next dream. (1984) 

Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn't matter to me ... Going to bed at night saying we've done something wonderful... that's what matters to me. (1993) 

I was worth about over a million dollars when I was twenty-three and over ten million dollars when I was twenty-four, and over a hundred million dollars when I was twenty-five and it wasn't that important because I never did it for the money. (1996) 

What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. (1991)

So after turning his back on what the rest of the computer industry was doing, Jobs had to come through with Step 2:  he had to deliver the goods.    There was a long-time saying at Apple Computer that was attributed to Jobs (although I haven't been able to find an official citation), which was "Real artists ship." And there is no doubt that Apple Computer has shipped some of the finest consumer technology products of the 20th and 21st Century.

But the revolutionary genius of Jobs and/or Apple was realizing that simply building amazing products also wasn't enough.  To transform people's experience with, and willingness to use computer-based products, particularly among the baby boomer generation of which Jobs was a part, you needed to build support structures to help people adapt to an entirely new way of doing things.    For example, this was Jobs' explanation about why the iPod basically wiped out all competition from other MP3 music players:

We had the hardware expertise, the industrial design expertise and the software expertise, including iTunes. One of the biggest insights we have was that we decided not to try to manage your music library on the iPod, but to manage it in iTunes. Other companies tried to do everything on the device itself and made it so complicated that it was useless. (2006)

In short, the iPod took over the market not just because it was a beautiful and functional machine, but because Apple created the entire iTunes music delivery system that simplified the process to the point that even grandparents could find and download the music they wanted.

And that is the beauty of the Apple Stores, with their Genius Bar to fix your technical problems, their free classes to educate you about the products' capabilities, and their One to One service, where for $100 a year, someone will sit down with you once a week and work with you individually on whatever project you need help with.   The stores and their services are Apple's promise to their clients that when you buy their products, they won't abandon you.  You take the leap of faith to go with the non-dominant computer, and they will be your partners in making it work for you.  Your hardware isn't working; we'll fix it.  You don't know how to use the software; we'll teach you.  You can't figure out how to get the music from Garageband to match up with the right pictures in iMovie; we'll work it out with you.

In short, Apple has built not only the computers and other devices they sell, but the infrastructure necessary to help the non-computer generation get control over the computer's more creative capabilities than simply using it as a fancy typewriter.  And that is how you create a technological revolution.

So, once again, Jobs has a lot to teach us about how to make fundamental changes in society.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Apple will continue to keep its revolutionary outlook going now that its pirate captain has sailed on to other waters.

Thank you, Steve Jobs

I was really sorry to hear the news from one my friends today that Steve Jobs had died.  The term "visionary" gets thrown around a lot these days, but if there was anyone who deserved that term, it was Jobs.  You may not be a dedicated Apple computer user, like our family is.  But did you realize that the whole point-at-a-picture-and-click-to-make-your-computer-respond interface that prevails in today's personal computers came from Job's vision?  I remember the first time such a way to interact with your computer first showed up, in the long defunct Lisa Computer (from Apple).  Lisa didn't last, but it was such a harbinger of the future--a vision, yes, of a computer that could be used by those who hadn't learned computer code, which was the only way to run computer before Apple Computer redefined computers.  Windows was merely a copy, a catch-up, to Apple's game-changing software interface.  So pretty much all of us who aren't code-crunchers owe a debt to Steve Jobs.

Of course, that wasn't his only gift to us.  How many of us own iPods, or other MP3 players that were inspired or influenced by Apple's foray into the digital music business?  And, indeed, the iPod technology has arguably changed the entire music business as much as anything since the earliest recording technologies.  Eventually, that morphed into the iPhone--where you could stay connected to email and WWW and such using your phone--and then to the iPad, a design for the digital book, plus much more.  Again, that entire line was driven by Job's vision for a digital technology that could transform our lives.

Even the youngest among us has been touched by Job's genius.  Is there any children's movie makers today who have had such an unbroken line of hits as Pixar, which Jobs bought from George Lucas and turned into an digital movie company that has enjoyed an unparalleled success, both critically and commercially.

There is so much that we could all learn about the leadership path of Jobs over the years, and perhaps I will write something more about that in a later post.  But right now, I just want to express my gratitude to the man who had done so much to make computers so easy for us to use.  Particularly as a homeschooler, I don't know how I could teach without the easy operation of computer technology that he helped to facilitate.

History of the Internet

For today's middle schoolers, there has always been an Internet and World Wide Web, Macintosh computers and Windows software, Google and Wikipedia.  But most of us teachers can remember when that wasn't so...

The following is a video from 1969, which was the last year of the original TV series, Star Trek, envisioned the connected computer network of the future (albeit in gratingly sexist ways):


640


Almost 25 years later, Star Trek was still on...except by now, it was Star Trek:  Deep Space Nine.  The Internet was a reality by this point, but was so primitive compared to what our children can even imagine, as shown by this 1993 video:




I think it is great for our kids to see how far computer networking has come in a relatively short time... or, if nothing else, to recognize that distinctive connection noise that those of us using the Internet in the 1990's will never forget...

Should Your Middle Schooler Be on Facebook?

Should your middle schoolers be on Facebook?  Technically, the answer is no--at least, unless they are at least 13 years old.  That is the minimal Internet "age of consent"set by a federal law known as The Children's Online Protection Act of 1998.  That legislation makes it illegal for anyone to collect personal information or track the online activities of anyone who is younger than 13.  Rather than writing special software to exempt users who are 12 years old or younger from such tracking technologies as storing cookies, most sites, including Facebook, simply forbid anyone younger than 13 from establishing an account.

But, of course, it's not that simple.  Once children are old enough to be able to figure out how many years they need to add to their real birthdate to reach the minimal age, there is nothing stopping them from simply lying about their age and signing up anyway.   And they seem to be doing that by the score!  In June 2011, Consumer Reports estimated that there were about 7.5 million Facebook users who were 12 or younger.  And a recent report by the Pew Research Center said that 46% of 12 year old who are online participate in social networking sites such as Facebook, compared with 62% of online 13 year olds.


So there are a number of reasons to be concerned about middle schoolers using Facebook.  A major concern, of course, is the fear that predators may be targeting this young and naive age group, trying to entice them to reveal information or do things, including meeting their "online friends" someplace in person, that are dangerous, inappropriate, or otherwise creepy.  There is the threat of "cyberbullying"-- mean messages, embarrassing photos or videos, or the intentional exclusion of certain people from desired groups of their peers, which can all take place online without any adult being aware of it going on.  Plus, it creates a bad precedent of children lying online; if they can "fool" Facebook, they can transfer that technique to lying about their age to gain entrance to even more adult sites that require users to be 18 or 21.


Another issue that middle schoolers should be aware of is the fact that anything they post to Facebook can become part of their permanent record.  Even if they delete information rated to embarrassing or illegal activities (underage drinking, illegal drug use, or other typical preteen actions that might show a serious lack of common sense), that entry may be kept by Facebook and shared with whomever Facebook chooses to do so--advertisers, college admissions, potential employers, etc.  Control over any information posted is one of the things all Facebook users give up when they set up an account, usually without having bothered to read the long, boring legalese that basically gives Facebook the right to do anything they want with anything posted.  And just this weekend, the Washington Post had an article about the increasing use of social media background checks as a routine part of the current job application process.


Of course, the other side of the argument is that if you look at the Pew data, it seems like when your middle schoolers tell you that "everyone else is doing it," they might be telling the truth!  If their figures are right (they seem a little high to me, and I haven't researched the study methodology or anything), then almost half of online 12 year olds have a social media presence.  Things like Facebook are becoming increasingly important as a means for socializing and staying in the loop about what is going on with friends and peers, even among the preteen set.


One alternative is to eschew Facebook for one of the social networking sites that have been set up specifically for the middle school or younger crowd.  NPR recently posted the following sites as safe places for preteens to develop their social networking skills:

1. ScuttlePad (2010) Age 7+

Social network with training wheels is safe but limited.

2. Togetherville (2010) Age 7+

Kids' social site connects to parents' Facebook friends.

3. WhatsWhat.me (2011) Age7+

Tween social network with top-notch safety features.

4. Yoursphere (2009) Age 9+

Kid-only social network promises to block dangerous adults.

5. Franktown Rocks (2009) Age 10+

Music and social networking combine in safe, cool hangout.

6. GiantHello (2010) Age 10+

Facebook-lite gets a lot right, but watch out for games.

7. GirlSense (2009) Age 10+

Safe, creative community for tween fashionistas.

8. Sweety High (2010) Age 11+

Fun, closed social network for girls is strong on privacy.

9. Imbee (2011) Age 10+

Safer social networking if parents stay involved.

10. YourCause (2009) Age 13+

An easy, fun, socially networked way to fundraise.

In our house, this whole thing is a non-issue.  My 12 year old son has NO desire to be on Facebook, and I have no desire to allow him to be.  In fact, I refuse to establish a Facebook account for myself, mostly because of privacy concerns.  This is not to say that I have anything to hide, but because I am concerned not only about Facebook's policy of retaining the right to use my personal information in any way they want (and can make money from), but also about the close ties between Facebook leadership and funders to government intelligence agencies.  I still have friends in DC who are high up enough in various governmental agencies to know who tell me that the following video is not just something cooked up by some conspiracy theorists:

The bottom line is, middle schoolers need to realize that the whole thing is a lot more complicated than just swapping the latest news and pictures with their friends.  Facebook is a great example for this age student to think through the old adage that "There's no such thing as a free lunch."  Maintaining the Facebook network is a huge expense, and someone is paying for that expense somehow.  Your middle schoolers may not care that the price they pay is a loss of privacy, but then again, maybe they will.  At the very least, it is a good opportunity to demonstrate to them why you really do need to read through all those boring legal clauses we all want to click through on almost every site we use on the Internet.

Game for Developing Left Brain AND Right Brain

I am very interested in the learning theories around the dominance of different hemispheres of the brain--the whole "left brain/right brain" business.  Both according to the test we've taken and just observation in our everyday lives, my son and I are both right-brained--intuitive, global, diffuse (some might say "scattered") thinkers.  My husband, on the other hand, is left-brained--sequential, narrowly-focused, organized, one-thing-at-a-time, logical thinker.

Of course, as the theories always say, no one (at least, no one without a brain injury or something) works out of just one half of the brain.  We all can access both parts of the brains when we need to, but for most of us, it is easier or more natural to operate from one hemisphere or the other--leading up to apply the wrong hemisphere thinking to some tasks, just because that mode of thinking feels more natural to us.

However, I just came across a game to help us with that.  The computer-based game Twinoo, by Dawn of Play, is a fast-paced game that requires you to draw on both sides of your brain.  On the left side of the screen, a simple math problem flashes up, and you only have a few seconds to choose which of the three possible answers is the correct one.  

Pretty easy so far, isn't it?

Except at the same time, a color mixing problem flashes up on the right side, and you have to select the correct answer for that one as well.  This time, your "equation" is a square of one color (red, say) and another square of a different color (for example, blue).  You have to decide which of the three squares of color below the problem is the right solution (in this case, purple).

That doesn't sound too bad either.  The thing is, the color equations usually aren't that clear cut.  So, for example, you will get an aqua square and a light yellow square, and you have to figure out which of the three shades of green below is the most likely for that combination.

Plus, the time is ticking down on both of them at the same time.  You go back and forth, answering both questions, until you've missed three on one side or the other.  Then the game is over.

The best I've been able to do is 21 correct on both sides, for a total score of 42.  I am finding that I am getting better, though...at least sometimes.  And it isn't consistent for me about which side I mess up on--the left brain side or the right brain side.

I will also say I don't think this is the greatest test for right brain dominance.  While I am right brained, I am not primarily a visual learner.  I haven't tried it with my son yet, who is very visual, but I suspect he would be much better at it than I am.  Of course, he is pretty much better than I am at all video games... he has those quick reflexes, if nothing else.

Anyway, it's a fun game to play for a bit, and I think it might just help develop both sides of your brain.  At least, it couldn't hurt!

You can play the game online here, or get it for $0.99 for the iPod or iPad at the Apple App Store or for Android devices at the App Store on Amazon.

How to Search On Google--Advanced Tips

I don't know about you, but I would be lost without Google.  I truly can't imagine what it was like for parents to homeschool before Google and the World Wide Web.  And my son has grown up with an idea of Google as an omnipotent information source.  I think he was only five when, after asking me one of those questions that has been pondered for ages (like "which came first, the chicken or the egg?"), he responded to my answer that I didn't know with a sigh and a disgusted face and said, "Mom, just Google it."

That said, I've only recently realized how much I had been missing about how to use this powerful tool.  Here are a few of the features that I've only learned about lately:

• Did you know you could use Google as a calculator? It serves as an advanced math calculator, in fact, since it can give you the answer to math equations with symbols that I've long ago forgotten what they stand for.  
• Did you know that they have a special search engine, called Google Scholar, that is geared to searching through scholarly literature?  This search engine attempts to rank the responses to your quest the way an academic researcher would--that is, looking not only at the text of the article, but weighing factors such as the author, where it was published, and how many times it had been cited in other scholarly journals, before ordering the responses to your search request.
• Did you know that if you are looking for something within a particular website, but it doesn't have its own internal search engine, you can make Google do a site-specific search?
• Did you know you could use Google to give you conversions, like changing dollars into English pounds, or degrees Farenheit into degree Centigrade, or other metric conversions of distance and weight?
• Did you know you could use Google as a dictionary?

Well, maybe you did, but I didn't.  But Google Education is here to the rescue!  They have recently developed a series of posters for teachers to post in the classroom to educate students about search engine terminology, symbols, and best practices.   You can download them here, and even if you don't print them out as posters, you can keep the documents on your computer when you need a quick reminder about how to search for, say, Martin Luther King Jr. quotes ONLY during the Kennedy Administration, or gathering information about twilight without venturing into vampire territory.

Easter/Earth Week/Screen-Free Week

Well, there has been a lot going on for the past seven days.  We had a whole variety of activities to celebrate Earth Day, we had our week of Easter and local produce from the Farmers Market, and we foreswore our use of the Internet or computer games for purely entertainment purposes.  I don't remember when, if ever, these events have lined up together as they did this month.

So although it was busy, I have to say that it was a really great week.  And while the Earth Day activities and Easter Egg dying and hunts and fresh strawberries were all great, I really have to admit that I believe our reduced computer time was a big contributor to our appreciation of this week.

Part of it, I will also say, is due to the fact that our academic year is winding down.  Two of our activities ended last week, which is bittersweet--we've really enjoyed them, but we're looking forward to more unstructured free time.  (Let me say that I consider us to be homeschooling year round--however, during the summer, we are more laid back, because we don't have so many scheduled activities and I don't have many classes that I'm leading for groups of children.  This allows us to do our own thing on our own schedule, which is a nice break from all our classes and coops, as much as we do need and enjoy them in their time.)

But I also have to admit that not turning to our computer for entertainment meant that we turned to each other more--which is a good thing.  We spent a lot more time together playing board games or reading together.  And I have to commend my son, who really took this challenge on and didn't try to "cheat" by sneaking in his Wii or computer games.  I know he is looking forward to getting back "online," and I plan to catch up on some of my "time wasters" I've given up this week.  However, I think it has been a valuable lesson, and I think we'll have a discussion about how to keep our electronics more in check.  I already have one day a week when I don't drive as an environmental consciousness thing; perhaps we will add on an "non-essential electronics day."  We'll see.

I hope everyone else has been enjoying this week as well, and that your family life has been enriched by this holiday (at least here in North Carolina, classes have been cancelled all week for Spring Break).

Screen Free Week

This is such a busy week, since it is Passover and Easter and, of course, Earth Day, which we are celebrating through a book giveaway and webinar and blog hop...

But if that is not enough on your plate (because usually these things don't line up on the same week), April 18-24 is also Screen Free Week.  Screen Free Week, organized by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, and endorsed by a whole bunch of government agencies, public health organizations, and child development non-profits, urges families to unplug their digital and/or screen based electronic entertainment and spend the week in more personal and interactive pursuits, including spending time outside in nature, reading, playing board games, and, like, talking to each other.

For years, this was known as "Turn Off the TV" week, which we were virtuously able to ignore, because we haven't had TV in the house for over 20 years, and my son has never lived with a television.  I think it is one of the best things we've done for him for a whole bunch of reasons, but, of course, that is a personal family decision.

However, when it came around this year, I felt like maybe we ought to take notice of it.  While nobody is watching TV, we know have more computers in the house than there are people, and we all probably spend more time on our computers than we should.  Also, at Christmas, we bought our son a Wii--the first video game system he has ever had.  I don't think he goes overboard, but he is now spending a lot of his free time on either the computer or the Wii--time he used to spend reading or drawing or doing other things.

So I talked to my son, and he agreed not to use the Wii this week, and to cut back his entertainment use of the computer to a minimum.  I, too, am trying to cut my computer use to the bones.  We do a lot of our school work (we include doing our blogs as school work) on the computer, and most of my projects involve computer use, so I'm not willing to cut it off completely.  But we're doing our best to stick to using it just for essential needs this week, and actually turning it off for most of the day.  I figure that not only is it a good exercise in taming our digital addictions, but it is another way to reduce our carbon footprint during Earth Week.

We spent most of the day in activities outside the house.  Then tonight, after dinner, instead of retreating to our separate screens, we played a couple of board games--Roundabout (simple to play, but deceptively difficult to win) and Likewise.  It made it a nice evening--seemingly more laid back and personal.

But we'll see how we're doing as the week wears on....

Middle Schooler Creates #1 Free App in Apple Store

All those middle schooler computer geeks out there, take note--the longstanding favorite free app for the iPhone and similar devices, a game called Angry Birds, has been knocked off its perch...by a 14 year old boy!  Robert Nay, an 8th graders living in Spanish Fork, UT, created his "Bubble Ball" app (in which you move balls through puzzle spaces using wooden and metal planks and such) in only six weeks, using a programming package called Corona from Ansca Mobile.  Corona is free to download and use on your own device, but you will have to buy a $349 annual subscription to share any programs you create with others (although educational users with a .edu address can get the software for only $49/year).  While it was only released right before Christmas, Bubble Ball has already been downloaded more than 3 million times!

Here is a video of Robert Nay speaking about his creation and future plans:



What a great example of what middle schoolers can do with a good idea, some parental support, and a little free time (OK, so I'm sure the fact that Nay has been programming for about six years already probably had something to do it with).