C10


R


K Eids The balloon’s ascent lasted 2 hours 32 minutes. The descent lasted 39 minutes.


Science project goes to the edge of the Earth A


t the Potomac School in McLean this past school year, 13 seventh- and eighth-graders signed up for a biweekly science elective that proposed this challenge: Take a photo of the curva- ture of the Earth and spend just $200 to do it.


Science teacher Bill Wiley knew the kids could research online what tools they would need, including a weather balloon and a styrofoam cooler. But that was the easy part. They still had to figure out how to put it together. “I figured there was about a 60 percent chance they would pull it off,” Wiley said. In the end, the group got incredible


pictures. And the experience of launch- ing and tracking the device was like a scene right out of Hollywood, Wiley said, as the kids tracked the device in real-time using a student’s iPad. “It was like one of those scenes you see


on TV where they do these things [with technology], and you go, ‘That can’t be real,’ ” Wiley said. The students met every other week throughout the year. They started with a digital camera, which they programmed to shoot photos and video several times a minute. They bought a cellphone that had a GPS function and loaded software that regularly relayed the phone’s loca- tion to the Internet through a program called InstaMapper. Both phone and camera went in the cooler, along with hand warmers to keep the electronics warm in the stratosphere, where it would be 70 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Fi- nally, the kids had to figure out what an- gle to hang the cooler so that the camera would get shots of the Earth’s edge, not just a bunch of clouds. “It pushed all their math ability,” Wiley said. On the day of the launch, June 5, four students drove with Wiley to Chambers- burg, Pennsylvania, to launch the balloon and its payload. Wiley had asked the kids to bring their laptops so they could use WiFi signals to get online and track the camera’s movements on InstaMapper. But seventh-grader Will Prout brought


Hoffman, president of School Zone, which has added 13 iPad apps to its line of workbooks and flashcards. “Now you’ve added sound, motion and touch to enhance learning.” Here are some fun, useful and educational apps that are great for the iPad (or iPhone or iPod Touch).


1. Tales2Go, free for 30 days, then $24.99 for a year. Get unlimited access to more than a thousand audio books and stories for kids of all ages.


PHOTOS FROM BILL WILEY


Potomac School seventh-grader Will Prout inflates the weather balloon his class used to take a photo of the Earth’s curvature.


his father’s iPad, which was able to con- nect to the Internet through a regular cellphone network. That meant they could follow the signal while driving around. “I didn’t expect we would use the iPad


that much, but it really saved us,” said Will, 13. After the balloon rose above the clouds, the cellphone signal faded, so the group toured the Gettysburg battlefield. In the thinner atmosphere high above the Earth, the lack of pressure would cause the balloon to expand from six to 15 feet in diameter and eventually pop. Then the cooler, cellphone and camera


on www.kidspost.com


The camera took this photo of the Earth during the balloon’s descent.


A cooler attached to the balloon held a camera and cellphone.


THEATER REVIEW Charles Ross in ‘Rings,’ shining with glee


Actor goes to the ends of Middle-earth in a funny take on Tolkien


by Peter Marks Let me confess that I can’t tell


whether I’m a fan of “The Lord of the Rings”: I’ve never read the books or seen the movies. (Yes, we aliens live among you.) But it must be saying something that even a Tolkien agnostic can chuckle over Charles Ross’s “One Man Lord of the Rings,” his vir- tuoso encapsulation of the film trilogy. The 70-minute production, at


Woolly Mammoth Theatre through Aug. 1, is a sequel of sorts to his “One Man Star Wars Tril- ogy,” the uproarious show that put Ross on the theater map. Un- like his “Star Wars,” this new work is not being offered as part of the Capital Fringe Festival. But the follow-up is just as gleefully Fringe-worthy, so those who know their way around Middle- earth would be well advised to detour from the official venues and catch Ross in his tickling solo act. The charming Ross is a fab- ulous technician, an astute mim- ic of voices, of actors’ gestures, even of movie sound effects. With those skills alone, “One Man Lord


of the Rings” makes a funny im- pression. Dressed in the kind of dark jumpsuit that gives him the look of a trainee for some kind of security job, Ross provides a vir- tually nonstop embodiment of the gallery of characters from “Fellowship of the Ring,” “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King.” (Between each seg- ment of the clearly exhausting movie re-creations, he stops only long enough to take a gulp of wa- ter.)


Because I can’t distinguish a hobbit from a wizard, many jokes went over my head. Then again, my seatmate, who’d seen all three films, reported getting only about 50 percent of the references. While enormously popular, “The Lord of the Rings” doesn’t match “Star Wars” for touchstone pop- cultural significance, and so the audience for this show might not be quite as sizable or ready-made. Still, Ross is such a winning en- tertainment machine that any- one who partakes will remember his herculean labors fondly. marksp@washpost.com


LISA HEBDEN


A QUEST WORTH TAKING:Charles Ross eyes the ring in his solo show “One Man Lord of the Rings” at Woolly Mammoth.


One Man Lord of the Rings based on the books by J.R.R. Tolkien, written and performed by Charles Ross. Directed by TJ Dawe. Through Aug. 1 at Woolly Mammoth Theatre, 641 D St. NW. Visit www.woollymammoth.net or call 202-393-3939.


See a photo gallery of images taken by the Potomac School’s balloon camera.


would fall down to Earth with a small parachute. The kids constantly checked the iPad to see if a signal had reappeared, marking the cooler’s reentry. It finally showed up, three hours later, but on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay! The weather models that the kids had used to predict the de- scent hadn’t worked so well — they thought it would land north of Baltimore. The group headed to Delaware, driving


toward the cooler’s location on Insta- Mapper. They drove on rural roads, clos- ing in on the cellphone’s GPS signal, until they finally spotted the bright orange parachute in the middle of a strawberry field. A few anxious moments later, they turned on the camera and looked through the pictures. Mission accomplished. —Margaret Webb Pressler


KLMNO FRAZZ


TUESDAY, JULY 13, 2010 JEF MALLETT


TODAY: Chance of storms


HIGH LOW 86 75


ILLUSTRATION BY MAGGIE MROWKA, 10, BURKE


Who says learning can’t be fun? Check out these iPad apps.


Using the iPad to track the weather balloon convinced Bill Wiley that the tablet computer is a breakthrough educational tool. “You can be sitting in a cornfield looking things up, or in the middle of the woods logging data,” he said. “It’s a game-changer,” said Jonathan


2. Star Walk, $4.99. A portable planetarium. Hold the iPad up to the sky, and it shows you the stars in that direction as if you were looking through a telescope. You can get information on constellations, celestial bodies and how the sky changes over time.


3. PopMath, 99 cents. Get your math facts down with this addictive app that makes math a game.


4.Wurdle, $1.99. A fun word game that’s like Boggle.


5. Magic Piano, 99 cents. Play and learn classic piano pieces on a regular keyboard, or you can make the keys display in a spiral or circle pattern.


6. Musée du Louvre, 99 cents. APPLE VIA PR NEWSWIRE


Take a virtual tour of one of the greatest museums on Earth, the Louvre in Paris.


CAPITAL FRINGE FESTIVAL ‘Hunchback’: A ringer with Beethoven, Quasimodo


Some people skip the Fringe, remembering only the plays that were uncomfortable, terrible, a waste of time. They forget that the Fringe makes it possible for some truly funny, strange, esoter- ic shows to find an audience — shows like “The Hunchback Vari- ations,” written by Mickle Maher, which continues at the Goethe- Institut through July 25. This play posits that Beethoven and Quasimodo are colleagues de- spite the obstacles of one of them being fictional, and that they are holding a panel discussion on an


obscure problem they’ve been studying together. The show, which features two


very promising and very young actors, reads a bit like a classic Monty Python sketch. Beethoven (Aaron Bliden) and Quasimodo (Michael Saltzman) have joined forces to discover a mysterious sound described by Anton Che- khov in the stage directions of “The Cherry Orchard” — “Sud- denly, a distant sound is heard, coming as if out of the sky, like the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away.” The


two men spend 40 minutes sum- marizing their findings on what the sound is not: a didgeridoo, Quasimodo’s hands squelching together, a clay flute, the pages of a book. It never occurs to us to ask


“Who cares what the sound is?” much less “How can they hear the sounds if they’re both deaf?” or “Why is Beethoven wearing Con- verse? He looks like Dr. Who.” Their quest is more than aca- demic; the thirst for knowledge and the need to escape their lives concentrate themselves into the


search for the magic sound. Both actors are funny and committed, but it’s the moments when we’re not laughing that make the play more than an extended joke about the uselessness of aca- deme.


— Fiona Zublin


ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM More offbeat theater options abound at the 2010 Capital Fringe Festival. Visit washingtonpost.com/ fringe for reviews and a complete list of shows.


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