The Huntington Memorial Library is very excited to announce that we will be hosting an Afternoon Tea on Saturday September 14th at 1:30pm in preparation for the upcoming release of the Downton Abbey movie in theaters September 20th. There will be several fun activities at the tea including a short talk about the history of Afternoon Teas and etiquette and watch the series finale so we are all caught up on where Downton left off before the movie comes out all while enjoying a full tea served with sweet and savory delights AND a photo booth so come dressed up in your 20s apperal. Don’t have anything to wear? No problem! Props will be donated from the Underground Attic to set the scene. We didn’t stop there! The library will also be raffling off a teapot and two tickets to see the movie when it comes out!
Tickets are FREE and available now through Eventbrite (click here for the link). Be sure to reserve your seat before this event sells out!
The summer is over, and another successful Minecraft Camp is in
the books! The kids worked on one large project, called a museum of
constellations for most of the Saturdays we were together. This project was
inspired by Molcraft, a project
created by students and faculty at the University of Hull in the UK to create
an immersive chemistry learning experience. In Molcraft, you can tour huge
models of proteins and common chemicals, learning facts from signs and from
Minecraft Villagers who seem to talk to you and searching for hidden prizes
among the models. In HML’s constellation museum, we did something similar by
building models of constellations, sprinkling facts around the area, building
our own “talking” villagers with a redstone machine, and hiding prizes for
museum guests.
To complete all this, kids started by picking out a constellation
and doing some research about it in books and online. Then, on some printed out
star maps, they measured the distances between stars as they appear in the
night sky and made a scale model of their constellation. Some of our
Minecrafters learned an important lesson about how the scale you choose matters
when their constellation models ended up positively gigantic, while their
friends had a much more manageable size, all because they decided that every
millimeter on the page represented two blocks in Minecraft instead of one.
Finally, they finished by sharing their research through signs, books, and a
redstone machine that creates the illusion of someone (or something) talking to
you through the in-game chat.
We’re proud of everything the kids created in our constellation
museum, from one kid’s very avant garde take on the project to another’s
precise recreation of Ursa Minor. And yet… there’s not enough kids in
Minecraft Camp to create every constellation, so our museum has lots of room
left to fill! If you want to add your own constellation model, or if you just
want to tour what we did, you can download our Minecraft world by downloading this
folder. If you don’t know how to download a Minecraft world and play in
it, you can follow instructions here. If you do
add on to our museum, send it back and we’ll include your contribution!
