I got inspired to return to my webcomic, Boolean Squared, this morning after posting about the shift to Screen Literacy in my last post. So here is the first of a series of comics about my crew being called Children of the Screen.
After this series of comics, I will be introducing a new character — finally, a girl to mix things up a bit with the boys. She’s a smarty-pants, too.
This is a comic from this week, featuring not only Boolean but also my XO computer. See more Boolean Squared over my website: www.booleansquared.com (Yeah, I finally got around to purchasing the domain name).
Over at my webcomic, Boolean Squared, I have been exploring the antics of a play written by Mr. Teach and performed by his students. The play is a twist on Alice in Wonderland, with a technological bent to it (Boolean is a virus, for example). This particular comic strip story was one of the first Boolean Squared I had done (back when I was using Strip Generator) and it was inspired by a play/musical that I wrote during my Summer Institute with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. The play — called The Note Who Got Lost in the Masterpiece — is not about technology but about music, and I always envisioned doing it with my sixth graders. So far, I have chickened out, in part because of the time needed. But a few years ago, the play won a national competition and was performed by a youth theater group in Amherst and it was an amazing experience to watch the story unfold on the stage.
The comic strip allowed me to make fun of the process of putting on a play with young kids, particularly when the teacher is the writer and an actor is Boolean (he envisions being cloned, with multiple Booleans running rampant around the stage).
This week’s strand of my webcomic, Boolean Squared, deals with research and projects in the digital age as Boolean tries to figure out why maps are on the classroom walls (when there is Google that he could be using to gather information) and how to best overuse powerpoint for a project presentation.
The last couple of episodes of my webcomic, Boolean Squared, have been all about Funk, Boolean’s new pet. He wanted a dog or a cat, but his mom got him a llama. Funk digs the music of James Brown and loves to dance. Heck, who doesn’t?