How You Can Save Lions!

Lions are going extinct. If you want more lions to roam the land you can write a letter write a letter about lions to African leaders.

First you have to ask your parents if you can write a letter to National Geographic. If they say yes you should write a letter no more than 250 words. You can include pictures of lions, if you like. Then you can print a permission slip for your parents to sign. By doing so, you can have a chance to get your letter posted on their website.

Send your letter to
National Geographic Digital Media — Kids M-4430 1145 17th St.,NW Washington, DC 200036.

There are only about 20,00 lions remaining and 60 years ago there about 450,000, according to National Geographics.

PBS Kids: Get Ready to Interview the DESIGN SQUAD's Adam and Judy

This week, we had success with our Hidden Alarm Challenge. (For to read more about our failed attempt last week, read this post.) The following video show our alarm working and how we might hide it or play a trick on someone with it.

The following are the questions we plan to ask Adam and Judy, when they visit The Herald next week. We will be interviewing them either in person or via iChat.

• How did you make the mars rover work?
• How did you make the paper table hold a heavy object?
• How did you make the buzzer work with a double AA battery?
• Did you use a buzzer from radio shack?
• Is the mars rover really hard to make?

Failing Buzzer — Ack!

The buzzer failed. Yes, building a working hidden buzzer is more difficult than it looks. Nikita and Zack's buzzer worked well and earlier on in our Hillwood Herald blog session, but the rest of us could not get our buzzers to work. The question now is, Why?

The tape? The batteries or the alarm? Too much aluminum or not enough. We're not sure, and we did compare our alarm set up to that of Nikita and Zack's. They looked pretty much the same, but clearly they did not work the same. Jay will be discussing the project with his dad for advice, and next Friday, we will try again.

Stop-Animation: What Is It?

Stop-animation is when you make a video by taking many photos of different poses so it looks like one movement. This video below was made using stop-animation. The people wore different color shirts and took many photos of them. In stop-animation you sometimes have to make more than one of a picture.

The video was made by French-Swiss artist Guillaume Reymond.

The Constitution

The Members Constitutional Convention signed the final draft on September 17, 1787. It took 4 months of secret debating to replace the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. 


The Constitution was all about how the government would work. Women, people of color, and non-Christians were excluded. The Constitution is a paper that people look at for guidance.