MINI BBYO REUNION — If you are a member of the classes of 1975 and 1976 — or a few years before or a few years after — stop by the annual Bowling with Barb event at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, July 14, to get a little extra shmooze time. The actual fundraising event for Mitochondrial Disease, a disease under the umbrella of Muscular Dystrophy, will be held at the Ward Parkway Lanes and begins at 2 p.m. This will give the BBYOers of that generation a chance to chat and catch up with friends they may not have seen in many years. For more information about the mini reunion, the event, or how to make a donation, contact Barb Mendelsohn at 816-589-1144 or .
ISRAELI SCOUTS COMING HERE — Over the weekend you may run into a group of 12 Israeli Scouts and two leaders who are arriving from the Gezer Region Friday to attend Camp Naish in Wyandotte County. Before and after camp a group of families, most of whom are connected with Boy Scout Troop 61, will be hosting these teens and leaders. We’ll tell you more about their experiences here in an upcoming issue.
YIDDISHE KOP — A loyal reader sent us this interesting tidbit. We don’t know where it originated, so unfortunately we can’t properly credit the author.
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $1.2 billion to develop a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to 300 Celsius.
Confronted with the same problem, the Israelis used a pencil.
APP TEACHES CHALLAH BAKING — Let’s Bake Challah!, the new app from G-dcast, is the first children’s app to offer a Jewish cultural experience in a playful way. Mix challah, braid it, bake it, decorate it, bless it and eat it — it’s the whole megillah on your mobile. The app is also an experiential way for children to learn how to bake and practice rituals like saying Hebrew blessings over bread. The app is available for free in the iTunes store at: http://appstore.com/LetsBakeChallah.
“Watching my three-year-old son spend hours on my phone during long plane flights and car trips decorating everything from balloons to cupcakes made it obvious that we needed to make a Jewish contribution to the early childhood mobile space,” G-dcast’s Executive Director Sarah Lefton said. “We knew that if we designed something to be as fun as it is educational, then kids would embrace it.”
Let’s Bake Challah! is G-dcast’s first offering for the preschool set. Designed to be easy to use by the pre-literate child, the app builds not only Jewish literacy but also fine motor skills as kids swipe to knead bread, shake salt on top and sprinkle on sesame, poppy and more exotic toppings to their hearts’ delight. Activities are narrated by the parent’s choice of a female or male voice.
G-dcast is a San Francisco-based nonprofit dedicated to raising basic Jewish literacy through online videos, games and mobile apps. Visit www.g-dcast.com for hours of playfully animated learning.
