Younger Students
For elementary teachers, students can email Santa and he’ll write back! (He might have a grumpy Elf or a silly Reindeer answer if he gets too busy).
Visit bit.ly/emailtosanta and check it out.
Older Students
You know those moments when you’re excited for something, and you share that thing with somebody, and they look at you like you just suggested skinning a puppy to make a wallet?
My director gave me that look when I showed her the below slideshow. It’s not going to my district staff, but it’s just too fun to keep to myself.
For older students, this is a good way to pass the time on the last day before break:
In case you can’t see the embedded slideshow, here’s a link to full-screen.
~Matt “If you don’t celebrate Christmas… I got nothing” Vaudrey
Matt Vaudrey takes cues from https://what-if.xkcd.com
Brilliant.
~ Andrew “I’m-totally-stealing-this-and-what’s-wrong-with-puppy-wallets” Busch
822 visits per second * 74 seconds for the US implies that there are fewer than 60,000 households with kids in the US? This is serious stuff, and demands higher accuracy than that…
Oh, I firmly agree that this matter requires our complete focus and accuracy.
While addressing your comment, I found some errors, so it’s a good thing you came a-knocking.
This work is corollary to the US having the same ratio of “good children” as the rest of the world (it’s likely less), and the same ratio of Christmas-celebrating households (it’s likely more), so between the two, we’ll call it a wash.
That got us 80.8 minutes for the United States.
A quicker (easier) calculation goes thusly:
The US population is roughly 4.3 percent of the world; 4.3 percent of 31 hours (of Christmas) is 75 minutes.
Eric, it’s that attention to detail that makes Desmos such a fantastic tool. Well done.