Need a laugh ?

[Andrew Davidson]

I saw this post on Edutopia — http://www.edutopia.org/blog/film-festival-standardized-testing-stress — with a collection of funny videos about test-taking. Some of them were very funny, but before you show them to your stressed-out AP students, know that a few of them have NSFHS language.

The Hunger Games parody (#4) by 6th-graders is adorable, though.

#2 (Better Than a Test on Ukelele) is a cute satire about elementary school standardized test-taking.

In one of my classes I have a deaf student with an interpreter in the room. I usually look for videos that are closed captioned to make the interpreter's life easier if I’m going to show something in that class. For instance, World Tech Update is a big challenge in that regard, since it is full of tech jargon and goes very fast and is not closed captioned.

Anyway, while I was watching that ukelele song, I turned on the Google automatic captioning just to see what it would do, thinking of our interpreters.

And THAT was far funnier than the song. If you want a good laugh and proof of why we still need human interpreters and can’t rely on computer software for that task yet, watch how it mangles these simple song lyrics!

I think I’ll show that to my AP CS class just to show an example of a current challenge in CS.

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