This is a small example that I made: a map of Denmark, with the Danish flag superimposed over the country. The pixels are rather large in this version, so it gets pretty blocky. Note that tile is used to give a different texture and depth.

At the STEM Moon Shot event, kids will help build the mosaic. There are 36 plates, and teams will make each plate. They will be in random order with weird names ...so it is going to be almost impossible to guess the bigger picture based on just one plate.

Here is another, and as you can tell, all of the plates are on a 16x16 plate. The pixels in this case are pretty small with the overall mosaic quite large.

Well, you can tell that this project will be colorful! As with the tile of Denmark, I am using LEGO tiles to give depth and a different texture to the art.

The mosaic is designed to hang on a wall. Toward the middle of the afternoon, volunteers will assemble the mosaic and we will have a big reveal. Technic bricks, pins, plates, and brick will lock everything together.

You can do some incredible things with this form of building. Here is artist Nathan Sawaya's reproduction of Starry Night by Van Gogh. Notice the use of depth and brick type to make this jump out at you!

Here is a segment of a proposal I made to a local organization to do an event where kids would help build their logo.

In 2015, I did a team building activity for a large group of Simplot employees and we had a blast. As a team, I had the people build portions of this and made a large monument. In this case, the bricks are in profile (side) and you get a different texture.

This is a mosaic by Sean Kenny, similar to the work just on display at the Boise Art Museum. Here the building technique is basic, but the patterns made are kind of hypnotic, aren't they?

Last year, I funded a project on Kickstarter to do a master reprint of the Apollo 11 Flight Plan. They only had a poorly scanned copy to start from. They digitized, cleaned, sharpened, and printed on a sturdy archive grade paper. They did NOT correct the 11 typos (or some other very small number) that they found, since they were in the original.

Deke Slayton was one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts who, due to a health concern, did not fly in that part of the program, but became the first Chief of the Astronaut Office - in charge of selection who goes on each mission. Ultimately he did go to space after the Apollo program was done. Chris Kraft literally wrote the book on the Flight Director role and was key to the success of the whole program.

So a flight plan is a detailed listing of all activity over the course of a mission.

At launch, the plan is in minutes and seconds. Here you see liftoff and 2 minutes and 42 seconds later, the second stage ignites!

After liftoff and in orbit, the plan shifts to one hour pages. On this page, you see that if there was a problem, the plan had a branch that would eject the lunar module and burn to prepare for an abort. Certainly glad this was never used in the program.

Did you know that the astronauts actually confirmed their flight path using the stars? They did this as a backup to the navigational computers of the day, which were not as powerful as a programmable calculator, and way less capable than your phone today (smart or not)!

They even had little sketches of the spaceships. Here was the burn required to stay in orbit around the moon. Otherwise, they would swing around the moon and return to earth.

Heat is a major problem in any space craft, as is cold. One side of the spaceship will be hot because of the sun, and the other super cold. Here is show how they want the ship oriented to keep antennas pointed at the earth. They would then also rotate to even out the temperature.

Well, after 103 hours, the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) has landed on the moon. Seems kind of a simple thing when you see it in the plan, but can you imagine how excited everyone was? I was watching this live, as were millions of millions of people all over the world.

Before anyone could celebrate (or breathe, probably) they had to decide if they could stay on the moon's surface. Stay they did, and for all mankind, they walked on another world.

On this page, the LEM (just a portion of it) returns to orbit, and the two astronauts and a bunch of rocks transfer to the Command Module for the return home. The ascent portion of the LEM was left behind.

I wonder, is that ascent portion still in orbit? I am going to have to look that up!

The last page of the plan is the Command Module splashing down into the Pacific ocean. The work of the flight director and the hundreds of engineers guiding and monitoring the space ship are done... until the next mission!

There were consumables on the space ship, with no resupply along the way. Here is the budget of propellant and everything that was required to be done in the mission. This was tracked carefully for the whole time in space.

I have lots of stuff to show. On the right is a reproduction of the Apollo 11 Flight Plan. To the left is a new book (a Kickstarter campaign) that has incredible pictures from all the moon landing missions. Toward the bottom is a book my Aunt got me when she worked for a CBS affiliate... a very exclusive book about all their coverage of the moon landing. Just peaking out is a picture of the Apollo 11 crew. Do you know that astronaut's name?

Answer: astronaut Michael Collins, who often isn't remembered, as he did not set foot on the moon. He was the pilot of the Command Module and stayed in orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were leaving foot prints in the moon dust that are still there today!

Not nearly as important to history, but I will be showing all the sketches and drawings I made as I planned and designed the event. See into the mind of an engineer as he develops a LEGO Moon Rocket!

This is perhaps my favorite photo ever. This is Earthrise as a photo taken by Apollo 8 in December 1968. This is the a picture that many said launched the environmental movement, showing the Tiny Blue Dot that is earth in the vast ocean of night that is space.