I came across the website ThisIsSand.com and immediately thought, “Well, this is kind of dumb.” As you hold your left mouse button down, sand drops. That didn’t exactly seem thrilling. Well, it turned out that the website wasn’t dumb, but I was. I just didn’t catch on that you could change the color of the sand you were dropping. As you did that, you could come up with a very abstract or very concrete picture of whatever you wanted. You can save your project to the This Is Sand gallery so you can look at it later, and that makes it possible for a teacher to grade the projects.

This Is Sand is a pretty simple idea that has really neat results.