Each year since 2006, thousands of children across the United States submit artwork representing a plethora of endangered plants and wildlife living on the brink in our fair country. The submissions are amazing, the cause is attention-worthy, and the contest culminates in national Endangered Species Day, which this year happens to be today, May 21.

The contest gives students (grades K-12) the chance to learn about and promote the conservation of endangered species through art. And it gives us some lovely eye candy with a message.

To see the winning artwork, visit http://stopextinction.org/. And you can learn more about Endangered Species Day here.

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Here’s a video of a nifty Exploding Piano Alarm Clock that was recently made in a graduate product design class at MIT. One of MAKE’s former interns, Jake McKenzie, was part of the team who created it. They based their project on the traditional piano drop held every spring off the MIT Baker House.

The premise is simple and aggravating: the piano and its color-coded legs explode once the alarm goes off. The user’s task is to gather up all the parts and put the legs in their corresponding color slots. All while the alarm annoyingly beeps at you. The rub: the color slots move around, so you have to be agile (and awake) to get the correct legs in the correct slots. A knob on the bottom allows you to adjust the difficulty by speeding up the rate of the color changes.

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