Are You the Poisson d’Avril?

Or, in English, the April Fish? If you spent April 1st in France, you might want to check to see if someone attached a cardboard fish to your back without noticing!

Don’t try to freeze yourself

snowmanWe couldn’t help ourselves, and had another shot at an April Fools class this year. If you missed it, check out Freeze Yourself: Visiting the Future with Cryogenics.

We actually had a bit of interest in the topic of cryogenics (some disappointed people wrote to us when they realised it was a joke!), so if anyone out there actually knows something about it, we’d love to hear from you so we can run a real class about it!

Ocelot

And if you missed last year, find out where this nonsense started at Laneway Learning with Training Ocelots for Fun and Profit. Don’t trust the ocelots…

Highlights of 2015

While nothing will ever beat the spaghetti tree and the “special penguins” (check out our post from last year, Happy Hunt the Gowk Day!), 2015 had some good pranks. Did you fall for any of them?

  • Google, always putting waaaaaaaay more effort into their pranks than should really be worthwhile, released a fun addition to Google Maps. In the bottom left corner, where you can change to satellite view, you can currently change to Pacman view and play the beloved arcade game on actual streets! We don’t know how long it will be up, so try it out before they take it away.
  • There’s a trend towards artisan advertising: beer and spirits have been doing it for years, and now Motorola joins in with their hand-crafted selfie sticks.
  • Some teachers really go that extra mile. Matthew Weathers, a mathematics lecturer at Biola University, pranked his class in this fun video.
  • If you were wanting steam-powered technology to make a comeback, then ThinkGeek was out to trick you this year. Presenting, their Steam-Powered Gaming Cabinet.
  • Finally, CERN announces it has finally confirmed the existence of The Force.

Tell us if you come across any others which deserve a mention!

The featured fish above was photographed by Benson Kua, and we have borrowed and edited the image, with thanks, under a Creative Commons Licence.