Spotty Blue Banana

LabTV online by the National Defense Education Program (NDEP) has some interesting videos about science and engineering for older kids. There are over 50 videos from two seasons of webisodes, helping to capture kids’ imaginations and instill an interest in engineering.

If you want to access some interesting and accessible research from universities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom then Futurity.org is a good place to start looking.

The clear and crisp appearance of this site is very appealing. Five stories scroll through on the upper part of the page, with four drop down categories (Earth & Environment, Health & Medicine, Science & Technology, Society & Culture) providing access to more story. Down the right hand side are two drop down menus, the first listing all the universities’ research stories are taken from, and the second allows you to draw out research stories from any particular month/year combination.

Vic Voltage is the cartoon character set to help primary or elementary school children around the Fusebox site about electricity and its history, using interactive flash games, activities and general information.

There are circuit boards to create using drag-and-drop components. You can see how three common electrical things work in the home. There’s a section on safety, which took me back to a public information film of the 70s. You can also play an electrically themed version of hangman.

The site is created by CE Electric UK who supply electricity to many homes in the UK, so they should know what they’re talking about.

Marvin and Milo are a couple of cartoon characters on the physics.org website that explain how to do some experiments to display physics principles. The cartoons will engage the kids and draw them into the science. The instructions below are clear and simple to follow. There is a dropdown menu to access all the other experiments in the set.

I really like the look of this site and I’ll be returning to other parts of the physics.org website in the future.

I’ve mentioned the Exploratorium (R) before, but not the full site in detail. I’ll be returning to it again in the future. And tying in with my Evolution of Life post, I came across Evidence: How do we know what we know?

This site uses the origins of humans as a case study to demonstrate scientific process and investigation. There are several high quality videos supplementing the content, section being:

• Observing behaviour
• Collecting clues
• Investigating relationships
• Finding patterns
• considering possibilities

• How science works
• Can you believe it?
• Map your knowledge

In the Podcasts and more section there is a little template that you can print out and cut/fold into a useful booklet about fundamentals of scientific process.

Then there is a section called myEvidence, where you can see evidence on a range of subjects other people have ‘mapped’ and you can login and map your own evidence.

The site is Flash driven, so you’ll need to have a Flash player installed and reasonable bandwidth, although there is a low-bandwidth printer friendly version of the site available.

This is a site well worth spending plenty of time investigating.

This site has a set of aminations to explain aspects of evolution of life.

‘Mutation – selection: the bacteria resistance‘ explains how over use of antibiotics has caused, which in turn meant bacterial mutations led to antibiotic resistance.

‘Darwin on the evolution trail‘ follows Charles Darwin as he embarks on is scientific investigations into diversity and eventual publication of On the Origin of Species.

‘O as Origin‘ follows a water molecule on an asteroid as the planets are created and the first cells evolve.

Science Bob is this guy with what looks like a tie-dyed lab coat. He has some simple, effective science experiments. There are instructions about how to recreate the experiments; some accompanied by videos. Also there are explanations of the science.

This site, Sixty Symbols, does for Physics and Astronomy what my last post, Periodic Table, did for Chemistry.

Links: Sixty Symbols dedicated site & YouTube channel

Well these are (just a little bit) famous. The Chemistry dept. in Nottingham explaining the Periodic Table in separate videos.

The videos are hosted on their YouTube channel.

And there’s a dedicated site.

Based in San Francisco, the Exploratorium was founded by the famous physicist and educator Dr Frank Oppenheiner, who remained the director until his death in 1985.

I’ll be visiting the site again, and again and probably again; it’s got to great stuff on there.

However, today I’m interested in the After School section, which “brings hands on activities and digital library resources into afterschool play”.

There are well presented instructional videos telling you how to create the activity, how to engage children in the activity, and how to vary things and investigate the results.