Kahn Academy

I have to take my hat off to Sal Kahn for a truly immense resource. What he has achieved with the Kahn Academy is nothing short of incredible.

He’s single handedly generated 1000+  instructional videos covering subjects including:

• Economics
• Finance
• Chemistry
• Arithmetic
• Pre-algebra
• Algebra
• Geometry
• Biology
• Trigonometry
• Precalculus
• Statistics
• Probability
• Calculus
• Differential Equations
• History
• Linear Algebra
• Physics

What a wealth of information. This has to be place in the category alongside Academic Earth and Udemy.

LabTV – Science and Engineering Videos

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.

futurity.org

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.

FuseBox – Understanding electricity

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.

Chemistry for Kids

This page has a great set of links to chemistry related online resources for kids.

It includes The Periodic Table Videos from the University of Nottingham that I’ve previously written about.

One item from the list I’ve had more of a play with (and shown my rusty knowledge with) is The Periodic Table Game.

Physics explained by cartoons

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.

Evidence: how do we know what we know?

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.

Evolution of life

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’s experiments

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.

Water Bottle Rocket

A couple of years ago I saw a video that capture my interest in creating a water rocket to demonstrate how Newton’s Laws act, hence how a rocket works, and have a bit of fun in the process. Over the intervening period, I forgot about it again, until recently when I came across another example on a BBC television programme, Bang goes the theory (I’ll return to this in a later post).

The latter version of the rocket is somewhat simpler in design, and can easily be recreated.

The original example I now remembered was a bit more involved as a project, and takes a little longer to create. I dug out my early Make Magazines from the garage and found the instructions in there. You can also access them online.

1. Easier design

This is an informative page about the principles, and how to recreate the design with a video embedded.

2. More involved design

This design takes a little more time and effort, and leads to a more ‘explosive’ result.

These are the online instructions from the Make Magazine volume 5 that I’ve got. This is Steve Lodefink’s original design, and there is a video of Steve firing his rocket.

A later instructional video, by Kip Kay is less successful with the rocket, but gives you some pointers.

Additional

You can even have water rocket parties, where you get the kids to decorate their rocket how they want, before launching them, as demonstrated in this finkbuilt post.