Back from vacation....
Hey everyone. Hope you’re all having a fun summer. I’m back from my vacation and ready to start posting regularly again!
Cheers,
Doug.
Immune Attack is a video game designed by the Federation of American Scientists to help teach immunology concepts to students in senior level high school biology and first year university biology.
To play the game, users control a microscopic robot and navigate through a first-person 3D body, completing a series of stepwise missions to detect a bacterial infection and activate the appropriate defensive immune cells. These stepwise missions follow the actual biological process that occurs during an infection and how immune cells are stimulated to kill the bacteria.
Immune Attack is a supplemental teaching tool, designed to be used in conjunction with HS and freshman college biology textbooks.
It’s a free download (registration required). To learn more about the game see the Teacher Guide, Game Guide and System Requirements.
Ever thought your family deserves its own coat of arms? Scion has made a fun Flash tool for creating one…
Astronomers are inviting members of the public to help them make major new discoveries by taking part in a census of one million galaxies.
Visitors to www.galaxyzoo.org will get to see stunning images of galaxies, most of which have never been viewed by human eyes before. By sorting these images into “spiral galaxies” (like our own Milky Way) or “elliptical galaxies”, visitors will help astronomers to understand the structure of the universe. The new digital images were taken using the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico.
‘It’s not just for fun’ said Kevin Schawinski of Astrophysics at Oxford University where the data will be analysed. ‘The human brain is actually better than a computer at pattern recognition tasks like this. Whether you spend five minutes, fifteen minutes or five hours using the site your contribution will be invaluable.’ Visitors will be able to print out posters of the galaxies they have explored and even compete to see who’s the best virtual astronomer.
Start with the tutorial, and then get to work!
PROJECT: Build a soda bottle water rocket.
Here’s a neat little project from Wired’s fantastic PBS science show and website WiredScience:
Have you ever wanted to launch your own rocket? Well, now you can, with little more than a two liter soda bottle, wire hangers, a bicycle pump and some PVC pipe. Watch GeekDad Dylan Tweney and his helpers, Nelson and Ben, as they construct a launch pad that can shoot a soda bottle 100 feet or more into the air.
Roz Savage is an amazing woman who is currently rowing solo across the Pacific Ocean. It’s a crazy endeavor (perhaps only slightly moreso than her solo row across the Atlantic a few years ago) that is truly amazing to follow… and through the magic of the Interweb (and a satellite phone), you can get updates about her progress every day.
Roz regularly updates her blog (including pictures and video) and posts to twitter. You can see exactly where she is right now using her Marine Tracker. Roz uses her sat phone to chat with Leo Laporte three times a week. You can listen in live (Tues, Thurs, Sat, 10a Pacific/1700 UTC) or subscribe to the podcast.
You and your kids should really check it out.
From Wired’s GeekDad blog:
Let’s get one thing straight: juggling is geeky. It’s ubergeeky. In my experience, learning to move objects—props, as jugglers call them—through the air in a controlled fashion is a talent reserved for carnies, clowns, and extremely geeky fathers.
Therefore you owe it to yourself and your kids to learn how to juggle. It’ll amaze kids of all ages, and the older ones will probably want to try for themselves.
One of the best Internet resources for juggling tricks and tips is the Internet Juggling Database, and the best trick to start with is the three ball cascade.
The NASA Robotics site has a list of robotics summer camp programs, some NASA-affiliated and some not, available all over the United States. Not suprisingly, most of the camps use LEGO Mindstorms as the robotics platform, but some use GearsEDS (which I’d never heard of before).
I searched around for similar camps in Canada but didn’t find much… if you know of any, send me an email and I’ll post a link.
O’Reilly’s Make Magazine launched a new series of books called DIY Science, and the first one is The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments, by Robert Bruce Thompson.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, chemistry sets were among the most popular Christmas gifts, selling in the millions. But two decades ago, real chemistry sets began to disappear as manufacturers and retailers became concerned about liability. This book steps up to the plate with lessons on how to equip your home chemistry lab, master laboratory skills, and work safely in your lab.
From the preface:
This book is for anyone, from responsible teenagers to adults, who wants to learn about chemistry by doing real, hands-on laboratory experiments.
DIY hobbyists and science enthusiasts can use this book to master all of the essential practical skills and fundamental knowledge needed to pursue chemistry as a lifelong hobby. Home school students and public school students whose schools offer only lecture-based chemistry courses can use this book to gain practical experience in real laboratory chemistry. A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book has done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry laboratory course.
I really encourage you to read the book’s rather inspiring preface here at BoingBoing. It gives you a very clear idea about what to expect with this book, and why building your own chemistry lab beats the pants off of any pre-boxed chemistry kit.
In a series of colorful, fun-filled comic-book pages, cartoon kids Celine and Tucker set up a home workshop and then proceed to build a whole series of toys and gadgets out of leftover items like soda bottles, duct tape and mop buckets. They are the heroes of a just-released MIT-spawned book called Howtoons, designed to inspire 8-15 year old readers with a sense of can-do adventure and the creative possibilities all around them (and teach them a few principles of science and engineering along the way).
From the author:
What we hope is that kids everywhere will not look at throwaway stuff the same way ever again. Instead, they will realize than an old plastic bottle can be a rocket or a submarine or any number of things.
Howtoons are also a regular feature in Make Magazine. Click on the images above to see some example projects from the Howtoons website.
Papercraft are models made from sheets of heavy paper or cardstock… a hobby that’s particularly popular in Japan and Europe. It sounds simple enough, until you see some of the amazingly cool things you can make using freely available patterns on the web:
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(There are loads more available… here are some places to start looking:
Molecular Workbench (from the Concord Consortium) is billed as a “virtual lab” for science education, allowing you to create and work with 2D and 3D interactive simulations of a wide range of physical processes. There are hundreds of pre-built simulations available to explore that cover an amazing array of topics in physics, biology, chemistry, and even biotechnology and nantechnology (there are many more models available from within the software). For the more adventurous, you can build your own simulations using a range of tools that are available from within the program.
Check out this video podcast that demonstrates some of the programs’s basic features.
The program is completely free and available for Windows and Mac (and Linux too, since it’s a Java app).
Project: LED Candles. This 5-minute video from Popular Science shows you how to make a handy little candle light from basic electronic components (a 9-volt battery, a couple of LEDs, a resistor and some wires), without any soldering required.
To get more out of this project, learn some more about the electronic principals involved.
Wired’s GeekDad blog has a great review of a new graphic novel about “ethical hacking” aimed at pre-teens and young teenagers:
Parents unfamiliar with the concept of ethical hacking may get nervous about exposing their children to a comic book that glorifies hacking. However, there is a strong moral current throughout the story, with predatory adults (the usual scum: suits, politicians) attempting to turn the Hackerteen students’ elite skills towards criminal activities, to the utter scorn of the kids…
There is a clear moral message in the real world, just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do that thing. To educate kids that that applies to computers too, and to do it in an entertaining and respectful manner, as Hackerteen does, is incredibly valuable.
Microsoft has just launched their much anticipated WorldWide Telescope, a program that integrates vast amounts of space imagery from different telescopes (downloaded as needed) into a seamless experience of the universe:
The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a Web 2.0 visualization software environment that enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope—bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world for a seamless exploration of the universe. Choose from a growing number of guided tours of the sky by astronomers and educators from some of the most famous observatories and planetariums in the country. Feel free at any time to pause the tour, explore on your own (with multiple information sources for objects at your fingertips), and rejoin the tour where you left off…
The sneak peak of the program made quite a splash at the last TED conference. If you’re interested in some more background, Robert Scoble did a great in-depth interview with the two main architects of the project (Curtis Wong and Jonathan Fay).
The program (Windows only) is a free download. It looks incredible.
How-To:
