Group items tagged

What does a teenage brain on Google look like?

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) presents Immune Attack™, an educational video game that introduces basic concepts of human immunology to high school and entry-level college students. Designed as a supplemental learning tool, Immune Attack aims to excite students about the subject, while also illuminating general principles and detailed concepts of immunology.

Science Center Where scientists and engineers share expertise and experiences with learners from around the world

"Explore what kinds of important clues scientists can find on bones."

Project Noah is a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere.

"The Habitable Planet is a multimedia course for high school teachers and adult learners interested in studying environmental science. The Web site provides access to course content and activities developed by leading scientists and researchers in the field."

"Grab your pith helmet, camera and let's go exploring with Project Noah. Project Noah is a web and mobile (iOS and Android) platform that helps students become "citizen scientists" by encouraging exploration and shared documentation of wildlife and flora. Students can discover wildlife from around the world or simply examine the living world in their own backyard. Teachers can join existing missions or create missions to build a community of explorers, who contribute content to their students' learning experiences."

" brought a superhero into my classroom the other day. He wasn't wearing a cape. He didn't have an alias. But he had the greatest superpower of all: inspiration. When you teach using project-based learning (PBL), one brings outside expertise into the classroom. My eighth graders begin the year creating science fiction based origin stories for original superhero characters as an introduction to a greater advocacy unit. Therefore, it seemed natural to bring in an actual scientist. Which brought me to CalTech and Dr. Spyridon Michalakis."

"Part of what makes games great is how subjective our enjoyment of them can be. The best games unravel in different ways for different people; we play them differently and in different contexts, changing what they mean to us. Unfortunately, when we evaluate games for the classroom we often don't consider how mutable they are. We see them as either containing a certain amount of educational content or not. Some games fit into this model, sure. But for games that are more akin to, say, modeling clay than quizzes -- the learning value is up for grabs; they need people to give them shape and context. On its face, Geoguessr -- a geography guessing game that tosses players into random parts of the world (using Google's Street View) -- doesn't seem to have much traditional educational value. There's not much to be memorized and used on a typical geography test. Players guess where they are rather than know it, and guessing is bad, right? Not quite. Because what Geoguessr gets kids to do is think about what the essence of geography is. It asks the player to consider "place" in every sense, not just from the perspective of a geographer. It asks the player to think like an anthropologist, a scientist, indeed - a detective. In fact, it's one of my go-to examples of "21st century literacy," that notoriously murky way of looking at the world that's tough to understand, let alone teach."

"Creativity, according to Albert Einstein, is intelligence having fun and for most neuro-cognitive scientists creativity is something that is inherently born with us and the proof is kids. All kids draw on their sharp sense of creativity to discover and explore the world around them. They can easily adapt their behaviour to new situations, develop new thinking skills and are constantly engaged in trying out "new ways of doing stuff". Sir Ken Robinson made a strong argument in this regard in his popular TED talk "schools kill creativity". Ken argued that kids come to school bursting with  creativity and by the time they graduate they have lost most if not all of their creativity. Sounds like schools are "educating kids out of creativity"!"

"It's known as the "musician's advantage."  For decades, educators, scientists, and researchers have observed that students who pick up musical instruments tend to excel in academics-taking the lead in measures of vocabulary, reading, and non-verbal reasoning and attention skills, just to name a few. But why musical training conferred such an advantage remained a bit of a mystery. "

"If you have sometime this weekend, you might want to check this list of TED talks on the human brain. The original list curated by TED contains only 9 talks but we also added our favourite talk which is that of Jill Bolte.   Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist and brain scientist,  who one morning woke up to a massive stroke that was gradually paralyzing some of her brain functions including speech, movement, and understanding. In her popular talk "Stroke of Insight", Jill shares her story of what she went through in the process of regaining her brain functions."

"THERE are two kinds of motive for engaging in any activity: internal and instrumental. If a scientist conducts research because she wants to discover important facts about the world, that's an internal motive, since discovering facts is inherently related to the activity of research. If she conducts research because she wants to achieve scholarly renown, that's an instrumental motive, since the relation between fame and research is not so inherent. Often, people have both internal and instrumental motives for doing what they do."

"Recently, there's been much debate over whether or not everyone should learn to code. Software engineer Yevgeniy Brikman says that this is the wrong question: there's a huge difference between learning programming and learning computer science, which is the more valuable skill. "

"Tinkering activities provide a powerful way to inspire students' interest, engagement, and understanding in science. The Tinkering Fundamentals course will help educators and enthusiasts develop a practice of tinkering and making. This course will focus on key design elements of high-quality, science-rich tinkering activities, effective facilitation strategies and environmental organization. Watch Intro Video About the Course The Tinkering Fundamentals course will offer educators and enthusiasts an opportunity to develop a practice of tinkering and making.  We see tinkering as a serious endeavor -- one that is generalizable across content and especially good at interweaving disciplines in a way that leads to complex projects and individualized learning opportunities.   Tinkering has recently been introduced into the educational field as a potential driver of creativity, excitement, and innovation in science learning. It is seen by many as an effective means to engage in exploring STEM concepts, practices and phenomena. Tinkering typically blends the high and low tech tools of science along with a strong aesthetic dimension that supports children's (and adults) self expression.  For over a decade, the Exploratorium has been developing science-rich tinkering activities. Working with learning scientists, we have identified a set of design principles and indicators of learning that can help you to integrate tinkering activities into your elementary and middle school science programs. This course will focus on key design elements of high quality science-rich tinkering activities, facilitation strategies, and environmental organization. Selected  tinkering activities will be centered around circuits for this course.  We will review the ways in which tinkering supports science learning through providing opportunities to deepen engagement, intentionality, innovation, collaboration, and understanding. This course will excite you, inspire you, and get you tinkering in

"Professional coders work collaboratively, and rarely does a computer scientist create a program solely on their own. Every successful programming project evolves as a result of Iterations of code, the merging of ideas, and the contributions of the individual team members. Not only does coding empower students to think logically and critically, to collaborate, and to create meaningful learning, but it also provides them an authentic opportunity to develop critical communication and collaboration skills."