Stories tagged education
USA Today has an interesting story today about the role museums can play in increasing science literacy in the country. You can read it right here.
Tags : Biology Browser
in Life Science, Diversity of Organisms, and Biological Populations Change Over Time
Biological research resource
A great biology teaching resource can be found at biologybrowser.org. Both the Biology Browser home page and their search engine are subdivided into:
- organism (animals, plants, viruses)
- subjects (biodiversity, botany, genetics)
- geography (Africa, Asia, North America)
To experiment, I entered the term "turtle" in the search box which resulted in 369 hits (the MN DNR web page entry, Turtles of Minnesota was #6).
Biological database gains several hundred links per day
A fourth column lists the latest additions to the BiologyBrowser database gleaned from the Biology News Net site. This week averaged about 300 new additions per day!
Access top papers and interviews with top scientists
Biology Browser
Courtesy Art Oglesby Another feature is the "Hot Topics" box inserted top and center of the page. Todays hot topic was "stem cells". The link took me to an Essential Science Indicators page listing the top 20 papers, authors, institutions, and journals.
An editorial section features, interviews, first-person essays, profiles, and other features about people in the stem cell field. Three scientists are featured, the first being Dr. Outi Hovatta discussing her highly cited paper, "A culture system using human foreskin fibroblasts as feeder cells allows production of human embryonic stem cells"
Check it out
If you wish to keep up with advances in the biological sciences, I recommend exploring BiologyBrowser and learn to use the tools they provide.
For the first time in its nine-year history, the prestigious Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology for US high schoolers awarded both of its grand prizes to girls.
Ball together now: More schools are getting rid of desk chairs and using exercise balls for students to sit on to help improve their health and help them learn better. (Photo courtesy of WittFitt)It’s a classic scene from NBC’s “The Office” that’s being played out more and more in classrooms across the country.
You may have seen that “The Office” episode that starts out with nerdy Dwight Shrute bobbing up and down at his desk, sitting on a huge inflatable ball, extolling all the health wonders to be had from it, including increased dexterity, and he then proceeds bump his coffee cup on the desk next to him. His workmate, Jim, proceeds to drive a scissors into the ball.
What’s funny on TV is becoming reality in more classrooms around the country today. Desk chairs are being taken out of classrooms and being replaced with exercise balls. The balls are most common in elementary classrooms, where high-energy students can wiggle while they work.
The initial idea was to provide a new alternative to the decreasing amount of school time devoted to physical education. Having kids bouncing on a ball all day is good at developing leg and torso muscles along with draining excess energy that can make kids fidgety in classrooms.
A company based in Hudson, Wisc. – WittFitt – is one of the top suppliers of classroom sitting balls. According to it’s website, it lists these positive benefits to using the balls instead of chairs:
• Assists in improving posture
• Allows for "active" sitting
• Enhances attention and concentration
• Promotes learning through movement
• Improves blood flow
• Improves balance and coordination
• Strengthens core (postural) muscles
• Adjusts for a customized fit
In many of the classroom, students have an option between using a ball or a chair. Invariably, balls are more popular than chairs. One second-grade student is quoted in a recent newspaper story as saying wiggling around helps her think better.
So what do you think? Is this a wave of the future for education and health or a flash in the pan? Do you have experience as a teacher or student using exercise balls in the classroom? Share your opinions here with other Science Buzz readers.
Q-drum: credit: P.J. HendrikseNinety per cent of Earth's population does not have regular access to food, clean water, or shelter. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum currently has an exhibit titled "Design for the other 90%".
Design away poverty.
“The No. 1 need that poor people have is a way to make more cash,” says Martin Fisher.
Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, says Kickstart's mission is to help millions of people out of poverty. Pumping water can help a farmer grow grain in the dry season, when it fetches triple the normal price. Dr. Fisher described customers who had skipped meals for weeks to buy a pump and then earned $1,000 the next year selling vegetables.
Another successful pump is the bamboo-treadle pump. Over 1.7 million have been sold in Bangladesh and elsewhere, generating $1.4 billion in net farmer income in Bangladesh alone.
Design and transporting water.
How can a child transport over 100 pounds of water more than a mile? The Q-Drum is a durable container designed to roll easily. With a Q-Drum even children can carry more than 100 pounds of water more than a mile.
Read about dozens of designs that make a big difference.
The Design for the other 90% exhibit is divided into categories. By clicking on each you will be able to learn more about these life-changing designs.
Source: New York Times
Barbara MorganAstronaut Barbara Morgan is also a teacher. Several educational sessions are scheduled for the STS-118 mission.
Students from Challenger Learning Centers interact with Astronauts on Wednesday August 15th at 11am and 3pm; Shuttle Downlink with astronauts Barbara Morgan and Rick Mastracchio on Thursday August 16.(more info)
I am watching Barbara Morgan live on the NASA TV as she uses the shuttle's arm to install the external stowage platform. Yesterday a new gyroscope was installed. To follow activities I recommend these links:
- status reports of space mission STS-118.
- photogallery
- STS-118 Index
- Mission overview
- multimedia index
- NASA TV (windows media)
I use the windows media link because it allows full screen viewing. If you want to use other video formats they are here.
Science Hack is a search engine that lets you look for pre-screened educational science videos.
Stanford, MIT, Caltech, U C Berkely, and others are providing lectures online for free.
Does the wrong kind of praise discourage schoolchildren?: Photo courtesy of Community Consolidated School District 15, Chicago, and NIST
All parents face the challenge of motivating their children to do well at school. Many tell their kids how smart they are to encourage them. But now comes a study showing that too much praise can be a bad thing:
The researchers would take a single child out of the classroom for a nonverbal IQ test consisting of a series of puzzles—puzzles easy enough that all the children would do fairly well. Once the child finished the test, the researchers told each student his score, then gave him a single line of praise. Randomly divided into groups, some were praised for their intelligence. They were told, “You must be smart at this.” Other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”
...
Then the students were given a choice of test for the second round. One choice was a test that would be more difficult than the first, but the researchers told the kids that they’d learn a lot from attempting the puzzles. The other choice... was an easy test, just like the first. Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The “smart” kids took the cop-out.
A second round of tests actually showed that students praised for their intelligence did worse on later tests than students praised for their efforts.
The lead researcher explains the phenomenon:
“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. ... They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”
Of course, a lot of this was explained by John Holt in his 1964 classic How Children Fail. But it's always good to get a reminder.
The British charity Sense About Science is encouraging celebrities to make sure they have their facts straight before they go talking about scientific issues. A lot of people enjoy reading and hearing what celebrities have to say. Unfortunately, a lot of what they say is nonsense.
Sense About Science has issued a list of especially silly celebrity statements. And while most of these stars are British, I don't think we'd have any trouble putting together a list of Bad Science spouted by American celebs -- or any country's, for that matter. Any nominations?
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