In the past, we’ve highlighted several Google tools that allow you and your students to explore hard-to-reach places virtually. This week, we’d like to highlight something similar: The EarthViewer app from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). We first learned about this app from an NSTA blog post by Mary Bigelow. Bigelow roused our curiosity simply by quoting from the HHMI press release:

“Have you ever wanted to go back in time to see what the Earth looked like 400 million years ago? You can with the EarthViewer, a free, interactive app designed for the iPad, that lets users explore the Earth’s history with the touch of a finger by scrolling through 4.5 billion years of geological evolution. The app allows students to see continents grow and shift as they scroll through billions of years – from molten mass to snowball Earth. Students can also explore changes in the Earth’s atmospheric composition, temperature, biodiversity, day length, and solar luminosity over its entire development. The app, developed by HHMI’s BioInteractive team, tracks the planet’s continental shifts, compares changes in climate as far back as the planet’s origin, and explores the Earth’s biodiversity over the last 540 million years. It combines visual analysis with hard data, and helps students make connectionsbetween geological and biological change.”

This fun and educational app allows the user to access climate and carbon dioxide data for the past 100 years as well as continental reconstructions going back billions of years. You can look at how modern cities evolved over time, and zoom in to specific places on the globe. The app is chock full of information about geological and biological events that have affected the Earth over time. To help yourself become familiar with the app, it’s helpful to visit the HHMI EarthViewer app web page. Here, you’ll find a video tour that will help you navigate the images and data within the app. You’ll also find ideas for how to use the app in your classrooms. Two things that make this app a compelling classroom resource are 1) that it was “designed to link across multiple domains of science as called for in the Next Generation Science Standards” and 2) “the data on the EarthViewer App, including the locations of the landmasses, come directly from the primary literature and are based on current scientific knowledge in research arena that is active and constantly being updated and refined.”

Image source: iTunes App Store

Have you ever wondered what hominins ate long ago — say, two million years ago? Do you know when human beings figured out how to use fire? When did people invent tools? Can you imagine if women were pregnant for more than nine months? Information about these questions is among some of the most interesting evolution discoveries that were made in the past year. In this Scientific American blog post, Kate Wong provides a list of some pretty cool things that were recently discovered about evolution. The items on the list are fascinating by themselves, but some of them could be easily incorporated into your science curriculum.

Tartar analysis reveals what hominins ate. Source: Scientific American

For example, if you’re teaching your students about Lucy, you could include information about a newly discovered 3.4 million-year-old fossil foot that “suggests a second lineage of hominins (creatures more closely related to us than to our closest living relatives, chimpanzees) may have lived alongside Lucy’s kind.” If you’re teaching about the technology of some of the earliest humans, you can include information about tools that were made 500,000 years ago. Wong’s list isn’t just about bones and tools. Students can also learn about ancient cave paintings that were found in Spain. The Scientific American list is by no means exhaustive. But it’s a good way to get a glimpse of the cool things happening in the field of human evolution.

Here at Seminars on Science, we keep our eyes open for interesting ways in which science education and technology intersect. Recently, the folks over at Wired wrote about scientists at the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research, located in Greece, who have recently created a methodology for optimizing worm-imaging. These scientists have published a paper describing their new research. The paper, entitled “Micro-computed tomography: Introducing new dimensions to taxonomy,” was published in ZooKeys. From the paper’s abstract:

“Continuous improvements in the resolution of three-dimensional imaging have led to an increased application of these techniques in conventional taxonomic research in recent years. Coupled with an ever increasing research effort in cybertaxonomy, three-dimensional imaging could give a boost to the development of virtual specimen collections, allowing rapid and simultaneous access to accurate virtual representations of type material.”

In other words, scientists are making huge strides in 3D virtual imaging. In addition to the paper, these scientists have also published videos of their work, which means that teachers can now bring advanced-imaging dissection into their classrooms. Some of these videos are assembled in the Wired article. Teachers can show their students a MicroCT scan of a bi-valve or a crustacean, a virtual dissection of a worm, and more! How would you use these videos with your students?

3D Worm Dissection

Dear Readers,

It’s been a busy couple of months here at the Museum! Like the rest of the tri-state area, we bravely battled Sandy, then grimaced through a nor’easter, and then ran smack into the holiday season and the new year. In the midst of all of this, we conducted online and on-site courses and workshops for educators, began the initial plans to develop an online course about the brain, and, most excitingly, we migrated our flagship Seminars on Science courses to a new learning management system called Moodle.

On January 28th, we launched our first six courses in this new platform: Climate Change; Space, Time and Motion; The Ocean System; The Solar System; Evolution; and Genetics, Genomics, Genethics. Students enrolled in these courses now have a friendlier and more dynamic user interface, better personal profile customization options, newly organized and updated resources, and an online checklist of course requirements to help them better manage their assignment submissions and course participation.

During the next six weeks, we will continue to migrate the rest of our courses so that our entire portfolio will be available in Moodle. We are also putting together a demo course so that those interested in taking our courses can view sample resources and participate in open discussion forums. As we continue to develop this next chapter of Seminars on Science, we will be able to leverage the technological affordances of Moodle so that we can create updated interactives, facilitate better communication, and provide a more powerful education experience for the thousands of current and future learners we will serve.

Thank you for coming with us on this educational journey.

Regards,

The Seminars on Science Team

Weekly Home Page for The Solar System Course

With 2012 quickly coming to an end we look back at this year in science.  We wanted to share two articles with you that highlight science discoveries this year.  First up, from Scientific American, The Most Fascinating Human Evolution Discoveries of 2012  - explore the changing understanding of our ancient past – from new insights on our ancestors diets to early colonization of the Americas.  CNN provides our second article: Danger meets discovery: Top 10 science stories of 2012 – a great summary of the amazing scientific moments that happened this year.  What is your favorite story of 2012?  We hope you had a great year and look forward to bringing you more stories in 2013!

It’s that time of year, again. Magazines, newspapers, and blogs post their favorite holiday tech gifts, and children and adults alike make their holiday wish lists. Here at Seminars on Science, we’re always on the lookout for fun and innovative gadgets that can be used to engage students in learning about science. Have you heard about Raspberry Pi? It’s an affordable gadget for both entertaining and educational reasons. Raspberry Pi is described by its creators as “a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.”

There are two models to choose from, and the price ranges from $25-$35 dollars, making this a great way to introduce students to hardware development and programming without a high-cost investment. When you receive your Pi, some quick assembly is required. This is described in detail in a quick start guide. Once the machine is up and running, students can learn to program their computers to do different things. The company’s education forum can help get you and your students started with simple projects, like turning on an LED light, reformatting the SD cards, and learning simple LINUX command prompts. More advanced teachers and students might want to experiment with some of these projects that were recently featured in Wired. Lastly, the company’s teaching and learning resources forum has useful information about workshops and beginners’ guides. Raspberry Pi has a growing community of people interested in harnessing the power of this technology so that it can be useful and educational to a variety of audiences. If you use Pi with your students, or plan to, please let us know how. Happy programming!

A few weeks ago, we wrote about using a jelly bean activity in our International Baccalaureate professional development workshop. Recently, Daisy Yuhas of Scientific American blogged about a similar taste test. Yuhas goes into detail about how the experiment works. Given that this is the time of year when we all eat extra sweets, and that this activity is great for students both young and old, we thought we’d share what Yuhas has to say about the jelly bean taste test.

When we eat something, we rely on a combination of senses in order to taste the flavor of our food. Looking at food, we make assumptions about what we think it will taste like. For example, if you see a red jelly bean, you might expect it to be strawberry flavored. If you see a black jelly bean, you’d probably expect licorice. Sight is the first sense we use when we encounter food. Once we decide to put something in our mouths, taste and smell take over to help us enjoy (or not, as the case may be) the flavors. How does this work?

Our noses have millions of receptors that help us to smell different things – including food. We smell food by sniffing it, or by breathing through our noses as we chew. Since the back of our throats connect our noses and mouths, breathing through our noses when we eat helps us to experience a food’s flavor. Yuhas writes that “[w]hile you are eating, your brain receives signals from both your mouth and nose, allowing you to recognize whatever tasty treat you happen to be chewing.” The jelly bean taste test helps students separate the functions of their noses and mouths so that they can see how each of these two senses helps them to taste a particular food.

For this activity, you’ll need the following:

- three different flavors of jelly beans (fruit and cinnamon flavors are great)
- pencil and paper
- plastic sandwich bags
- small paper cups

Before class starts, take three plastic bags and put one flavor of jelly bean into each bag. For example, put all of the cinnamon jelly beans in one bag, the apple ones in a second bag, and the grape ones in a third bag. When you’re ready to do the activity in class, complete the following steps:

Put your students into groups of two or more and tell them to have a pencil and paper ready.

- Give each student a paper cup.
- Pass around the bags of jelly beans, and instruct your students to take two of each jelly bean and put it into their cups.
- Based entirely on what they see, have your students write down what flavors they think the jelly beans are.
- Tell your students to pinch their noses shut and taste one of each flavored jelly bean. After tasting each one, have them write down what they think each flavor is. After they’ve eaten the first round of jelly beans, have them compare notes. What did they taste? Could they discern the flavors with their noses pinched?
- Then, have your students eat the second of each jelly bean, this time with their noses un-pinched. Again, have them record the flavors they taste. What did they taste this time?

Once the taste test is complete, have a group discussion with your entire class in which you reveal what each flavor is. Ask your students what they tasted with their noses pinched versus eating while breathing through their noses. When our noses are pinched, some people can only taste that the candy is sweet without tasting a particular flavor. Some people report that the candy tastes like wax and that they don’t taste any sweetness at all. But when we breathe through our noses while eating, our sense of taste and sense of smell combine to tell our brains what flavor it is that we’re eating.

This is a great activity to do with students of all ages, particularly around the holiday time, when children can be excited and eager for interactive classes. This is also an experiment that they could do at home with their parents/guardians. By teaching others about the way sight, smell, and taste combine, they will be reinforcing these concepts for themselves, and having fun in the process.

Source: Yuhas, Daisy. Savory Science: Jelly Bean Taste Test. Scientific American. 22 November 2012.

We’ve written before about the fascinating educational resources that Google creates. Lately, we’ve gone from exploring the Great Barrier Reef to poking around on Mars. Google Mars has been around for three years, but up to now, there wasn’t much detail to be seen in the images. In a recent post on Wired.com, Adam Mann writes that ”Google has now updated their Mars coverage by including large swaths from the Context Camera (CTX) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. CTX offers great details with around 20 feet per pixel.”

Getting started is simple. You can download Google Earth here. (It’s free!) Once you’ve installed it and opened it, you can navigate to Mars by clicking the planet icon in the toolbar at the top of the screen. Double-click to zoom in, and click and drag to move around. While you’re roaming, you’ll see little red squares that represent the hi-res images from NASA. Click on these to learn about what they are and where they are located.

“Perhaps the best way to use your time has been suggested by Curiosity ChemCam investigator and planetary scientist Ryan Anderson on his blog, The Martian Chronicles: Find an interesting area covered by both CTX and the even higher resolution images from HiRISE and then zoom, zoom, zoom all the way down.” Another activity that you can do with your students is compare the images in Google Mars with images that have recently been taken by the Curiosity Rover.

When you’re done exploring Mars, click on the planet icon in the toolbar again. From there, you can also explore the sky and the moon.

Exposed light-toned layers on floor of Noctis Labyrinthus

Source: Mann, Adam. “New Google Mars Has More Coverage, More Detail and More Awesome.” Wired Science. 6 Nov 2012.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” It turns out that the US Postal Service motto could be adopted by the Seminars on Science team and a dedicated group of educators who didn’t let a hurricane or a nor’easter stop them from participating in a workshop. From November 8th to November 10th, 16 teachers from the International Baccalaureate came to the Museum for three days of hands-on science education professional development. They toured Museum halls, viewed special exhibits, conducted experiments, and thought about ways to bring the informal education of a museum into their own science classrooms. Here are some of the hands-on aspects of the workshop, which you can replicate with your own students:

What’s in the bag? Take a brown paper bag and fill it with random objects. For our workshop, we used a cork, skittles, marbles, a plastic eyedropper, a piece of tinfoil, and a cotton ball soaked in anise. Place the objects in the bag and tape it shut. You’ll want to make several bags like this. In class, give a bag to a small group of students. Tell them to feel the objects in the bag and try to guess what they are, writing down their observations based on touch, sight, sound, and smell. Instruct them not to open the bag. After a few minutes, have them switch bags with another group and make the same observations. Did both groups guess that the bags had similar objects? What words did they use to describe them? At the end of the activity, collect the bags. Your students will surely protest because they weren’t able to open the bags. Tell them that sometimes, scientists don’t get to find out what’s inside the object of their studies. Sometimes, you have to make hypotheses, and rely on ways other than sight to try to obtain information.

reflection/refraction activity

Test your sense of smell. A fast, fun, and tasty way to test your ability to smell things comes from our Ology site. Buy a bag of jelly beans. Cinnamon flavor works best, but if you can only find assorted beans, that will work, too. Give your students a jelly bean. Based upon the color, what flavor do they think they have? Many students (and adults!) will guess strawberry for a cinnamon jelly bean. Have your students pinch their noses shut while they start to chew the jelly bean. After a few seconds, have them breathe normally. With their noses pinched shut, the jelly bean will just taste like chewy wax. But once they can breathe through their noses, the flavor – especially cinnamon – will become immediately apparent. Repeat this process without having the students hold their noses, so that they can pay attention to the connection between their sense of smell and the flavors.

taste test activity

These activities generated a lot of discussion at our workshop, and can be replicated in the classroom with any age group. If you have older students, you might want to try Ology’s refraction and reflection experiments. Ology is AMNH’s science site for kids. It’s also a great resource for classroom ideas!

Of course, the IB workshop wasn’t all play. The teachers in attendance talked about the importance of interdisciplinary units, about ways to encourage girls to become confident science students, and about how to apply IB principles to the ideas they were generating as a group. We at Seminars on Science love hosting teachers for our on-site workshops. Our next IB workshops are in February (for the Middle Years Program) and April (for the Primary Years Program). We’d love to see you there!

This past weekend, AMNH hosted a group of International Baccalaureate teachers for a three-day workshop. The group of teachers worked on interdisciplinary curricula, collaborated on mini sessions, and used the Museum’s resources as inspiration for project ideas. One teacher suggested that AMNH staff watch a particular YouTube video about hexaflexagons. After watching the video, we immediately knew we wanted to share it with our larger Seminars on Science audience. A hexaflexagon can be made with simple strips of paper, some tape, and some crayons or markers. It’s a great classroom project for students as young as elementary school, or as old as high school. Making a hexaflexagon in class is a great way to teach your students about shapes and symmetry. You could also use it as an art project. Watch the video, try it at home, and have fun introducing it to your students!

PS - Physicist Richard Feynman, who won a Nobel Prize and served on the Challenger Commission, authored a cut-out book on hexaflexagons in the 1960′s.  Rob Steiner, Director of AMNH’s Online Teacher Education Programs, got one as a gift from his father many years ago!