Extra-Curricular Resources for Students?

rende asks: "With school soon starting or having already started for many, this seems like a timely question. The MIT OpenCourseWare project is looking like a great resource for additional information to supplement my own coursework this year. I was very delighted to find this information freely available online, and wish I would have known about it previously. I would like to ask Slashdot: Are there any other resources, offered by other schools or independent sites, that offer such a robust selection of information that would fit in nicely, with the standard classes of a science related major?"

Comments

Use everyday teaching materials

[GuyMannDude]

Sometimes the most impressionable lessons are those that use everyday objects to convey. Have your son team up with his school chums and drag the class wimp into the bathroom. Have Junior shove this kid's face into the toilet while flushing it and point out that the direction in which the water swirls when it goes down is due to the Corriolis Effect. Depending on the age of the children involved, he can go into a deeper discussion of this important rule of nature. If you son's schoolmate does not seem to appreciate the significance of this natural phenomenon, have your child repeat the experiment over and over until the subject grasps the material being presented. It is quite likely that such a dramatic demonstration of the Corriolis Effect will have a much more lasting impression on the student than simply reading about it in an overpriced textbook.

It saddens me to see public schools squander their limited financial resources on internet-enabled computers and graphing calculators. All you really need are simple, everyday objects and a desire to teach! Too often, teachers are overworked and the students must find novel ways to educate each other. This is just one example of how students can share the joy of science with their fellow classmates.

GMD