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Ask Slashdot: Online Science For 8th Grade Students?
Peterus7 writes "I'm a student teacher in an 8th grade science classroom, and have noticed that students are very motivated by anything online. After realizing that, I've been looking for ways to incorporate internet resources into my teaching, and trying to find cool citizen science projects, activities, and simulations that would be appropriate for a grade school science class, such as galaxyzoo and fold.it. So, I'm asking slashdot for more resources that could help bring science to their lives. Thanks!"
I've been out of school for quite a while but have kindled an interest in physics. I find that more and more there are Youtube demonstrations and lectures that are worthwhile. Also labs and hands-on science work is invaluable so I'd check out instructables.com because this not only can provide unique science opportunities, it also helps people in gaining engineering skills. BTM
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
Teach the kids about 3D printing (see http://reprap.org/ maybe even get one of the cheap printer kits or an UP! Printer if you have budget.
These things let kids unleash a form of creativity and spatial learning that is hard to find anywhere else. No need to actually teach them how to design 3D objects - they'll be scrambling to figure it out for themselves! Keen students will print their own 3D printers. Less enthusiastic ones will download from http://thingiverse.com/ and create "Mash up" objects.
Inevitably one of them will print a penis for shock value, but kids are like that.
You may want to look at Scratch programming environment. While Scratch is a programming tool which lets kids make all sorts of stuff (animations, games, etc), there is a large number of kids who build science simulations with it. For example, you can look at this gallery of physics simulations and animations, all of which were created by kids. Most of the projects on the Scratch website have been created by kids and all projects are under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, so kids in your class will be able to download the projects, examine how they have been built, and build their own projects upon existing work.
There is also a website for educators who want to use Scratch - you can ask for ideas and suggestions in the forums in that website.
[Disclaimer: I am a graduate student in the research group which develops Scratch]
I remember our science teacher getting a very large steel drum, putting some water in it and heating, then quickly screwing on a tight-fittning cap and dousing the thing in iced water. It collapsed on itself in a satisfyingly noisy way, showing just how substantial atmospheric pressure is.
One more vote for real experiments.
Our teacher would always have a "demo" if everyone was in their seats on time and quiet when the bell rang.
Some of the 'epic' ones I still remember:
Coiled a gas tube through a beaker. Filled the beaker with liquid nitrogen, so then we had liquid natural gas (not sure what they run to chem labs). He lit the beaker on fire and then dumped it on the floor. It was like watching a bead of water skitter across a hot skillet, except it was on fire.
They also got 2 massive blocks of dry ice. Lit up magnesium and put it in the center. We then removed the dry ice and what was left was a solid chunk of carbon. Magnesium is so insistent on burning that it ripped the oxygen from the CO2 to sustain itself.
One day we went out to the football stands and he had a rig setup that would drop a bowling ball straight down just as another one shot off the side. Used to show shit falls just as fast even if it's moving sideways.