The Terrifying Beauty Of Xenomorph Dentition AKA Adult Teeth Pushing Out The Baby Teeth: Shown Here On Real Human Skull
So cool.
Crazy!
(via lorenlovesdopamine)
Spongelab
Official Tumblr for Spongelab.com, a global science education community.
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2013-01-22
Source: bone-lust
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2012-12-14
Science Warning posters - neat!
(via ikenbot)
Source: oblog.designobserver.com
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2012-11-30
Interesting infographic about the state of educational technology.
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2012-11-13
Great infographic on educational games!
Source: paulselearning
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2012-10-15
Spongelab stitches science learning together
- Originally posted on World Summit Award blog -
In 2009, Spongelab Interactive was awarded a World Summit Award in eScience and technology. Three years later, we’re continuing our amazing momentum towards becoming a standard in education across the world. With users in over 160 countries and over a two million pieces of educational content delivered to students across the world, we’re rapidly on our way there.
But where did Spongelab come from – and more importantly, where are we going?
Playing with science
At Guelph University in the university town of Guelph, Canada, the seeds of Spongelab were first planted in the mind of a young graduate student. Frustrated by the difficulty of teaching challenging – and somewhat boring – topics to undergraduate biology students, Jeremy Friedberg started to explore interactive, hands-on teaching methods. From explaining chromosome structure with plasticine models to animating his own videos about genetic networks, Dr. Friedberg went on to co-found an educational games studio, Spongelab Interactive, creating educational games with an emphasis on science communication through effective visualization.
From teaching science class in the late ‘90s to Spongelab Interactive’s founding in 2004, Dr. Friedberg and this educational games company have gone on to produce a string of award-winning videogames. Genomics Digital Lab, the World Summit Award-winning biology games suite, served as a model for Spongelab’s approach to educational game design: combining game-based learning with data metrics and online lesson creation tools. Since this first game, we’ve created a diverse range of interactive titles – but we’re also heading in a revolutionary new direction.
Stitching it all together
In 2011, we launched Spongelab.com – a free online platform for playing, teaching, & tracking the results of science education, using game-based learning in a blended classroom approach. More than just a website, Spongelab is an incredibly powerful platform for communicating educational content to a user-base and growing a community of science learners, all empowered by a library of games and incredible data-tracking tools.
Spongelab is also a philosophy: that cutting-edge education should be free and open to everyone, everywhere across the world. It’s the culture of organizations like the United Nations that inspires us to enact meaningful social change, providing educational opportunities for all people regardless of country or budget.
Spongelab Interactive also continues to develop striking, interactive game-based learning experiences. In the past year we’ve released a series of anatomy and cellular structure games, accompanied by more casual creations for rapid learning. You can stay tuned for even more games throughout the next year – but that’s not all that’s next for us.
The future of Spongelab
We’ve assembled a unique team of educators, researchers, designers, programmers and artists who are passionate about building tools for learning. For our incredible teacher user-base, we even offer a Professional Development License as a way to get more out of Spongelab.
Our STITCH Application Programming Interface is most exciting of all, as it shares the power of Spongelab’s tools and features with any partner organization that wants to create a content hub powered by data and supported by a community.
The World Summit Award helped push Spongelab into the limelight, catapulting us into the string of successes in the educational world that teachers and students everywhere are benefiting from today. Look to Spongelab.com to see what the future holds for us!
Source: wsis-award.org
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Walter R. Tschinkel pours molten aluminum into ant colonies
(ht Radiolab listener Astima Chitre)
This is so cool!
(via kqedscience)
Source: core77.com
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2012-10-09
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2012-10-03
What is Spongelab in a sentence?
Spongelab is a free online platform for playing, teaching, & tracking the results of science education, using game-based learning in a blended classroom approach.
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2012-09-12
Top science & gaming posts of the week
Week 5
Last week was back-to-school week! So we’ll stick to educational articles in this edition of Top Science News and Stories around the Internet.
Social Media Changing the Way Students go to School
This wasn’t an issue 20 years ago. Actually it wasn’t even an issue 5 years ago. Social media has taken over the internet and infiltrated the minds of school children. This article lists the pros and cons of social media in education and classrooms.
The benefits are simple:
- During summer months, it’s very easy for the kids to keep in contact with each other
- Parents can check in on their children more frequently
- Bullying can be more easily prevented through kids texting their friends to stay out of certain situations
However, along with everything good, there’s also a downside:
- Online bullying is an issue parents in the past never had to deal with before. Students who have trouble fitting in the classroom now have to worry about those insecurities arising at home on Facebook, twitter, via texting or any other numerous outlets and it’s very hard for parents to know what is going on.
- Also, grammar has taken a hit lately with the widespread use of internet “slang” and abbreviations.
Social media is here to stay: the internet isn’t going anywhere, so we need to adapt. Solution? Have anti-online bullying seminars during parent-teacher nights? Or more proactively, curriculums could incorporate social media assignments for students. What are your thoughts?
One school in New York is delaying the start of High School from 7:45 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. to let the students sleep in! But it’s not for the reason you may think, according to research a person’s rhythm naturally adjusts in the teen years and make sleeping later a biological tendency (So teenagers aren’t lazy?). According to the article it’s called circadian rhythm and it controls the body’s sleep pattern.
Because this school doesn’t rely on bus schedules and school start times in New York City are depended solely on the individual principals, the prediction is that students will sleep more than they do now and result in more attentive and active classroom environments. The results will be when the grades show up during the first report cards. What can students blame for bad grades now?
The thought alone sounds daunting. UK oceanographers are aspiring to measure the world oceans, by weighing at a single point in the water. A team of oceanographers have been able to show that a net 6 trillion tonnes of water enter the ocean between March and September each year. The group is hoping engineers will develop an instrument capable of measuring fractions of a millimeter of water per year, while being submerged under 4 km of water. It’s not the weight they are looking for: its how much water accumulates each year. What’s your prediction? How much water do you think there is in the oceans?
Teacherless classrooms are the way of the future
Teachers as coaches could possibly be the way classrooms look in the next decade or so. With the rate of educational technologies advancing, teachers might not be as necessary as once perceived. They’ll still be in the classrooms, they just wouldn’t be “on stage” at the front of the class anymore. There will be more monitoring of the students and asking of questions, as it could be possible you have students all in the same room learning three different things at the same time. It’s all very similar to tutoring. Take a read of the article!
First Grade Kids learning to code?
Estonia is implementing a new education program which will have 100% of the public school educated students learn to write code. This move positions Estonia as a future benchmark for other countries. They are increasing the odds of their country to achieve jobs in the highly competitive computer science field and with the world increasing in tech jobs internationally; this can help the economy in the future.
Starting from grade one, students will learn code in the curriculum up until the last years of public schooling at age 16. Teachers in the country will also have to learn coding and private sector IT companies are also getting on board in the classrooms.
Making changes in the classrooms won’t necessarily create change immediately, it will take some time. However, North America should take a page from the Estonia teaching book and implement something perhaps not as drastic but similar, before we fall even more behind when it comes to computer programming.
Hope you had a great time reading this week! Let us know what you think about this and any of the other articles either through Tumblr or reply to us at @Spongelab on Twitter. See you next week when we once again run down five more stories from the science and gaming world around the Internet!
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2012-09-05
Top science & gaming posts of the week
Hey Sponge fans, we’re back again to discuss five cool articles that were tweeted from @Spongelab for the week of Aug 27 - Aug 31, 2012.
Happy Birthday Home Video Games!
Video Games at home turned 40 last week. This sophisticated multi-billion dollar industry has come a long way from what it was 40 years ago. In this article you’ll see the Odyssey by Magnavox, the very first home video game, where overlays covered your television screen with various soccer fields, hockey rinks, tennis courts etc. It would be see through, so your “player” would be able to move vertically and the “ball” would bounce back and forth, similar to Pong style. It’s amazing to think back in the 70’s that people were both mesmerized and confused about the possibilities of playing a game on the television. Now it’s mesmerizing when your phone doesn’t have those capabilities.
20 things you didn’t know about deserts
What’s the world’s biggest desert? How much of the world is partially/total desert? What’s the world record for crossing the Sahara on a bike? These are all things that can be answered in the next featured article. With the extremely warm weather we experienced this summer and all the droughts across North America, be thankful you don’t live in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth. There are, in fact, parts of the Atacama where rain has never been recorded, ever! You’ll be surprised by what you read here.
Did you catch the Blue Moon last week? No, the moon didn’t change colour, it just refers to the fact that it’s the second full moon in the same month. This blue moon is the first one since March 2010 and this phenomenon happens every 2-3 years. In fact in 1999, there were two blue moons in the same calendar year (January and March; February did not have a full moon that year). There are two versions of “blue moon”. It can be the third of four full moons in a season, or what happened last week, which was the second full moon of the month. If you missed out, looks like you’ll be waiting until 2015 now.
Do you think a Paralympian will be one day faster than Bolt?
Oscar Pistorius amazed everyone last month at the London Olympic Games, as he was the first man to compete in the Olympics as a double amputee. Though he didn’t medal, it was an amazing feat to qualify and compete in the semi finals for his event. Commentators throughout the Games mentioned that world records are becoming harder and harder to break naturally. The world record for the 100 metre men’s sprint decreased only 0.18 seconds for 20 years until Usain Bolt started competing five years ago and chopped another 0.16 seconds himself. However, the way technology has changed athletics over the years via shoes and or the material of the track they race on, technology will help Paralympians too.
This article states that “Many experts predict Paralympians soon will be outperforming their able-bodied counterparts, thanks in part to future improvements in prosthetics.” Specialty blades are used just for running and competing purposes for these athletes and technology will only improve into the 21st century. Read the article; let us know what you think about this in the comments section.
The Oldest Bugs ever Preserved in Amber
Finally, our fifth article is about 230,000-year-old bugs. Discovered were an ancient nematoceran fly and two eriphyoid mites. Found in north-eastern Italy, these bugs were thought to be from the Triassic era. This discovery is a big deal for the history of tree development, because if this particular tree could produce enough resin to “capture” these bugs, other trees from that era may be able to do the same. Take a look at this photo.
Hope you had a great time reading this week! Let us know what you think about this and any of the other articles either through Tumblr or reply to us at @Spongelab on Twitter. See you next week when we once again run down five more stories from the science and gaming world around the Internet!
Source: spongelab.com
