Tofugu (where Carla is executive editor) interviewed Bao Nakashima, the 10 year old author of the hit Japanese book, Seeing, Knowing, Thinking.
Q. You said, "No need to read the air." What do you mean by that?
It literally means "Having a life that follows your honest feelings." Air is data, so I think we can leave it to artificial intelligence.
Q. What is your current study method?
If I had to give my study method a name, it might be "open-ended." Although it is like learning the concept of social interest in Adlerian psychology, I think my study method doesn't have a name yet.
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Larry Scheckel was a high school physics and aerospace teacher for almost 40 years, and he wrote a book called Ask a Science Teacher: 250 Answers to Questions You’ve Always Had About How Everyday Stuff Really Works that answers common questions on a wide range of topics.
Why are we attracted to unhealthy foods? How does your heart pump? Why is chickenpox so much worse for adults than it is for kids? What is the lowest temperature known in nature? How does the moon affect the ocean tides? Why can't we create a perpetual motion device? Why don't school buses have seatbelts? What is quantum physics? Who or what built Stonehenge?
The answers (they are 1-3 pages long) are clearly written, and filled with fun insights and anecdotes. This is a fantastic book for a curious kid or an adult such as myself who likes to learn how the world works. Read the rest
Monocle interviewed Ed Cooke, the founder of the language learning site, Memrise.
During a three-month hospital stay when he was 18 years old, Ed Cooke studied memory techniques to overcome boredom. By the age of 23 he was a Grand Master of Memory, someone who can memorise 1,000 random digits in an hour and the order of a deck of cards in two minutes. Cooke is now the founder of a fast-growing start-up called Memrise, which allows people to learn a language quickly while also having fun. He outlines the value of a good memory and tells us how Memrise gained tens of millions of users. Read the rest
The Atomic Chemistry Set is a "modern chemistry set - 47 chemicals, glassware, lab apparatus, and insane chemical reactions." It looks great! Read the rest
Wink /
2:18 pm Wed, Mar 2, 2016
See sample pages from this book at Wink.
Walking through the children’s section of any given book store, this book will immediately catch your eye. The front cover has gears sticking out the side, and if you turn them, you can see one of our main characters moving up and down on a wheel and axel system. Open the book, and you’ll be treated to even more interactive illustration done in the book’s playful art style.
The plot of the story follows two friends who live in a zoo, Sloth and Sengi. After many years of living there, they have decided to escape using some simple machines. Along the way, they encounter many problems (as you can imagine would occur when a sloth and a variety of elephant shrew attempt to scale a zoo enclosure). Each page outlines a different type of machinery and invites the reader to learn about how each system functions. When Sloth and Sengi try and use an inclined plane to escape, the narrator demonstrates why it takes less effort to climb up an inclined plane than straight over the vertical fence. Later on, this idea of the inclined plane returns when Sloth and Sengi try and use a screw to escape. Probably my favorite section of the book involves the section on levers. The author outlines how a lever functions with an effort, a fulcrum, and a load. You can construct a lever from cardboard cut-outs in the book, and then use it to try and fling Sloth and Sengi over the fence of their enclosure, usually with more success than our main characters. Read the rest
Introduction to DIY: Becoming a Maker
An Online Skillshare Class by Mark Frauenfelder
Skillshare is a terrific online learning community for creative people. It teaches you new skills through well-made videos with great production values. I've been using Skillshare to teach myself Adobe After Effects. All the videos feature people who are professionals in their field. I love this site.
I taught a couple of classes for Skillshare as part of its Month of Learning for January. One of my classes is about learning how to use the Arduino electronics prototyping platform and the other is about how to develop a maker mindset. You can use this link to sign up for my classes.
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5 Courses, 25+ Hours of UX Training to Delight Your Users
Kick-Start Your Game Creation Career w/ 115+ Hours of Game Design & Developer Training
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Bloxels lets kids design playable spaces using physical blocks on a grid—that can then be captured by a tablet device and translated into a real digital game. The creator, Pixel Press, says it's like "coding with Lego." Read the rest
Learn to develop games through seven courses, including 30+ hours of training for creating mobile & desktop games. The entire package is just $49. Read the rest
The internet is aflood with gratuitous St. Paddy's Irish-ness, so why fight it? My favorite Irishman, who knows where the pots of gold are, is Paddy Hirsch, Senior Producer of Marketplace Radio, by American Public Media. Hirsch is not only the author of the very accessible book, Man vs Markets, Economics Explained, Plain and Simple, he also hosts a series of explainer videos on his YouTube channel.
Like your favorite teacher, he can teach about the complicated levers of our everyday economy, without you feeling like a dunce. He describes the bad news and hard choices of our time with a winking sense of humor, funny doodles, and a winning Irish brogue. He knows his stuff.
It's like sitting down with your smarter friend and learning things you probably ought to know. He refers to himself as "your mate Paddy Hirsch," and typically signs off his discussions of often sour-tasting topics like dark pools, toxic assets and quantitative easing with some reference to grabbing a drink, just like you would with your mate. Read the rest
At Twitter, Ben Lillie has been collecting Science Sparks — the first experiences with science or some science-related thing that made people connect emotionally with nature, space, math, and wonder. He's collected them into a Storify that's worth reading, especially if (like me) you're thinking about ways to get kids engaged with science. My Science Spark: It's a toss-up between the epic multi-habitat diorama at the University of Kansas' Dyche Museum of Natural History (a place I visited so frequently as a child that I almost feel more of a connection to it than to any house I lived in) and the adorably illustrated adventures of Louis Pasteur and Marie Curie from the ValueTales book series. Read the rest
I'm loving the "Doing Stuff with Crazy Aunt Lindsey" series of hands-on science YouTube videos for kids. I can't find the host's full name on the YouTube page or her website, but she's a fantastic presence and so are the kids that appear with her. The result is a series of videos that are adorable, high-spirited, creative, and fun—full of great, simple projects that pack a surprising amount of science "oomph" behind them.
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“A playful brain is a more adaptive brain,” writes ethologist Sergio Pellis in The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. In his studies, he found that play-deprived rats fared worse in stressful situations.
In our own world filled with challenges ranging from cyber-warfare to infrastructure failure, could self-directed play be the best way to prepare ourselves to face them?
In self-directed play, one structures and drives one’s own play. Self-directed play is experiential, voluntary, and guided by one’s curiosity. This is different from play that is guided by an adult or otherwise externally directed.
A MacArthur Fellow told me that, when he was a teenager, his single mother would drop him off at an industrial supply store on Saturdays while she ran errands. Using library books as his primary resource, he built a linear accelerator in the garage. It wasn’t until neighbors complained about scrambled television and radio signals in the hours just after school and after dinner that his “playful” invention was discovered. Read the rest
