Ewan McIntosh | Design Thinking, Education & Learning

Magnetism explained beautifully

Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

If you're a science teacher trying to explain magnetism, you could do a lot worse than showing this beautiful animated film produced for Channel 4 with Arts Council England. As the blurb says:

"Are we observing a series of scientific experiments, the universe in flux, or a documentary of a fictional world?"

Plenty of other vids for scientists, geographers, writers over on the Vimeo site.

Update: Worth reading the comments underneath, reiiterating why finding knowledge on, say, magnetism is increasingly easy but gaining a foot in the door of learning about this might still require a talented teacher with an inspiring vid to kick things off.

Yahoo Mindset: intelligent searching

At Les Blogs I heard one of the Yahoo CEOs talking about the rather cool Yahoo Mindset. What is does is search for pages. So far so good. But it offers the chance for users to choose if they want more commercial, shopping type results or if they want to get the results for a school project. The latter search means that a search on Harry Potter need not be filled with ads for stuffed puppets, but instead a wealth of information and interactive games.

I hope they get it out of beta soon and this becomes a mainstream searching tool for kids in school.

Genuine Geography Question: Ozone Hole or Magnetism?

Pictured is the image I have received for the past few nights from OSXPlanet, about which I have written and over which I have puzzled many a morning.

Here's a genuine question for any budding geographers / physicists / primary school genius. Why is there always a 'hole' in the cloud over the North Pole?

A live view over the world

This impressive image is actually LIVE as I write this blog post. It comes to my computer desktop from satellite images downloaded automatically one minute ago, and another image will appear in another minute. I will see the sun set over Europe, Africa and the USA before once again seeing the sun come back round tomorrow morning.

It reminds you what it's all about, and how quickly time passes us by. I've been using this for two weeks now and I am still fascinated. Once you have downloaded the Mac-only application, OSXPlanet, you can put in the latitude and longitude to find anywhere on the planet. You can zoom in.

And in the classroom...
It's futile trying to give all the uses for this in the classroom. The thing is, you can follow hurricanes, storms, earthquakes... You can view it all live from real satellite images. Well worth the download. I wonder if my mate Ollie would find this interesting for his geography with images project.

Physics Lesson: Bursting Balloons!

I noticed an amazing piece of photography on Boing Boing this morning which I had to share. Make Magazine were running a session on high speed photography and set their 'students' the task of filming a bursting balloon. The photographic results of this are weird and amazing, as this example shows.

And in the classroom...
Nothing to do with Modern Languages but for a photography, art or physics class I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere. These are modern art if I've ever seen it!