15 year-old develops effective, cheap test for pancreatic cancer [TED Audition]
Wow. Here’s Jack Andraka’s TED Audition for a talk on his work developing a carbon nanotube and antibody-based test for pancreatic cancer.
Jack won the 2012 Gordon E. Moore Award ($75,000) at the Intel International* Science and Engineering Fair for the same work:
Read more about him, his work and the work he built it on here on Forbes.com.
*Yup – you can have a go too.
“Covalent Love” winner of Science Idol
Congratulations to James Mustapic, winner of Tomcfad’s Science Idol 2012 competition in New Zealand. For students in the UK, there is a similar competition underway: Geek Pop 2012. Have a go!
I was fortunate to meet Tom McFadden in Kyoto University yesterday, and have written up some thoughts on Educational Hip-Hop: Creativity and the Curriculum on i-Biology | Reflections.
Get inspired!
Thai Kids Anti-Smoking Ad [Video]
This is well done.
I wonder what would happen if a young orangutan asked this adult for a light? (Indonesian zoo aims to stub out orangutan’s smoking habit, Guardian).
Tori the smoking orangutan, from the Guardian
Boson the Fourth of July
Yesterday was a big day for science, and luckily the internet was on hand to give us a live stream of reliable information and the CERN press conference (which is more than CNN could manage).
Why is it important? Here are some really useful Higgs links:
- What is the Higgs boson? Guardian video by Ian Sample
- CERN press release “CERN experiments observe particle with long-sought Higgs boson“
- Now the real work begins – Guardian roundup of what happens next
……….o0O0o……….
This whole exercise is a great example of internationalism in science and is probably the world’s biggest group 4 project. It showcases the scientific method perfectly, as Adam Rutherford tweeted:
After the PR disaster of the EU’s hopelessly patronising Science: It’s a Girl Thing campaign, it was great to see a real inspiration to girls and boys take the stage – Fabiola Gianotti.
Four Fundamental Forces in Six Videos [Crash Course]
Here’s Hank, giving a run-down of the fundamental forces. Might be useful for a flipclass intro or review for older students.
Strong Force
IB Science Weekly Magazine – Get involved!
IB Science Weekly Magazine – do you want to be a news spotter?
I kept seeing these paper.li posts in Twitter, so after a quick exhange with Adrienne Amichetti (@amichetti) decided to give it a go. There are lots of paper.lis out there, especially it seems in the ed-tech world. It was quick and easy to set up, though a bit of a fiddle to work out how posts were categorised and filtered (still not sure how it works).
The aim of this project is to provide a weekly publication which pulls in the current science and education news, for use in MYP, DP and PYP classrooms.
If you would like to get involved and be an IB Science or Science Education news spotter, please head on over to Twitter and let me know. If you see some worthy news, simply tweet it with a link and a description, along with the hashtag #IBSciWeekly. The paper.li elves will see it and it should appear in the finished product. I will be able to curate the posts as they are published each week. If you think that everything you (or someone you recommend) is gold, I can include their Twitter handle or blog url as a source.
The details:
- Address: http://tinyurl.com/IBSciWeekly
- Hashtags: #IBSciWeekly, #MYP, #IBDP, #IBBio, #IBChem, #IBPhysics
- Published: Weekly, on a Tuesday (I think)
- NewsSpotters: IB Teachers and Students
Of course, things are bound to go wrong at first! I would love to find a way to share the editing jobs.
And here is a lovely video of a murmuration of starlings:
E.O. Wilson’s Letter to Young Scientists [TED Talk]
This is a great motivational address to young scientists the world over. Living legend EO Wilson gives his words of advice to the problem-solvers of tomorrow: you guys.
“The thirst for knowledge is in our genes; it was put there by our distant ancestors and it’s never going to be quenched.”
EO Wilson
Super Slo-Mo Slinky Drops | Veritasium [video]
I haven’t posted Veritasium for a while, so here’s a great video building on his slinky drop experiments. Go full screen and HD, then wrap yer brain around the explanations.
Extended Essay Frame and Word Citation Tool
IB Store
Here’s a document we are using in my Extended Essay group. The intention is that students set it up from day 1, keeping all of their reading and research in a section at the end which will allow them to build their citations database. This section of notes will be deleted before final submission, unless any of the resources they save are worthy of an appendix.
By this point, students have read the examiners’ reports for their subject area EE’s, looked at some excellent examples (on sale in the IB store) and have read carefully through the EE guide, noting the subject-specific guidance for each criterion.
At the end of the document is a set of rubrics for self-assessment, which they should refer to on a regular basis. I have set it up so that they can add their own checkboxes above each rubric, listing what is most important for them to achieve.
There is a screencast below the document which gives a very quick introduction to using the Word citation manager.
Check out these great resources from Purdue’s OWL project on APA citation.
What I would love to see
If I could make one request of the IB, it would be that rolled into our programme fees for DP we could have access to university-style academic searches and journals. Wouldn’t it be great if the IB subscribed to the journals and schools could access them through Athens or Springerlink (or something else), to use in EE’s and research?
i-Biology 