The Kid Should See This.
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There's just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
Kid-friendly not-made-for-kids videos for all! Collected by Rion Nakaya and her three four year old co-curator.
Tip Jar: Curating this blog takes work! If you like the videos on this site, please support the science education projects that we've picked on DonorsChoose.org.
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From the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, Measuring the Universe! So how exactly do we measure things that are incredibly far away? Positioning over time, light, and math, math, math! This video contains a lot of information — even about sound waves and color shifts in light — but it’s such a great start to understanding how we see and measure what’s out beyond our Earth and our galaxy. And it demonstrates how important math and patience are in science!
via The Awesomer.
Collosse – A Wood Tale, directed by Yves Geleyn: a short film about the meeting of a robot marionette and a little bird.
via UFunk.net.
Google’s The Story of Send visualizes how an email journeys through their data centers to reach its final destination, all while promoting the energy efficiency of their custom-built servers and their support of clean energy along the way.
I wish they’d gone into a bit more technical detail, but it’s a nice introduction to how much more there is to email technology than what we see, and provides some inspiration in the idea that a large company can innovate its business while still committing to carbon-neutrality.
via Neatorama.
From TEDEd, there is a five finger trick for understanding and remembering the five processes — small population, non-random mating, mutations, gene flow, adaptation — that impact evolution (ie. the changes in the gene pool of a population from generation to generation). This video, narrated by Paul Andersen and animated by Alan Foreman, is seriously so excellent.
via Explore.
We’ve watched this video quite a few times in the last few weeks… it’s surfaced as a kiddo-favorite. Not only is it a beautiful animation (by Toronto-based Smart Bubble Society, “a not-for-profit motion graphic studio that promotes social justice, self-education and critical awareness”), but the piece tells the story of our recent history with fossil fuels, and then names some cleaner solutions (wind and solar energy, for example) to the challenges that we face on the energy and climate change fronts.
Want more solutions to reducing oil consumption? There are some here and here — many that kids can help with.
Phases of the Moon, a beautiful video animation created using Virtual Moon Atlas and accompanied by Beethoven’s Sonata No. 14, (Opus 27, No. 2). Related watching to better understand the moon’s phases: (a super not-to-scale) moon orbits Earth as Earth orbits the sun.
More moon videos.
We aren’t using the telegraph as a metaphor anymore, but why aren’t we still teaching our kids about the central nervous system, peripheral nerves, the autonomic system in cartoons? Don’t our brains get email from our feet?!
Here’s the 1979 classic, Telegraph Line, from School House Rock. (Updated video.)
Using image sequences from NASA’s Cassini Solstice and Voyager missions, filmmaker Sander van den Berg has illuminated Saturn and its rings, Jupiter, moons, space and a bunch of other stuff.
The score is an instrumental version of That Home by The Cinematic Orchestra, which gives this footage a completely different feel than a video I saw late last year by filmmaker Chris Abbas when he put this same footage to Nine Inch Nails. Both videos are riveting, no?
Thanks, @mamagotcha.
