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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Via LaughingSquid, check out this video by Mark Day of the strange and beautiful shadows created by the annular solar eclipse on May 20th, 2012. And via KQED, the ring of fire — “when the Moon’s apparent diameter is smaller than the Sun, causing the Sun to look like an annulus (ring), blocking most of the Sun’s light” — as seen from Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Find out how they make chicken wire and get hypnotized at the same time!
Chicken wire, also known as poultry netting and hexagonal netting, is a woven wire mesh. The video shows how chicken wire mesh is woven. You can see how the wires are twisted together to make the hexagonal opening.
Thanks, @wizzyrea.
One of the most famous surfaces in mathematics, the Möbius strip can be constructed by cutting a long strip of paper, putting a half twist in it, and gluing the ends of the strip together. What makes this seemingly ordinary construct so fascinating is that, while the original strip of paper clearly had two sides, the Möbius strip seems to have only one. Try to draw a line on both “sides” without picking up your pencil. It’s actually quite simple.
Then you take some scissors to it… and it gets even more interesting!
via ScienceDump.
A flip book video by paper engineer, TEDx speaker, and artist Matt Shlian, who also makes paper sculptures and videos of his intricate flip books and small paper installations. A few favorites are here, here and (don’t miss this one) here.
Parabolas (etc.) from Radiolab, which has the co-curator running around looking for parabolas everywhere we go.
“A video inspired by the mathematician, Steve Strogatz. At the age of thirteen, Steve was astonished to find that pendulums and water fountains had a strange relationship that had previously been completely hidden from him.”
It was pointed out in some comments on vimeo that many of the shapes in the video are not parabolas but are actually catenaries. Since I won’t explain it best, you can check out more on parabolas vs catenaries next!
Thanks, @mindfulmimi
A series of visual examples from the book How Round Is Your Circle: “John Bryant and Chris Sangwin illustrate how physical models are created from abstract mathematical ones.”
We liked watching all of these, but Dudeney’s Dissection — cutting an equilateral triangle into pieces which can be rearranged into a square via well-placed hinges — is definitely the co-curator’s and my favorite.
Math FTW!
Created for Yo Gabba Gabba’s Christmas special, animator and director Kirsten Lepore recruits the most adorable shapes around to give presents to each other!
I wasn’t sure that these “daytime fireworks” were compelling (ie. different than any other explosion) until I saw the rainbow around the 50 second mark. Wow.
At the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar this week, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang put on his largest “explosion event” of the last three years, utilizing microchip-controlled explosives to form incredible designs and patterns. The video we’ve embedded of the event is an impressive testament to how a volatile black powder explosion can be controlled and shaped by computer.
Each set of explosions was calculated to paint a different picture. One series of explosions created black smoke clouds that looked like “drops of ink splattered across the sky.”
via @nickbilton.
