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 team that brought us The Secret Life of Plankton and The Plankton Chronicles comes this wonderful TEDEd video from their amazing microscopic footage, re-created to explain How Life Begins in the Deep Ocean:
Where do squid, jellyfish and other sea creatures begin life? The story of a sea urchin reveals a stunningly beautiful saga of fertilization, development and growth in the ocean depths.
from TEDEd.
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.
An 86-year-old Yorkshire man, Brendon Grimshaw may have lived alone for many years on the tiny island paradise of Moyenne in the Seychelles in the middle of the Indian Ocean since he bought it in 1962 for £8000, but he is rarely lonely.
For Brendon has spent the years reintroducing the indigenous giant tortoise to Moyenne and now shares the island with 120 of the magnificent creatures, on one of the world’s smallest national parks.
The BBC’s Simon Reeve went to visit him.
Once a hideaway for pirates, the island is now a paradise of accidental conservation! But it took a lot of work in the last 50 years to change it.
He hired his own Man Friday, a Seychellois called Rene Lafortune, who helped him transform Moyenne.
Together they planted palm trees, mango and paw-paw.
They saved rainwater and pumped it up the hillside by hand, or rowed back to the main island to collect a barrel of fresh water.
It was backbreaking, exhausting work. ‘My hands were covered in blisters,’ said Brendon…
Slowly the trees grew and fruited, and eventually water, electricity and a phone cable were piped across from Mahe.
Brendon also encouraged around 2,000 native birds back to the island by feeding them. Fifty years very well-spent.
via Kottke.
Alana Nichols of the women’s wheelchair basketball team admits she likes going “really fast.” “I love feeling my heart beat,” she says. Her competitive spirit took over when she started playing wheelchair athletics. Nichols is amazed that she and her team won a gold medal on the exact anniversary of the day she broke her back. Now, she’s the first woman to win gold in both the Summer and Winter Paralympics.
More than 4,000 athletes from 150 countries are expected to compete at the London Paralympic Games, which open on August 29 and run through September 9, 2012.
Produced for PBS by WGBH Boston in association with the US Olympic Committee and the International Paralympic Committee, Medal Quest is highlighting the singular stories of these athletes as they prepare to compete in the London 2012 games. The kid should see this.
After watching The Secret Life of Plankton, oh how happy we were(!) to find Para Films‘ The Plankton Chronicles. There are so many beautiful videos shot in microscopic detail that we haven’t watched them all yet.
In this video, the Sea Urchin and its cone-shaped echinopluteus larvae demonstrate the cell-division cycle. Other excellent vids: Protists - Cells in the Sea, Iridescent Ctenophores, Pelagia - Fearsome Jellyfish, and Pteropods - Swimming Mollusks. Stunning film work and really breathtaking science.
We really love this video, The Secret Life of Plankton, from TEDEd. Marine biologist and science educator Tierney Thys and a team of scientists and film makers (Noé Sardet and Sharif Mirshak from Parafilms in Montreal) created this phenomenal six minute film about microscopic organisms using some excellent storytelling and new videography techniques (dark field optics and macro lenses or microscopes equipped with HD SLR cameras).
Tierney is also a TED speaker, having previously studied the Mola mola, a super-unique giant ocean sunfish that weighs over 2.5 tons and eats jellyfish. It’s a phenomenal looking creature. You can watch Tierney talk passionately about the Molas, the water, and her work as a Marine Biologist in a video at NationalGeographic.com. Highly recommended.
For a great set of plankton images, there is molecular geneticist Richard R Kirby’s book, Ocean Drifters: A Secret World Beneath the Waves, featured at Scientific American.
Thanks, Achim Brauweiler.
When we tell stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problem was impossible. Instead, we skip straight to the breakthrough. We tell the happy ending first.
The danger of this scenario is that the act of feeling frustrated is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we can even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. Because it’s only after we stop searching that an answer may arrive.
Not sure how much the kid understood this video (via Brainpickings), but it entertained him, reminded me, and gave us the opportunity to talk about the value of mistakes, failure and persistence.
Related reading for teachers, parents and interested parties, from Science Evangelist Dr. Ainissa Ramirez’s TED Talk:
…recast science education from being about memorizing facts, “a trivial pursuit,” to being about problem-solving and thinking for oneself. We need to move away from focusing on tests to showing kids that it’s ok to learn or to take risks. “Children need to explore and to discover. This is how you innovate; you fail your way to your answer. Scientists fail all the time; we just brand it differently. We call it ‘data.’”
Love that.
