The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments

It turns out that someone got tired of complaining about the sorry selection of home chemistry sets out there (like me) and decided to do something aout it. Robert Bruce Thompson wrote the Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments to replace some of the old home chemistry books from mid-century (you have to go back that far to get a good one). The book was just released today and is available at Amazon.

"From the 1930s through the 1970s, chemistry sets were among the most popular Christmas gifts, selling in the millions. But two decades ago, real chemistry sets began to disappear as manufacturers and retailers became concerned about liability. The Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments steps up to the plate with lessons on how to equip your home chemistry lab, master laboratory skills, and work safely in your lab. The bulk of this book consists of 17 hands-on chapters that include multiple laboratory sessions..."

"With plenty of full-color illustrations and photos, Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments offers introductory level sessions suitable for a middle school or first-year high school chemistry laboratory course, and more advanced sessions suitable for students who intend to take the College Board Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry exam. A student who completes all of the laboratories in this book will have done the equivalent of two full years of high school chemistry lab work or a first-year college general chemistry laboratory course."

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture (Illustrated Guide) at Amazon.com

(via BoingBoing.net)

Eyeclops Activity Kit

It is no secret that I am a big fan of the Jakks EyeClops Bionic Eye. Now Jakks has added an activity kit with eight "microprinted" posters. They are full of tiny stuff that you have to find with the Eyeclops. The kit is not very expensive and is eligible for free super-saver shipping at Amazon.

Cole loves seek and find books, I have no doubt that he will have a blast looking across a much larger canvas for tiny clues and items. I am also interested in encouraging him to be meticulous when as he searches. I think that attention to detail and being methodical are good traits to have in adulthood (if not carried to an extreme).

EyeClops Activity Kit at Amazon.com


Related Posts: here and here.

Power House

In the Power House science kit your kids will learn about powering a model house using wind, light, plant, and electrochemical energies. In addition to the house, they will also build an electric train, a solar cooker, and even make their own chewing gum. There are 20 building projects and 70 experiments, plus an instructional manual. Sounds like several fun weekend projects for a future scientist or inventor.

link

Live Butterfly Garden

A friend recommended this to me, it is a "butterfly garden" or more like a caterpiller habitat where they are allowed to turn into butterflies. You get a foldable net covered cage along with a feeder and a voucher to get the butterfly larvae and food, the only other things you need are sugar and water. Using it is pretty easy, you set up the habitat, add the larvae and food, and wait (and watch). It takes about a week or so for the larvae to begin building their cocoons, and when they do it happens fast. After about another week the painted lady butterflies emerge, which you can set free after a couple of days. It is a great way to expose your kids to the natural world.

Live Butterfly Garden at Amazon.com

Save the Frogs!

Nothing grosses the girls out more in Biology class than the annual frog dissection event. Indignation, empathy for the dead animal, and general squeamishness are common responses (from both sexes) to cutting open a dead animal, even for educational purposes. With the Discovery Channel's Frog Dissection kit you can feel better knowing that you are only desecrating the body of a simulated animal instead of the real thing. This frog is made of plastic and rubber, which most people will agree are not alive. It has removable organs so you can get a good look at the small intestine after removing the liver. The dissection table is included and has trays and tools to use to poke around in the simu-frog. It has x-rays too, so you can see the muscles and skeleton that this ersatz Kermit will never get to use. Dissecting this frog has everything you could want except being able to watch the captain of the football team faint onto the Biology classroom floor.

Discovery Dissect A Frog

Eyeclops is a Amazon Gold Box Deal Today

My favorite giant eyeball toy is an Amazon gold box deal today. This is one of my (and Cole's) favorite toys, and the geek in me get excited not only at the 200X magnification you get, but also the wild up and down swings in the price. Suggested retail price is $50, the last time I was at Wal-Mart I saw an entire end-cap of these priced at exactly that. Amazon is always below this price point, but still swings pretty wildly between $30 and $40. Now my geekiness at tracking prices can pay off for you. Right now the eyeclops is at $30.70 with free super saver shipping. I think I might get an another one to give as a Christmas present to someone this year.

Jakks EyeClops Bionic Eye


related posts:
I Spy With My Little Eyeclops
Eyeclops Update

Chemistry Card Game "Elementeo"

14-year-old Anshul Samar has developed a card game (it looks similar to Magic: The Gathering) that is intended to help teach kids chemistry. He is still seeking funding to develop and market his idea, so it is not available yet. I'm not sure if it will catch on or not, but it is a great idea:

“Our aim is to combine fun, excitement, education, and chemistry, all in one grand concoction,” says Samar. “We don't want to create a fantasy wizard world or create a boring education textbook world, but combine the two where fun and learning come together without clashing!”

link

Robert Krampf - science experiments you can do at home

Robert Krampf is a well known science educator that has appeared on television and has an weekly "experiment of the week" that reaches over 180,000 households in more than 95 countries. His web site is of particular use to home schoolers since most of the experiments are fairly simple and can be done at home (or in the backyard), possibly to the amazement of your kids. He has an archive of 325 of his experiments, and don't miss the science videos section of his site also, where he demonstrates important scientific concepts that you can reproduce at home as well.

link

(via the OpenScience Project)

No mess tie-dye T-shirt

Make your own pseudo-psychedelic T-shirt using sharpie(s), rubbing alcohol, a plastic cup, and a rubber band (and a t-shirt). Find the instructions at Steve Spangler's science website.

link

Weekend project - Non-newtonian fluids

Non-newtonian fluids is defined as a fluid that changes viscosity based on strain rate. What this means for us is that you can make a substance that sometimes acts like a liquid and at other times like a solid. A common name for is is "oobleck" which comes from the Dr. Seuss book Bartholomew and the Oobleck. If you mix 1 part cornstarch with 1.5 to 2 parts water, you get an Elmer's glue like goop. You can pour this from bowl to bowl, even scoop it up with a spoon if you move slowly. The fun happens when you move or push on the liquid quickly, at this point the viscosity decreases and it acts much more like a solid, allowing you to push it around, even roll it into a ball (although it turns back into liquid as soon as you stop rolling it).

Here's a couple of videos to get your interest flowing.





If the weather permits this weekend I'll post our oobleck video on Sunday

Spring Sale at Discovery Channel Store

The Discovery channel store is having a spring sale, with up to 40% off. Some interesting items:




Discovery Remote Control Solar System Mobile




Discovery Polymer Lab





Discovery Radio Control Mini Storm Launcher Mi ™

Eyeclops update

The eyeclops is currently on sale at amazon.com for $30, that's about a $9 decrease over the previous price.

Jakks EyeClops Bionic Eye at amazon.com

Also, in an eerie case of synergy between earlier posts (the original Eyeclops post and the cockeyed.com post), check out cockeyed.com's eyeclops fun:
Introducing the Eyeclops
Looking at velcro with the eyeclops
Reader submissions of eyeclops pictures

The Human Body, layer by layer

Two related items, but for different age groups:

This is a layered puzzle of the human body, to help kids understand how their body is made and how it works.

Similar to the puzzle above, but this is a book, each page is another layer of the human body. Text accompanies each layer describing what you are seeing how the parts on that layer work.

One of the amazon.com reviews reminded me of the Visible Man/Woman and that brought back some memories:

By the way, the Visible Man and Woman (and horse) are still available, although it seems that the quality is quite poor now and I would not suggest that you buy one anymore. If you have different experiences I'd like to hear about it.

Beleduc Wooden 5-Layer Wooden Puzzle, Your Body Puzzle Boy at amazon.com
Beleduc Wooden 5-Layer Wooden Puzzle, Your Body Puzzle Girl at amazon.com
Uncover the Human Body: An Uncover It Book at amazon.com

Cockeyed Science?

http://www.cockeyed.com/ is one of my favorite websites. Rob Cockerham has been posting stories since 1997. His offbeat humor and unusual circle of friends are interesting, but what I find most interesting are the "How much is inside? adventures" and the "Science club episodes". In "how much is inside?" Rob and friends try to determine how much there is of a certain item or substance, for example in one episode they figure out how much of a package of oreos is cookie and how much is creamy filling by physically separating the two substances and measuring them. In another episode Rob determined there is approx. 2.87 meters of toothpaste in a 6 oz. tube of Ultra Brite toothpaste by squeezing the tube out across his floor.

The great thing about cockeyed.com is that Rob is able to shoehorn fun and silliness in with scientific data collection and a genuine curiosity about the world. If only high school science class had been this fun.

http://www.cockeyed.com/

Phun creations

I ran across these and had to share them. Let them spark some ideas of your own:








related post: Free (but Phun) science software

Good chemistry sets are still out there

You may have noticed that I have an attraction to science toys. During my research I have come across several articles, blog entries, and rants about the decline in chemistry sets over the last generation from borderline dangerous home chemistry kits to ineffective, irrelevant, and overly safety-conscious home chemistry toys. Here is a smattering of the some of the more coherent examples:

"But say 'chemistry set' to a kid today and you're likely to get a blank stare or a snicker in response. While the sets still technically exist, they rarely contain any real 'chemicals,' thanks to safety and liability fears; they also characterize scientists as crazy and eccentric rather than respectable and intelligent. This may be fueling kids’ declining interest in science, as evidenced by the fact that the percentage of students pursuing college chemistry degrees today is down by two-thirds since the 1960s. Could the disappearance of the old chemistry sets be somewhat to blame? A lot of scientists say yes."

Via Wiredscience article "Dangerous Science"

"Home-based experimentation is essential to raising the next generation of science nerds. And to make the best nerds in the world, the home experimentation needs to be a wee bit dangerous."

Via the Openscience project

The lure of do-it-yourself chemistry has always been the most potent recruiting tool science has to offer. Many kids attracted by the promise of filling the garage with clouds of ammonium sulfide – the proverbial stink bomb – went on to brilliant careers in mathematics, biology, programming, and medicine.

After reading a book called The Boy Scientist at age 10, Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science," says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. "Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out."

Via Wired.com

The good news is there is at least one good chemistry set still available:

The CHEM C3000 Advanced Chemistry Experiment Kit

As you can see in the picture, it comes with a plenty of good quality equipment, a supply of chemicals, safety goggles, and a 178 page experiment manual. (one of the experiments helps you make a fire extinguisher, which might be helpful with some of the later experiments)

For anyone wanting a little more danger, and aren't afraid of a little copyright violation, follow the link at Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments from Make Magazine's blog

Milestones in Science

This kit combines two of my favorite things, science and history. Recreate some of the most important breakthroughs in science.

"Milestones in Science combines history and science in a fun, hands-on way. Children learn about famous scientists and inventors while reproducing 100 of their most significant experiments. Beautifully illustrated 96-page book walks junior scientists through a world of microelectronics, atoms, light, magnetism, and much more. Covers more than 140 scientists and civilizations. Made in Germany and includes 95 pieces. Requires one "9V" battery. (Age 10+)"

Milestones in Science at backtobasicstoys.com
Milestones in Science at ebay.com

Free (but phun) Science software

Phun is a free software tool written by that lets you experiment with gravity, construction, destruction, you name it. You can view the trailer below. Free download of the software is available here.



An online toy/tool in the same vein (although probably not quite as cool) called Soda Constructor

"Sodaconstructor is a construction kit for interactive creations using masses and springs. By altering physical properties like gravity, friction, and speed, curiously anthropomorphic models can be made to walk, climb, wriggle, jiggle, or collapse into a writhing heap"

Want more? Crayon Physics Deluxe has only a prototype version available, but it looks pretty similar to Phun, but uses a touchpad and is more of a puzzle game than a free form world.



But wait, there's more! Armadillo Run is a construction/puzzle game, and is already released (for about $20) the game demo is available here



Credit: all of these were found at badscience.net

Feel like playing programmer?

Igor Kholodov developed a game called C-Jump to demonstrate to his son the basics of computer proramming. The object of the game is to get a skier down a mountain by rolling a die and finding the fastest path down the mountain. The paths are labeled with basic math and logic symbols, the working tools of computer programming. There are not many educational toys out there that fall into this category. It's worth looking at for that reason alone.

More details here including some good pictures of the game and more background.

I spy with my little Eyeclops...

I still have the microscope that my parents gave me when I was a kid. It is a hefty metal brick, but I spent hours and hours looking at slides when I was a kid. The Eyeclops take the weight and the glass slides and the fighting for who gets to look into the eyepiece out of the equation, and replaces it with a lightweight electronic "eye" that plugs into your t.v. It has 200X power, enough to look at the details of your skin, fabric, or the sludge at the bottom of the refridgerator.

Jakks EyeClops Bionic Eye at amazon.com
Eyeclops at ebay.com