As an environmental educator, I often feel like I’m trying to make scientific information relevant and digestible to children and the general public.
The blog Information is Beautiful is a demonstration of how art and creativity transform dry data into something stunning, attractive, and readily meaningful.
There is a new delightful Hayao Miyazaki movie out called Ponyo. In the film, the world is returning to the Devonian Period, AKA the Age of Fishes.
The movie is worth watching alone for the beautiful animation of trilobites, armored placoderms, and other pre-historic creatures. I tried to fish-out some clips of the sea creatures but the official trailer doesn’t feature any devonian animal scenes. If you’re a historical geology lover this is a must-see movie!
A whole new world of programming opportunity has just opened up to me; I just learned about cymatics.
“Cymatics is the study of visible sound and vibration, typically on the surface of a plate, diaphragm or membrane. Directly visualizing vibrations involves using sound to excite media often in the form of particles, pastes and liquids.” (wikipiedia)
Make has a great video using an amp and a cornstarch-water mixture to demonstrate how cymatics work.
I learned from a recent survey (Please take it if you haven’t yet, its really short!) that many people don’t know that I can provide graphic design services. So I’m going to through some design posts into the mix here at the blog to spread the word.
Two typographers from pleaseletmedesign.com and a pro race pilot (Stef van Campenhoudt) collaborated to design a font with a car. The car movements were tracked using a custom software, designed by interactive artist Zachary Lieberman. ( openframeworks.cc )
I knew it would be good because it won a 2008 NAI Interpretive Media Award, but it far exceeded my expectations. I anticipated a curriculum guide much like the Project WET and WILD guides – which are great resources. However, the MinnAqua Guide builds on the template in a couple major ways.
First, each chapter contains an impressive quantity of local aquatic natural history, essentially eliminating the need to seek out other sources to build your knowledge or to tweak activities to be locally applicable. The guide is alone worth reading to simply increase your natural history knowledge.
Second, the guide also comes with a CD containing a plethora of seriously impressive images, especially of fish. No simple line drawings here, think detailed full-color images that look like the fish jumped out of the water onto your page.
The guide also includes hyper-detailed evaluations of how each lesson meets Minnesota’s Academic Standards and ready-to-use assessment quizzes and standards. To top it all off, the entire guide was reviewed by over 100 experts in various fields so you can feel ultra-confident about the accuracy of the content.
You can get a copy by attending or hosting a MinnAqua Educator Workshop. Contact Michelle Kelly for more info.
The International Children’s Digital Library is wonderful website full of great resources for educators, parents, and anyone who loves children’s literature and illustration.
There are many science and nature themed books with high-res scanned images of all of the pages, including the illustrations. And many of the book’s copyrights have expired so you can used the illustrations for programs. The organization has even developed a Teacher Training Manual.
“the mission of the International Children’s Digital Library Foundation is to prepare children for life in an ethnically and culturally diverse world by building the world’s largest online multicultural repository of children’s literature.”
Image form the International Children's Digital Library
Both films required great ingenuity and patience to film and were cleverly edited to engage children and adults.
Steve and I met years ago while volunteering on an animal care crew at the Wildlife Rehabilitation Center of Minnesota where I think he bonded with an orphaned merganser and found his film inspiration.
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