The Impact Earth website allows you to calculate the impact of various asteroids if they were to hit the Earth. In this case if the YU₅₅ did hit Earth we could expect the equivalent of 8.49 x 10¹⁸ Joules = 2.03 x 10³ Megatons TNT or a 6.8 size earthquake. If it hit the deep ocean, 45-meter Tsunami waves between 2.3 meters (7.6 feet) and 45.7 meters (150 feet) would be expected.  But you will be happy to know that the average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth during the last 4 billion years is 1.1 x 10⁵years (and if you need a brush up on your scientific notation, just move the decimal point five space to the right so it is 110,000 years). And just to be precise about the vocabulary, when it is traveling in our solar system it is an asteroid, but when it crashes through our atmosphere and breaks up into pieces that hit the Earth, they become meteorites.

Impact Earth data for 400 m Asteroid

It is interesting to use Impact Earth to see the effects of various size asteroids on the Earth. Indeed, student exploration will allow them to realize some of the parameters that will affect the collision including speed, density of asteroid, and angle of impact. The Impact Earth calculator is a good start but it leaves me a bit flat. No matter what size Asteroid, the impact animation is always the same. The depicted size of the asteroid should resemble the number that was entered. But the data are useful, and students could ask and answer many questions about asteroid impact, producing deeper asteroid understanding and inquiry skills.

Famous Asteroids from Adaptive Curriculum Animation

Ice Candle and Specific Heat, December 30, 2010

Science Prezi-tations: A Break from PowerPoints, December 22, 2010

Sounds for Science Educators, November 27, 2010

Great Science Teaching: An Iterative Process, October 25, 2010

Report To The President Prepare And Inspire: K-12 Education In Science, Technology, Engineering, And Math (Stem) For America’s Future, October 21, 2010

Engaging Starts and Video of Class, October 1, 2010

Titles for 2010 www.ed-tech-4-science.com placed into Wordle

The Context of Learning and Learning with Style, September 15, 2010

Animals in the Science Classroom, August 29, 2010

What is Science? July 31, 2010

Readers and Science Education, July 12, 2010

Electric Cars, Tesla, and Sustainability, June 28, 2010

Sports Drinks, Young Athletes, and Summer Heat, May 29, 2010

Guided Inquiry and Surface Area to Volume Ratio, May 26, 2010

Happy Earth Day, April 22, 2010

Scale of the Universe, April 10, 2010

NSTA Presentation, March 19, 2010

SMALLab Physics, March 3, 2010

My Mendel Moment and a Review of Sprout & Grow Window, February 8, 2010

Testosterone and Who We Are, January 20, 2010

Science and the Haitian Earthquake, January 18, 2010

Science Shows by Undergraduate Students, January 13, 2010

“After Armageddon” on the History Channel, January 5, 2010

The hottest name in science presentations is Prezi, which creates a non-linear way to depict concepts and multimedia. Prezi calls itself “the zooming presentation editor,” which captures part of it but it really should be called an “animated zooming presentation creator.” The really engaging part is how it zooms to different parts. Take this Prezi presentation that is designed to be an introductory lesson on physics. You can’t appreciate how cool the zooming works until you see Prezi in action. You fly about the word Physics as students are brought to topics they will learn throughout the year.

A Prezi presentation introducing physics.

Great teachers view the world and wonder how can I use this in my teaching. There are teachers who see a tool and instantly think about how they can use it to present science better. Then, there are those that instantly think about how they can put it into students’ hands so they can use it to learn science. Check out this Prezi, which is designed to present info for students to do a “Solar System Prezi-tation.”

Prezis are kept on the internet, so you can access other teacher-created science prezi-tations. Hopefully, they will categorize their site but for now you can do a keyword search. I did a search for “photosynthesis” and found 650 presentations. You can easily have your students go to these websites. I like Adaptive Curriculum because you can embed internet resources with the assigned Activity Objects.

A lesson plan from Adaptive Curriculum includes Activity Objects and Internet resources.

Further, if you believe in the importance of concept mapping in science education (as I do), then Prezi is a great tool for this as well. You can present teacher created or student created concept maps (see below).

But if you are going to Prezi, you better get their quick. This tool will grow in popularity until one day students might say, “I keep getting motion sickness in all my classes from Prezi. Can we please go back to PowerPoints?”

This is how Carl Sagan (1997) described it in his book THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

Perhaps the grandest museum exhibit can’t be seen. It has no home: George Awad is one of the leading architectural model makers in America, specializing in skyscrapers. He is also a dedicated student of astronomy who has made a spectacular model of the Universe. Starting with a prosaic scene on Earth, and following a scheme proposed by the designers Charles and Ray Eames, he goes progressively by factors of ten to show us the whole Earth, the Solar System, the Milky Way and the Universe. Every astronomical body is meticulously detailed. You can lose yourself in them. It’s one of the best tools I know of to explain the scale and nature of the Universe to children. Isaac Asimov described it as ‘the most imaginative representation of the universe that I have ever seen, or could have conceived of. I could have wandered through it for hours, seeing something new at every turn that I hadn’t observed before.’ Versions of it ought to be available throughout the country – for stirring the imagination, for inspiration and for teaching. But instead, Mr Awad cannot give this exhibit to any major science museum in the country. No one is willing to devote to it the floor space needed. As I write, it still sits forlornly, crated in storage.

In my office, I have the model of the Big Dipper that George Awad gave me during that 1985 visit. After seeing so many 2-dimensional drawings of the big dipper, the model is a 3-dimensional view that shows how relative size and distance influence what we see in the night sky.

Then there was the famous  Powers of Ten Video (or applet) that gave us the broad view of the universe and kept on magnifying by ten, until we arrived in Florida, and then descended into a plant.

Now the folks at Primax Studio have done their own Scale of the Universe with drawn images, instead of partially using photographs, but the music and the interactive aspects make it delightful to explore.  

The scale of the universe is difficult to fully appreciate but we are getting closer due to multimedia tools. A 3-d Imax movie will soon be in theaters.

Thinking and TEKS Science Content Via Online Activities.”

I am placing the PowerPoint file here for participants and anyone else interested in this topic. Below are some titles and resources from the presentation. 

Click here to access the PowerPoint. tx-critical-thinking2

The text for the slides is presented below. 

What is Critical Thinking?

Some Elements of Critical Thinking

Design a Satellite

ž  describe types of equipment and transportation needed for space travel. (TEKS: 6.13)

ž  http://www.eduweb.com/portfolio/designsatellite/

The World of Goo

ž  demonstrate basic relationships between force and motion using simple machines including pulleys and levers (TEKS: 7.6)

ž  http://2dboy.com/games.php

Creature Creator

ž  prelude to Spore

ž  Free trial edition

ž  How can students making creatures

—  Develop science content?

—  Develop critical thinking?

—  Or both?

Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects

ž Dancing with the Bees

—  TEKS 6.12: responses to external stimuli

ž Determining Planet Layers from Seismic Waves

—  TEKS 6.6 identify forces that shape features of the Earth; 7.2: organize, analyze, make inferences, and predict trends from direct and indirect evidence

ž Groundwater

—  TEKS 6.1: make wise choices in the use and conservation of resources;  6.14 groundwater