Periodic Table Element Videos on Ted-Ed

Periodic Videos - an interactive periodic table
TED-Ed has created a set of videos with complete lesson plans, quizzes, discussion and further research topics for each of the elements in the periodic table.  They’re called the Ted-Ed Periodic Videos.

The online system also allows you to adapt the lessons to your own needs and re-share that. This looks like an awesome resource, well worth having in your “toolkit”.

Queensland Junior Physics Olympiad 2015

The QLD Junior Physics Olympiad (known to the participants as JPhO) is an annual winter school holiday event at the University of Queensland, this year running in the week of 29 June – 3 July, for year 10 students with an interest in science and mathematics.

Knowing people who have participated, and as a parent, I can say it’s an absolutely awesome program.  I am specifically telling you this now because there appear to be one or two student places still available for this year’s Olympiad!

So, if you’re a parent or teacher of a year 10 student who has an interest in physics, rush to the link and get things sorted with the organisers! You want to be really quick and convincing as officially the closing date for applications was May 1st and the Olympiad is definitely going ahead anyway.

Mirobot v2 on Kickstarter

Once again developed by the awesome Ben Pirt, you can now pre-order version 2 of the Mirobot for delivery in November 2015. Just in time for Christmas!

OpenSTEM uses the Mirobot turtle with students in primary schools doing soldering, assembling and introduction to programming, so we’re very happy to recommend this.

If you want a Mirobot before November and are in Australia, head over to our Mirobot v1 in OpenSTEM web store.

And if you’re interested in our school workshops, please contact us!

BBC gives children mini-computers in Make it Digital scheme | BBC

The BBC has launched its Make it Digital initiative with new hardware for schools and a raft of coding-based content.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31834927

Microbit prototype

This is a wonderful initiative – as I’ve written before, I grew up “next door to the UK” in The Netherlands, we received the BBC1 and BBC2 TV channels, and I managed to cajole my parents into buying be an Acorn BBC computer. It was a real enabler in terms of programming, understanding how computers work, interfacing with electronics, logic design, and much more. It’s awesome that good old BBC is launching something like that again. It shows vision and it’s very worthwhile.

It appears that some of the teaching material and content may be specific to the UK (as in, an Australian student may not connect with the references), but other than that I think it’d be awesome to basically adopt this for use here also. Even with such minor changes required, most of the work has already been done. Why not use it!