Nutrition Café
Developed jointly by the Pacific Science Center and the Washington State Dairy Council, Nutrition Café offers students three interactive games to explore the world of nutrition. The first game, Nutrient Sleuth, is an entertaining hangman-style game where students try to discover what nutrients different characters are missing based on clues and letter guesses. Another enjoyable offering is Grab A Grape, a Jeopardy-style game where site visitors try to match nutrition-related questions with answ
InfoNatura: Birds and Mammals of Latin America
InfoNatura is provided by NatureServe, "a non-profit organization dedicated to developing and providing information about the world's plants, animals, and ecological communities." This Web site is a comprehensive source for conservation, distribution, and taxonomic information on over 5000 bird and mammal species in 44 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Taxonomic treatment of all species in the database "reflects standard references, and most species have been assigned a global conservation
The Junior Engineering Technical Society: Guidance Brochures
The Junior Engineering Technical Society (JETS) has a relatively large Web site. This site has a variety of online motivational brochures that describe most engineering disciplines and the job roles of different types of engineers.
Dams
National Geographic's Dams Web site offers an interactive investigation into the good and bad impacts of dam construction. Visitors choose to view a river system before, during, or after a dam is built. Then at each time interval they can click on various sections of the river and read a short description of what is happening there. For example, after the dam is built, the reservoir that is created upstream causes several hydrological problems such as loss of water from evaporation. Although the
2001 Annual Energy Review
The US Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration (EIA) describes itself as providing policy-independent data, forecasts, and analyses to promote sound policy making, efficient markets, and public understanding regarding energy and its interaction with the economy and the environment. The EIA Web site provides many informational pages and publications including the newly released 2001 Annual Energy Review. The report covers fossil fuels, nuclear electricity, renewable energy, and t
The New York Botanical Garden: International Plant Science Center
In "combining modern technologies with a century of field and laboratory research," the New York Botanical Garden's International Plant Science Center "is one of the few institutions worldwide with the resources, collections, and expertise to develop the information needed to understand and manage plant diversity." This website grants considerable access to resources from the Center, including numerous plant databases, digitized rare botanical books, online access to the herbarium collections, a
National Environmental Data Index
The National Environmental Data Index is maintained by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration Environmental Information Service. The service provides a full text search of information from twelve governmental agencies including the US Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, Department of Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, and NASA. Users can choose to search from all or individual agencies, by type of information, and by several specific subjects. Results display th
Coral Reef Information System: Discover NOAA's Data
Part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Information System (CoRIS), this Web site is "designed to be a single point of access to NOAA coral reef information and data products, especially those derived from NOAA's Coral Reef Initiative Program." With Discover NOAA's Data, users can access information by a text search of metadata records, or by a spatial search using an Arc IMS application. The two approaches share many of the same data sets. With the text search,
SoloTrek XFV: Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle
Anyone who ever dreamed of flying with the birds should peruse the SoloTrek Web site. The vehicles shown online are either conceptual or in a prototype version, but they are intriguing nonetheless. Making its "proof-of-concept" test flight in December 2001, the Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle (XFV) is probably receiving the most attention. A technical primer describes the operation of the XFV and lists the specifications and components of the design. The vehicle's significance is outlined according t
UW-Arboretum: Earth Partnership Program: Prairie Fire Survey
This website presents an educational Prairie Fire Survey that was developed by the Earth Partnership Program (EPP) of the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, home to the oldest restored prairie in the world. The goal of the survey is "to help students understand the role and change fire plays in the prairie." To this end, the site provides background information on forces that have shaped prairies over time and reasons why fire benefits prairies. The website describes two activities, including ne
Self-Healing Minefield
The self-healing antitank minefield is an innovative system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It employs intelligent, mobile mines that can rearrange themselves to repair any breaches in the field. This forces the enemy to destroy a much greater percentage of the total mines, rather than simply clearing a narrow path. The project's Web site has considerable material on the mines' operation, including a very illustrative multimedia demonstration. There are also b
Statistical Education Through Problem Solving
Statistical Education Through Problem Solving (STEPS) was a collaborative project between seven universities throughout the United Kingdom "to develop problem-based teaching and learning materials for statistics." The materials draw on specific problems arising in Biology, Business, Geography and Psychology to help students learn that statistical issues are "important natural parts of the process of reaching conclusions." The software developed as a result of this project, which utilizes the com
Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology Network
The Science, Engineering, Mathematics, and Technology Network (SETNET), created by the British Department of Trade and Industry, "seeks to stimulate the interests of young people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and in pursuing careers related to these subjects." Local networks partner with educational organizations, professional associations, research institutes, industry, government departments, and charities to "deliver high quality STEM activities and experiences to school
Surgical Robot Competition: Introducing Engineering in Medicine to Pre-College Students
This paper was introduced at the annual conference and exhibition of the American Society for Engineering Education in June 2002. It was presented by a group of students and a professor from John Hopkins University, who each specialize in different areas of engineering and computer science. They propose a method for integrating "off-the-shelf robotic technology with current real-world engineering challenges" to teach secondary school students about robotics and its applications in medicine. This
Great Lakes BeachCast
The Great Lakes Information Network developed this website to "broadcast critical information about beach closings and educational content on human health concerns." The website provides the latest news on erosion control projects, contamination and cleanup efforts, beach testing efforts, and other environmental news. Users can explore monitoring data and maps by location. The website also contains the proceedings from the Great Lakes Beach Conferences from 2001 and 2002 and the US EPA's Beach P
Exploring Biodiversity
This new educational resource has been developed by the London's Natural History Museum to help students learn about biodiversity concepts and measures. Teacher resources include a glossary of terms and lesson plans with ideas for working through the online and field sampling activities with students. This is a valuable Web site that promotes an active approach to learning through concept and data investigation. Although the maps and data are specific to the UK, the concepts and lessons are appl
What's New at Sci4Kids
The Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the US Department of Agriculture offers its latest set of brief but engaging educational activities for kids in this Web site. The recently added feature, No Horsin' Around With These Tests!, introduces immunological concepts in the kid-friendly guise of a story about horses. Two older features are also available, one on using a biocontrol method to combat dry rot fungus in potatoes and another on mites. While these subjects may not at first appear to b
Sky Station
While satellites are the current backbone of telecommunications and wireless infrastructure, the company that maintains this Web site envisions a completely new technology. The Stratospheric Telecommunications Service (STS) relies on "lighter-than-air platforms which are held in a geo-stationary position in the stratosphere (approximately 21Km) over a major metropolitan area." The Sky Station company documents much of the STS theory online, as well as maintaining news and information articles ab
Observe one place at many scales
Developed for high school students, this Earth science resource utilizes a set of six enlargeable images to illustrate the meaning of map scale. Introductory text explains that because of the incremental changes in scale, the details in each image appear ten times larger than in the prior image. The first image in the set was taken at a scale that shows the globe, and the final image shows a city block in Atlanta, Georgia. There is an animation below the images that begins with the global view a
Floor tiles
This Java applet enables students to develop tessellations, which are patterns on a plane that do not overlap. The student is given a square that can be distorted into quadrilateral shapes by dragging its corners. Users can select colors for the alternating quadrilateral pattern, and a button displays information about the quadrilateral in a second window. The window lists the coordinates of the vertices, angle measurements, side lengths, area, and perimeter of the quadrilateral. From the applet
