This article describes a project that integrates English Language Arts (ELA) and coding into environmental science. For this project, students researched science content about human impact on the environment, communicated their findings through a traditionally formatted narrative story, and then used a coding program called Scratch to create an…

Dvolver is a free moviemaking platform that allows users to employ animated characters to develop fun, concise scripts in a digital format. The author and a co-teacher created a 45-minute lesson plan for teaching students at the upper-beginner and lower-intermediate skill levels. The purpose of this article is to describe the utility of Dvolver…

As science teachers, we often show animations and videos in class but there is the potential for students to create their own animations to represent science concepts and thus make their conceptions visible for critique and refinement. This encourages students to be active in their own learning, creating animations rather than just viewing them.…

The authors provide a dynamic Ferris wheel computer activity that teachers can use as an instructional tool to help students investigate functions. They use a student's work to illustrate how students can use relationships between quantities to further their thinking about functions.

The concept of specificity of enzyme action can potentially be abstract for some students as they fail to appreciate how the three-dimensional configuration of enzymes and the active sites confer perfect fit for specific substrates. In science text books, the specificity of enzyme-substrate binding is typically likened to the action of a lock and…

Today's global digital culture not only engages young people in daily consumption of visual images, texts, and artifacts, but also provides them with the tools to actively participate in the production of imagery and narratives. Whether they post a picture on Facebook, create a blog, or make a YouTube video with their peers, they engage in what…

The "Keep It Simple" package, which includes a short animated film (available online for streaming or download), a lesson plan, and supporting materials, was designed to be used with adolescents ages 15-19 to empower them to seek sexual and reproductive health care, and emphasize the availability of long-acting reversible contraception…

As science teachers continue preparing for implementation of the "Next Generation Science Standards," one recommendation is to use computer programming as a promising context to efficiently integrate science and engineering. In this article, a interdisciplinary team of educational researchers and computer scientists describe how to use…

In this article, the author describes the process of making "The Sneaky Sneaker Spies and the Mysterious Black Ink," a six-minute animation starring five art students who form a detective club. This animation is available online for art teachers to use in their own classrooms. After showing this video in class, art teachers could have students try…

Many studies have shown that students lose some of what they learn during the school year over the summer months. Because the author strongly feels that his students need to keep working at their technical skills year-round, he encourages them to keep active with school-related activities until they return in the fall. In this article, the author…

In this article, I describe an animated slideshow of Southern blotting that I have made freely available to other instructors. My hope is to provide a clear visualization of the logistics behind the technique so that instructors have a solid basis--as well as time freed up--to discuss its applications with students.

This article describes the "Kick Stick" activity from Design Squad Nation, in which kids turn a wooden paint stirrer and circuit into a motorized, spinning arm--then use it to kick a Ping-Pong[R] ball across the floor. Teachers can enrich their students' exploration of circuits and emphasize the engineering design process with "Design Squad…

The human eye and its vision problems are often used as an entry subject and attention grabber in the teaching of geometrical optics. While this is a real-life application students can relate to, it is difficult to visualize how the eye forms images by studying the still pictures and drawings in a textbook. How to draw a principal ray diagram or…

In recent years there has been a rapid expansion in the use of animated drawings for teaching physics. The benefits to the students are obvious. Rather than looking at still pictures in a textbook, they can observe a physical event and see how it plays out over time.

Multiple representations are a valuable tool to help students learn and understand physics concepts. Furthermore, representations help students learn how to think and act like real scientists. These representations include: pictures, free-body diagrams, energy bar charts, electrical circuits, and, more recently, computer simulations and…