Gooru - Great Collections of Science and Math Resources

Gooru is a new service (still carrying the Alpha label) that aims to provide teachers and students with an extensive collection of videos, interactive displays, documents, diagrams, and quizzes for learning about topics in math and science.

As a Gooru member you have access to hundreds of resources according to subject areas such as chemistry, biology, ecology, algebra, calculus, and more. Within each subject area you can look for resources according to media type such as video, interactive display, slides, text, and lesson plans. When you find resources that you want to use, drag them to the resources folder within your account. Gooru also offers you the option to add resources to your folders even if you did not find them within Gooru.

Applications for Education
Gooru could be a great place for math and science teachers to locate lesson plans and other materials to use in their classrooms. Students can create Gooru accounts to find useful review materials and take practice tests on the subjects they're studying.

Resources for Teaching the Math & Science of Sports

The Super Bowl is coming up this weekend and many classrooms will have students buzzing with their predictions for Sunday's game. This provides a good opportunity to incorporate math and science with sports. Below is a re-publishing of a review I wrote two years ago about NBC's Science of Football lesson materials.

The Science of Football is a series of ten videos from NBC Learn explaining and demonstrating math and science concepts as they relate to football. The Science of Football could be a good way to get students who enjoy sports, but don't necessarily enjoy math and science, interested in learning math and science. Lessonopoly offers lesson plans corresponding to each video to support your use of the videos in your classroom.

Here are some resources for incorporating other sports into math and science lessons.

Exploratorium's Sports Science site contains many pages on which students can explore the math and science of team sports as well as the individual sports of bicycling and skateboarding. The bicycling section has a calculator that students can use to calculate the aerodynamic drag and propulsion power of a bicyclist.

Sport Science on ESPN.com has couple of videos that are relevant as school winds-down and kids turn their attention to Little League baseball and softball. In MLB Vision Sport Science evaluates how quickly a player has to respond to a baseball thrown ninety miles per hour. Then to answer the question, can you really keep your eyes on the ball? Sport Science attaches an eye tracking device to Nomar Garciapara.

In Hitting a Softball Sport Science explains the scientific and mathematical differences between hitting a baseball and hitting a softball.

Sport Science: Distraction looks at whether or not all of those waving, screaming fans behind a basketball hoop actually make a difference in whether or not a player makes his or her free throw. You could turn this into an active survey in your school's gymnasium. Have your students shoot some hoops without distraction and tally their average rate of success. Then have them test out distractions like waving, playing music, or yelling to see if there is a change in the success rate.

Well Home offers an interesting infographic showing the energy expended by athletes performing various athletic tasks. I've seen other infographics like this and usually they only mention calories. Well Home's infographic mentions calories as well as watts and speed measurements. Well Home's infographic could be printed and displayed in health, physical education, and or mathematics classes.

Well Home's Energy in Sports infographic goes well with another resource that contains mathematics and science lessons in the context of sports. ESPN's series Sports Science looks at the mathematics and science involved in various athletic feats.

Google SketchUp Tutorial Videos and Math Lessons

Yesterday, I saw a Tweet from Steven Anderson that reminded me of a couple of good series of Google SketchUp tutorial videos. SketchUp is a great free program from Google that allows you to create 3-D models to use in Google Earth or as stand-alone models. Learning to use all of the features of SketchUp can take a while. Fortunately, as with most Google products, there are some excellent video tutorials to help you learn how to use SketchUp.

New to Google SketchUp is a series of 28 videos that will walk you through all of the basics of using SketchUp to create your first models. Some of the videos have been updated recently and now prompt you to click through to the updated version. Below I have included the first video in the series.


Although it is not an official series of videos from Google, SketchUp for Dummies has a series of web tutorials that you can access even if you haven't purchased the SketchUp for Dummies book.

Applications for Education
SketchUp can be used all kinds of educational projects like building models of ancient Rome or building models of the moon base that Newt Gingrich is going have people living on in eight years. SketchUp can be used in geometry lessons such as those offered by 3D Davinci. 3DVinci's SketchUp page has some very good resource for mathematics teachers, particularly Geometry teachers. 3DVinci presents a collection of mathematics projects that students can do using Google SketchUp. If you've never used SketchUp, don't worry. 3DVinci hosts video tutorials that will show you everything you need to know to get started using Google SketchUp to teach mathematics.

Five Resources for Visual Fractions Lessons

This is a list that I created in response to a request that I recently received as direct message on Twitter. A couple of these resources I found through a search in the Diigo community. If you don't have a Diigo account or if you do but you have never searched the community bookmarks, I recommend giving it a try.

Who Wants Pizza? is a fun online activity for learning about fractions. Who Wants Pizza was developed by Cynthia Lanius at Rice University. The activity has five parts plus practice activities for students to explore. Teachers will find notes about using this activities in the classroom.

Visual Fractions has eight categories of visualizations, lessons, and games for students to explore and learn the functions of fractions.

The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives has a lot of interactive activities for students learning the use of fractions, addition and subtraction, and the multiplication of fractions.

Thinking Blocks is a nice site for elementary and middle school mathematics teachers. Thinking Blocks provides interactive templates in which students use brightly colored blocks to model and solve problems. As students work through the problems they are provided with feedback as to whether or not they are using the correct sequence to solve each problem. There are templates and problems for addition, multiplication, fractions, and ratios. You can also develop your own problems using the modeling tool.

Conceptua Math is a provider of interactive visual mathematics lessons. One of Conceptua Math's primary focuses is on the development of tools to aid teachers in the instruction of lessons on fractions. Conceptua Math's offerings are a mix of free and premium (paid) tools. There are a total of fifteen free interactive tools for teachers and students. Each of the free tools has an introductory video and a sample lesson plan.

Econ Ed Link - Economics Lessons and Games

Produced by the Council for Economic Education, Econ Ed Link hosts hundreds of lesson plans and interactive games for teaching students about a wide range of topics in economics. Teachers can search the lesson plan index by grade level, concept, standard, or length of lesson (one class period vs. multiple class periods). Most of the lessons attempt to provide "real world" context.

The interactive section of Econ Ed Link offers four pages of videos and games. The videos and games can be used as stand-alone activities or as part of lesson plan. I tested out the interactive game on developing good credit habits. Developing Good Credit Habits is a game appropriate for middle school and high school students. Students earn money by correctly answering questions about credit scores, interest rates, and spending practices. The purpose of the game is to purchase items and pay expenses without damaging your credit score.

Applications for Education
Econ Ed Link offers lesson plans appropriate for all K-12 students. Many of the lessons are designed for use not only in the classroom but in the home as well. The parent section of Econ Ed Link offers good material that you can send home with your students to get parents involved in students' learning about personal economics.