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While researching for the blog this week, I came across a recent article on the NSTA Blog called Balloon Racers that outlines a classroom activity for students where they build, test, and modify balloon-powered cars. Author of the article and science teacher in Indiana, Shannon Hudson walks her readers through this experiment using the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) to frame the purpose of the activity and explain how it will fit into her students’ curriculum. She describes how she has students first explain the basics of Newtons Third Law, probe into the basic function of their car, and take baseline measurements...

This week I came across an article which reminded me of an interesting topic I had read about a couple of years back regarding the use of cell phone sensors and portable attachments being used to monitor your health in place of the traditional system of visiting a doctor to investigate symptoms as they appear. In this 2015 article from the Wall Street Journal, Ellen Weinstein examines what the future of medicine will look like as we live longer passed the “smartphone revolution.” She details a world where people are able to gather personal health data on their cellphones to...

Hey everyone! A few weeks back I shared this wonderful resource with you. It was, however, a little buried within a post, so I figured I’d go ahead and let it be my inspiration for a full post. For this week’s blog, I want to give a bit more of an in-depth look at how a classroom unit for a phenomenon-based learning lesson would look like. My examples are going to be based on those found on The Wonder of Science website and the website for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Before I begin, let me describe these sites a little...

The Aedes aegypti is back in the news! For those who don’t know, Aedes aegypti and their close relative, the Aedes albopictus, are species of mosquito that are notorious for transmitting diseases to people living in the warmer and wetter regions of the world. In fact, mosquitoes are the deadliest animal to humans on the planet. Don’t trust me on that fact? Check out this post on Bill Gate’s blog or this post from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal). This week, exciting results from a trial in Townsville, Australia were released, and it made me want to look into...

Though I don’t always cover science news on this blog, it is something I love to do because it keeps my imagination for the future of science alive. Some weeks when I’m hoping to cover recent science news, I struggle to find anything I want to write about. Then, other weeks I find so much that I want to write about that I can’t settle on one news story. This week, I ran into the latter situation. Two stories in the news this week made me giddy with excitement, and I couldn’t just decide to talk about only one of...