Tools Hack Daily

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

AMNH’s newest education program, BridgeUP: STEM is focused on the intersection of computer science and science #MakerEducation

Bridgeup hero dynamic lead slide

Cool new initiative from the American Museum of Natural History.

AMNH’s newest education program, BridgeUP: STEM is focused on the intersection of computer science and science. This portfolio of programs includes:

tuition-free intensive 3-year Brown Scholars program for high school girls

introductory middle school institutes covering a range of computational topics, like climate change (full-tuition scholarships are available; email institutes@amnh.org for more information)

the Helen Fellowship, a one-year post-baccalaureate fellowship for women

an annual overnight hackathon for professional developers addressing computational challenges in a given scientific discipline

Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!

AMNH’s newest education program, BridgeUP: STEM is focused on the intersection of computer science and science #MakerEducation

Bridgeup hero dynamic lead slide

Cool new initiative from the American Museum of Natural History.

AMNH’s newest education program, BridgeUP: STEM is focused on the intersection of computer science and science. This portfolio of programs includes:

tuition-free intensive 3-year Brown Scholars program for high school girls

introductory middle school institutes covering a range of computational topics, like climate change (full-tuition scholarships are available; email institutes@amnh.org for more information)

the Helen Fellowship, a one-year post-baccalaureate fellowship for women

an annual overnight hackathon for professional developers addressing computational challenges in a given scientific discipline

Brendan Lee Satish Tang’s Manga Ormolu #ArtTuesday

Fantastic iconographic mash-ups from Brendan Lee Satish Tang, via Hi•Fructose.

Manga Ormolu enters the dialogue on contemporary culture, technology, and globalization through a fabricated relationship between ceramic tradition (using the form of Chinese Ming dynasty vessels) and techno-Pop Art. The futuristic update of the Ming vessels in this series recalls 18th century French gilded ormolu, where historic Chinese vessels were transformed into curiosity pieces for aristocrats. But here, robotic prosthetics inspired by anime (Japanese animation) and manga (the beloved comics and picture novels of Japan) subvert elitism with the accessibility of popular culture.

Working with Asian cultural elements highlights the evolving Western experience of the “Orient.” This narrative is personal: the hybridization of cultures mirrors my identity as an ethnically-mixed Asian Canadian. My family history is one of successive generations shedding the markers of ethnic identity in order to succeed in an adopted country – within a few generations this cultural filtration has spanned China, India, Trinidad, Ireland and Canada.

While Manga Ormolu offers multiple points of entry into sociocultural dialogue, manga, by nature, doesn’t take itself too seriously. The futuristic ornamentation can be excessive, self-aggrandizing, even ridiculous. This is a fitting reflection of our human need to envision and translate fantastic ideas into reality; in fact, striving for transcendence is a unifying feature of human cultural history. This characteristic is reflected in the unassuming, yet utterly transformable material of clay. Manga Ormolu, through content, form and material, vividly demonstrates the conflicting and complementary forces that shape our perceptions of Ourselves and the Other.

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

‘Atlas of Florida Plants’ from Institute for Systematic Botany, @USouthFlorida, and USF Water Institute | #USF #botany

The ISB Atlas of Florida Plants is an incredible resource! Even if you’re not from Florida or have ever visited there – but you like plants! – you’re about to spend some time clicking through over 170k digitized specimens, comprised from 3,295 native and 1,495 non-native species. The species are further broken down by County, seen in the map screenshot above – just click a county outline and find all the plant species in that county that have been registered. What a great archive!

This project is itself a member of the “family of PlantAtlas.org websites” — there are other states and plants to enjoy:

[h/t to Jeffrey Thompson for initially blogging this!]

Can a Shipping Container Increase Access to Hands-On STEM? #MakerEducation

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Cool take on MilliporeSigma’s ‘Curiosity Cube’ from Scientific American Blog.

Designing STEM outreach programs for K-12 classrooms often becomes a balancing act between ambitious goals and limited resources. Scientific equipment is just one kind of resource, but one that is unavailable to many schools. Time is a less obvious resource, but time away from classroom curriculum is becoming increasingly hard for teachers to justify with their administrators. And personal access to relevant experts – face time with actual scientists – is a resource that many programs don’t even get to add to their wish lists.

With countless approaches being taken around the country, it should come only as a slight surprise that at least one group would get a shipping container, paint it yellow, fill it with lab equipment, and then send it on a cross-country tour staffed with volunteer scientists. That is exactly what the MilliporeSigma did this year with its Curiosity Cube.

Finding the Roots of Graphic Novels in the Ancient World #ArtTuesday

via HYPERALLERGIC

Graphic novels have long been a powerful medium for speaking to the masses, even if they haven’t been referred to as such. The stories told through ancient art have spoken to more people than most ancient authors, and yet they have never received the same respect as writers such as Thucydides or Virgil. In part, this stems from the belief that the written word and literacy are two elements of a refined civilization. However, expanding out ideas of literacy to include a more graphic lexicon not only elevates comics, graphic novels, and other narrative art forms, it allows us to read the ancient world much more successfully.

Comics and graphic novels have a disputed origin story, the features of which depend on how exactly you define the medium. The etymology of the term dates back to the use of comical cartoon strips inserted into American newspapers in the late 19th century. However, if comics are broadly construed as a series of artistic panels that form graphic narratives, one could argue for their birth as early as the cave paintings of Paleolithic France.

Recent research on the use of graphic narratives in the ancient world has revealed their value to everyday people in the ancient Mediterranean — similar to modern audiences’ appreciation for such work. George Kovacs, a professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Trent University, has written extensively on the use of graphic storytelling in antiquity. He emphasizes that while people have often dismissed such storytelling as lower in status than the liberal arts of epic poetry or historical prose, visual works were crucial for building complex narratives that could stand in for alphabetic literacy.

See more!

Science of Pickles: Kosher Dill Current Activity #MakerEducation

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Fun activity from Exploratorium.edu.

You’ve turned your pickle into a battery! Here’s how it works:

Pickles contain salt water, which is rich in charged particles called ions. The aluminum and the graphite react with these ions, setting off an electrical tug-of-war between the two materials. The material with the stronger pull—aluminum—takes electrons away from the graphite, triggering a flow of electrons around the circuit. This current powers the buzzer.

Most common batteries—such as your car battery and the batteries inside your flashlight—work on the same principle that your pickle battery works on: They use two metals suspended in an ion-rich liquid or paste to separate electric charge, and create an electrical current around a circuit.