Zydeco Inquiry vs Science 8

Now kids can do science inquiry on-the-go in fun and engaging ways! Centered on an open-ended question, this iPad app comes will all the tools to help kids engage in planning scientific investigations, collecting and annotating multimedia data from anywhere, and analyzing that data to create scientific explanations. This app helps motivate kids to do science by promoting learning with others, collecting data that is interesting to them, and allowing ownership over their data. This app is ideal for inquisitive kids of all ages, class field trips, summer camps, and homeschoolers! Educators at the University of Michigan and throughout Southeast Michigan have designed Zydeco. For more information, visit http://zydeco.soe.umich.edu/

These are a few tools for helping visualize middle school science. I spent a year volunteer tutoring middle school (grade 8) science students. While doing that, I created an app with a few simple demonstrations and practice tests to help them. The modules included were those that illustrated or helped practice the concepts my students had trouble either understanding or remembering. The test module contains every test the students took. Hot Molecules is an interactive demonstration of the effects of heating and cooling on molecular activity. Will it float? is an interactive lab simulation for determining density. Questions is a test-practice module for all subjects thus far covered (phase changes, heat transfer, density, atoms, molecules, reactions, atmosphere). Buckets is a category builder to help understand grouping of like things on arbitrary traits Which is Bigger? is an interactive statistics exploration, showing how much overlap there is between categories and how important sample size is. How do population dynamics of the species populations in a food web interact? Play with the simulation and ecological and human-introduced factors. Watch out for natural disasters! Other demonstrations and test topics are added periodically.