Ever wanted to find a list of topics covered in the show Good Eats?

Good Eats Fan Page

This lists both scientific and nonscientific themes covered in the episodes. Handy if you want to find an episode that covers a topic you'd like to use to enhance your classroom lesson.

Editor's Note: The link to this site may change. If the link is dead, please report it to me, and I'll try to fix it.

Note 2: Still not getting paid by anyone for mentioning the site. :)

Celebrating 15 Years with the 15 Classroom Activities Greatest Hits from the Journal of Chemical Education

Free activities! These are written so you can use them in the classroom as soon as you've gathered the materials for the experiments. Many of them are quite clever in their use of materials to demonstrate a chemical property. 

Celebrating 15 Years with the 15 Greatest Hits, 1997-2012 September 2012 marks fifteen years since the first classroom activity, "A Refrigerator Magnet Analog of Scanning-Probe Microscopy" was published in the Journal of Chemical Education. 112 Activities later - readers are still finding these activities attractive and useful; with their use of materials available from local grocery and hardware stores, wide range of chemical concepts covered, a ready-to-photocopy-and-use format, and the knowledge that each one had been tested by fellow teachers. Many of the activities require a subscription to JCE, but others do not. Here's a link to more information about the 15 greatest hits. http://pubs.acs.org/page/jceda8/15years.html

Medicine safety: Are these caplets the same or different?

Not the best photo, but do you think that these caplets are the same or are there differences? What observations could you make to determine if they are the same or different? The answer will be revealed soon.

This was a little thought experiment I came up with while I was at the Hoosier Association of Science Teachers Conference.   :)

Sent from my Windows Phone

How to turn a room into a camera....don't you want to try it?

Turn a room into a camera: Cool optics experiment idea

This could be such a cool optics experiment in a classroom. I could imagine getting a few large boxes (refrigerator size or bigger), taping them together, then creating the set up as described. You could try different lenses to see how that changes the image as well as their suggestion to change the aperture, or the amount of light, that goes through the lens. it would be neat to set it up so the lens could pick up the movements in the school, like in a cafeteria, so you could have a video camera set up to capture the images over time, then do a time elapse of the video to speed up the motion vs. time.

Editor's note: When I get excited about an idea, I tend to write really long run-on sentences. Sorry.
Note 2: I haven't been paid by anyone to share this idea or websites associated with it.
Note 3: I think I may have to build one myself. This could become a very cool traveling experiment for family science nights. The key will be to 1) get extraneous light blocked out, and 2) make it durable, and 3) make it easy to assemble and disassemble.