Looking for a way to get middle-schoolers interested in math? The Math Explorer will do just that. The folks at the Exploratorium, who brought you the Science Explorer series, have created this book filled with games, puzzles, and science experiments to help kids develop math skills while having fun.

Best of all, you don’t have to be a math whiz yourself. Youth groups and families have tested each activity to ensure that it includes all of the information that you’ll need to help guide your group. Launch rockets, fly kites, play games, make cool things– and learn about math in the process!

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Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when devices that you’ve built start to talk to each other, things really start to get interesting. Through a series of simple projects, you’ll learn how to get your creations to communicate with one another by forming networks of smart devices that carry on conversations with you and your environment. Whether you need to plug some sensors in your home to the Internet or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other creations, Making Things Talk explains exactly what you need.

This book is perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest. Maybe you’re a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor weather conditions at several locations at once, or a sculptor who wants to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. Making Things Talk demonstrates that once you figure out how objects communicate — whether they’re microcontroller-powered devices, email programs, or networked databases — you can get them to interact.

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LearnOutLoud.com is your one-stop destination for audio and video learning. Browse over 15,000 educational audio books, MP3 downloads, podcasts, and videos–some of which are free to download.

LearnOutLoud.com’s mission is to promote the use of audio and video educational material for personal and professional development by turning ‘dead time’ (time spent commuting, exercising, doing chores, etc.) into ‘learning time.’ Most of us have at least a couple of hours each day where we could be learning a foreign language, deepening our spiritual or philosophical interests or learning about hundreds other different subjects.

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Easy-to-Play Reproducible Games That Teach Essential Math Skills.
Get kids fired up about math with this big collection of super-cool reproducible board games that build key skills: multiplication, division, fractions, probability, estimation, mental math, and more! Each game is a snap to make and so easy to play. Add them to your classroom routine and watch those test scores soar! Content is correlated with the NCTM Standards.

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Maths Links is a partnership between Gregory Bate and Maryanne Tipler. Maryanne and Greg decided to self publish the Links Mathematics series because the relatively small number of MYP students worldwide make it financially unviable for them to write through a larger publisher.

Maths Links has endeavoured to produce quality resources for the IB programme to aid both teachers and pupils to fully enter into the ethos and spirit of the IB programme. There is a vision to provide a full set of workbooks for the whole 5 years of MYP Mathematics.

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This site provides a free physics textbook written for the curious: it is entertaining, surprising and challenging on every page. With little mathematics, starting from observations of everyday life, the text explores the most fascinating parts of mechanics, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum theory and modern attempts at unification. The essence of these fields is summarized in the most simple terms. For example, the text presents modern physics as consequence of the notions of minimum entropy, maximum speed, maximum force, minimum change of charge and minimum action.

To enjoy curiosity even more, for each field of physics, the text presents the latest research results, the best animations, the best images, the most interesting physical puzzles and the most telling physical curiosities. It includes more than 500 animations and illustrations, 90 tables and 1600 challenges and puzzles.

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BookHive is a web site designed for children ages birth through twelve, their parents, teachers or anyone interested in reading about children’s books. Providing reader’s advisory service, this site contains hundreds of recommended book reviews in a variety of reading levels and interest areas. Parents may find special “parental notes” attached to some reviews that provide additional information about the book. Users can search for books by author, title, reading level, interest area, number of pages, and even favorite illustrator. Catch the latest buzz on books at the BookHive: Your Guide to Children’s Literature & Books.

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Cambridge University Press is offering “The Parents Guide to the IB Diploma“, an essential 30-page document guide for parents written specifically to address questions and concerns over the IB diploma. This guide as well as IB Diploma Cross-Reference Grids are available for free to download here.

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To produce life-long learners, we need to show our children that learning is not just something that they get graded on or that only happens during certain hours of the day or certain times of the year. We need to help them hang on to the natural joy of learning that every child is born with, to help them see that learning new things is fun, and to help them realize that learning can take place anywhere and at anytime.

Fun Books has put together catalog of books, games and other materials to help you in your efforts to produce life-long learners. Good luck and remember to have FUN!

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Worried about how much time your children spend playing video games? Don’t be, advises Johnson—not only are they learning valuable problem-solving skills, they’d probably do better on an IQ test than you or your parents could at their age. Go ahead and let them watch more television, too, since even reality shows can function as “elaborately staged group psychology experiments” to stimulate rather than pacify the brain. With the same winning combination of personal revelation and friendly scientific explanation he displayed in last year’s Mind Wide Open, Johnson shatters the conventional wisdom about pop culture as pabulum, showing how video games, television shows and movies have become increasingly complex. Furthermore, he says, consumers are drawn specifically to those products that require the most mental engagement, from small children who can’t get enough of their favorite Disney DVDs to adults who find new layers of meaning with each repeated viewing of Seinfeld. Johnson lays out a strong case that what we do for fun is just as educational in its way as what we study in the classroom (although it’s still worthwhile to encourage good reading habits, too). There’s an important message here for every parent—one they should hear from the source before savvy kids (especially teens) try to take advantage of it.
Agent, Lydia Wills at Paradigm. (May)
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All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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