ResearchBuzz

If you’re a teacher and you’re looking for resources to teach engineering to pre-high school kids, you might want to check out TeachEngineering, a new library that, according to its home page, “provides teacher-tested, standards-based engineering content for K-12 teachers to use in science and math classrooms.” It’s available at http://www.teachengineering.org/.

There are two ways to go through the material first. First you can browse the material by standard (there are some state educational standards and what I assume to be federal standards.) From there you can also narrow down your search by grade level, topic, and standard number.

If you’re not a teacher you might want to search instead, which allows for either a simple keyword search or an advanced search that additionally allows you to filter by grade level, time required, and even by group size and cost per group member. (You can also browse all the lessons at http://www.teachengineering.org/browse_lessons.php — currently there are 163. There are 327 activities listed at http://www.teachengineering.org/browse_activities.php. )

I did a keyword search for rocket and got two lists of results: 5 results for lessons and 9 results for activities.

Lessons had a summary at the top of the page that included grade level, engineering connection, and overview. A more extensive description/plan included educational standards, points for a classroom discussion, background and resources for teachers, vocabulary, and lesson closure. There are also references. Activities were similar but since they are, you know, ACTIVITIES, they also include a materials list, safety issues, troubleshooting tips, and photographs of both materials and activities. Both lessons and activities had a place for reviews but none of the lessons/activities I looked at had reviews yet.

To save and organize the lesson plans in which you’re interested, you may register for a MyTE account. It’s free and requires some personal information (name, city, state, occupation.) You do not have to have a MyTE account to use the site however. Lots of great, well-documented stuff here, which I can see as useful for teachers or homeschoolers. I’m now officially jealous that I did not get to make Alka-Seltzer rockets in science class.

It’s back-to-school time, also Google Code Jam Time.

You can now log into Blogger with your Google account. Is this new?

Good grief, what’s with all the zero-day PowerPoint exploits?!

A Firefox extension to obscure your searching trails with search noise: http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2006-08-21-n28.html.

Google Base has a data API: http://googlebase.blogspot.com/2006/08/new-google-base-data-api.html .

Yahoo now has an API available for its Yahoo Answers service. The Answers service itself is at http://answers.yahoo.com/, while the API is available at http://developer.yahoo.com/answers/.

The Answers services vary a lot in how useful they are. I don’t like Yahoo Answers so much because there’s a lot of stuff you have to wade through if you’re doing any kind of serious research. I’m not a big fan of Google Answers either. The forced delineation between questioners and answerers feels strange. (I know you don’t have to be an answerer to make a comment on a question.) On the other hand, the money barrier means that the signal to noise ratio is much better.

I find of all the Ask-the sites out there I tend to prefer the Librarian/Reference type sites (it’s scary how many states now have Ask-A-Librarian services) and Ask Metafilter. AskMeFi because it tends to have interesting questions and thoughtful answers. (And occasionally, granted, whacked-out questions and lunatic answers.) Many of these sites also have archives of asked questions, making them fun to mine even when current questions aren’t interesting.

Question: If I made a search engine just for the domains of “Ask-An-X” type sites, would anybody use it?

Back to the Yahoo Answers API. The API allows developers to access Yahoo Answers content in several ways, including searching for questions and answers by keyword, search by a specific Yahoo Answers user, and search according to category. You will need an application ID to make use of the API, and you will be limited to 5,000 queries per IP per day per API. There’s a demo query box on the developer page that you can play with a little bit.