The Association for Science Education's "schoolscience.co.uk" and Martin Rapley, presenter of "The Big Bug Experience," are again running the Great Bug Hunt in 2012. Simply identify a habitat, explore and discover the bugs that live there, photograph or draw them and record findings--it's that simple. The winner will be the…

Thermal cameras are useful tools for use in scientific investigation and for teaching scientific concepts to students in the classroom. Demonstrations of scientific phenomena can be greatly enhanced visually by the use of this cutting-edge technology. (Contains 7 figures.)

This original pedagogical study captured three preservice teachers' experiences using visual literacy strategies as an approach to teaching English language learners (ELLs) science academic language. The following research questions guided this study: (1) What are the experiences of preservice teachers' use of visual literacy to teach science…

The multiple-reflection photograph in Fig. 1 was taken in an elevator on board the cruise ship Norwegian Jade in March 2008. Three of the four walls of the elevator were mirrored, allowing me to see the combination of two standard arrangements of plane mirrors: two mirrors set at 90 degrees to each other and two parallel mirrors. Optical phenomena…

Casio Computer Co., Ltd., brought in 2008 high-speed video to the consumer level with the release of the EXILIM Pro EX-F1 and the EX-FH20 digital camera.[R] The EX-F1 point-and-shoot camera can shoot up to 60 six-megapixel photos per second and capture movies at up to 1200 frames per second. All this, for a price of about US $1000 at the time of…

Using first principles, a theoretical equation for the maximum and actual muzzle velocities for a pneumatic cannon was recently derived. For a fixed barrel length, this equation suggests that the muzzle velocity can be enhanced by maximizing the product of the initial pressure and the volume of the propellant gas and decreasing the projectile…

Insects really need no introduction. They have lived on earth much longer than humans and vastly outnumber people and all other animal species combined. People encounter them daily in their houses and yards. Yet, when children want to investigate insects, books can help them start their explorations. "Paleo Bugs" carries readers back to the time…

The activities described here allow students to explore the concept of diffusion with the use of common equipment such as computers, webcams and analysis software. The procedure includes taking a series of digital pictures of a container of water with a webcam as a dye slowly diffuses. At known time points, measurements of the pixel densities…

Focusing on two bilingual children experiencing learning difficulties, I explore the scientific representations these students generate in an afterschool programme where they have opportunities to exercise agency. In the programme, children use a digital camera to document science in their lives and engage in conversations about the products they…

In their article "Measuring the Flight Speed of Fire Bombers from Photos: An In-Class Exercise in Introductory Kinematics," Greg W. Lowe and Eric Ayars remind us that photographs have always had physics hidden in them if you look hard enough. Since digital photos are embedded with EXIF data, vastly more physics can be explored with them. EXIF…

This study examines how three elementary teachers refer to pictorial models (photographs, drawings, and cartoons) during science read-alouds. While one teacher used realistic photographs for the purpose of visually verifying facts about crystals, another employed analytical diagrams as heuristic tools to help students visualize complex target…

There are many ways to visualize flow, either for laminar or turbulent flows. A very convincing way to show laminar and turbulent flows is by the perturbations on the surface of a beam of water coming out of a cylindrical tube. Photographs, taken with a flash, show the nature of the flow of water in pipes. They clearly show the difference between…

In the western half of the United States, fire bombers are not an uncommon sight. During the "fire season," which can extend from June through November, these specially modified aircraft are used to drop fire retardant chemicals or water on wildfires. It can be an entertaining and instructive classroom exercise to use pictures of these…

Stellar parallax is a concept that is dealt with infrequently in the high school classroom other than by qualitative consideration of stereoscopic parallax and argument by analogy. Use of stellar parallax for distance determination can be difficult for students to understand without some type of hands-on experience to explore the concept. Thus,…

Based on a photograph, the density of a watermelon floating in a pail of water is estimated with different levels of simplification--with and without consideration of refraction and three-dimensional effects. The watermelon was approximated as a sphere. The results of the theoretical estimations were verified experimentally. (Contains 6 figures.)