Here are my favorite references and links to science, electronics, physics, chemistry, and astronomy topics on the web. These links should be of interest to students of all ages in no particular order.
Richard Feynman (The best Physicist ever)
Joining one or more professional society will give you a sense of what a particular professions is all about. It's one helpful way of figuring out what to major in.
Ted (some content may be for mature audiences so check it out first)
Maker Faire (lots of really great talks)
Arduino (microprocessor kit to learn programming and make stuff move)
LEGOs
The Google Science Fair has started. The deadline for final submission is April 30, 2013. Some of the winning entries have been really cool. If interested you can find out more about it at the links below. The grand price is a $50,000 scholarship from Google. It's easy, just go to the website at the first link and press the start button/icon. Create a gmail account if you don't have one and then follow the directions. There will be a bunch of google+ hangouts that will help you along the way. The second link will give you some information about the fair.
Nanotechnology
Richard Feynman (The best Physicist ever)
- The Feynman lectures
- The Tuva Project
- The Vega lectures
- Sixty Symbols video on Feynman Diagrams
- QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter describes the subject with all most no math so that later courses in physics makes so much more sense. Wish I read it in high school and college.
Joining one or more professional society will give you a sense of what a particular professions is all about. It's one helpful way of figuring out what to major in.
- Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Society Student Activities
- IEEE TV
- America Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
- Engineers for Change (E4C)
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Materials Research Society (MRS)
- American Physical Society (APS)
- Deep Sky Videos
- Sixty Symbols
- Numberphile
- Periodic Table of Videos
- Test Tube
- Backstage Science
- Foodskey
- Computerphile
- Veritasium
- MinutePhysics
- Joanne Manaster
- Ben Krasnow
- Vihart
- US Science and Engineering Festival
- Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, 2nd Edition This is an excellent course and I wish I heard it in college. Check your local library for a copy.
Ted (some content may be for mature audiences so check it out first)
Maker Faire (lots of really great talks)
Arduino (microprocessor kit to learn programming and make stuff move)
- Arduino
- Arduino Cookbook
- Adafruit ARDX - v1.3 Experimentation Kit for Arduino (Uno R3) - v1.3 (nice kit $85)
- Ardino projects Check out this video about some of the cool things people are building with their Arduinos.
- Raspberry Pi Supercomputer This article is about how some folks in the UK build a supercomputer out of Raspberry Pi single board computers and LEGOs. The Raspberry Pi computer is a big brother to the Arduino Uno. Each Raspberry Pi runs the Linux operating system. I like that they stacked them up using LEGOs.
- Ringworld and Ringworld Engineers by Larry Niven
- Neuromancer by William Gibson
- The Foundation series Isaac Asimov
- 2001 A Space Odyssey Auther C. Clarke
- Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (series) Douglas Adams
- Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke
- The Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
- Jedi Academy Trilogy series books (available from the library most likely)
- Making Things Move by Dustyn Roberts
- What do you care what other people think? by Richard Feynman
- Yeager: An Autobiography by Chuck Yeager
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- The Heechee Saga by Frederik Pohl
- Dune (Original Series) by Frank Herbert
- How to read a schematic
- CircutLab Here's a website that will help you draw your schematics and share them with friends. It can simulate them too. Simulation will show you the voltage drops around circuit components like resistors and LEDs, and show how much current is flowing through the various legs of your circuit. The site is really useful for capturing your schematics even if you don't simulate.
- Squishy Circuits Make conductive and insulation dough and sculpt your circuits.
- Multisim Fee circuit simulator
- Electronic courses from Digikey and Design News
- Low High Tech
- A Kit-of-no-Parts
- Google Sketchup Draw things in 3D
- Inkscape A 2D drawing program similar to illustrator but free
- Blender 3D A rendering, animation, and modeling program — free
- Physion A 2D physics simulation program --free
- Algodoo A fun 2D physics program — $45.25. Try the demo.
- 7-zip A handy program for zipping and un-zipping files (free).
- Wolfram Alpha A freemium online math tool
- Mathematica (student version is $139.95 and is a great deal since a standard professional license is $2495).
- Mathematica Home
- Mathematica main page
- Mathematica Student
- 3D graphics workshop free
- EDU portal
- STEM
- Google Code University
LEGOs
- LEGOs in space Check out this video of astronaut Don Pettit using LEGOs for a neat science experiment on the space station.
- LEGO Builder This website that lets you build LEGO structures. It looks really cool.
- Zooniverse hunt for exoplanets or check the other cool citizen science projects
- NASA Wavelength
- SpaceX The link below will take you to an interview with the CEO of SpaceX who builds commercial rockets.
- SpaceShipTwo The link below will take you to an interesting article about the design, development, test, and manufacturing of the SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo. Both craft are made of carbon-fiber composite materials. The carbon fiber fabric does not make corners well so the both craft have very few corners. This is an excellent example of how your material drive your design
The Google Science Fair has started. The deadline for final submission is April 30, 2013. Some of the winning entries have been really cool. If interested you can find out more about it at the links below. The grand price is a $50,000 scholarship from Google. It's easy, just go to the website at the first link and press the start button/icon. Create a gmail account if you don't have one and then follow the directions. There will be a bunch of google+ hangouts that will help you along the way. The second link will give you some information about the fair.
Nanotechnology
- NanoDays Nanotechnology festival
- Nano.gov
- Nanooze Nanotechnology magazine for students
- Teachers Domain Nanotechnology materials for teachers
- Materials World Modules Nanoscience materials for teachers
- What can Nanotechnology do for you? WGBH production
- Nanoforum European nanotechnology education gateway
- The strange new world of Nanoscience, narrated by Stephen Fry
- Nanotechnology for k-12 students
- Nanotechnology resources for k-12 teachers
- Nanotechnology: Big things from a tiny world
- Energy: Big things from a tiny world
- How to make quantum dots
- NanoYOU
- ACS Nanotechnology educational links