Valerie Coskrey's Classroom Tools and Ideas

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One of my favorite genres for relaxation reading is science fiction, especially those books written by scientists and engineers that fall under the category "hard science fiction." I have long believed that good science fiction is useful for motivating students to read. Consequently, when the Tapped In Science K-20 group moderator sent this link out in the newsletter, I knew I had to share it here.

http://fathom.lib.uchicago.edu/2/21701757/

What is so special about this site? Michael Le Barbera has written several lesson examples that use science fiction movies to motivate students to use science and math. He presents a discussion of and graphics for teaching the geometry of the ratios of length, area and volume when objects are changed in size: scaled up or down. This is followed by descriptions of using scenes of several science fiction movies to teach about the implications of changing the size of, say, organisms. One use of the movies is to focus the students perceptions on the misconceptions about the science concepts associated with scale.

Take a virtual tour of a university campus.

Other sources of science fiction lists and ideas on the internet include

a site that collects science fiction links and jokes,
a blog with list of 100 Valuable Science Fiction Books from one man's blog
numerous readers' booklists of all kinds of science fiction favorites at Amazon.com.

These lists are generated based on the page you are viewing. Try the keyword search for an author, and there is often a booklist associated with the genre in which the author writes or with a series that that he/she developed.

my science fiction book list that I recommend for youth and use in teaching, complete with links to my lessons and ideas about using science fiction in teaching science. (This list is in the form of books to buy.)
my list of science fiction videos that I recommend for use in teaching science. (Ditto about the form.)

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