howtosmile blog

Wednesday, October 12 is National Fossil Day, cosponsored by the National Park Service (a howtosmile.org contributor) and the American Geosciences Institute. As part of Earth Science Week, National Fossil Day brings special events to national parks and many other sites around the country.

You may not have fossils right on hand, but you can still dig into hands-on fun and the thrill of fossil discoveries with howtosmile.org activities like

Dinosaur Dig—great for the youngest learners

Buried Bones—harden your own fossil dig site

Prehistoric Climate Change—measure ancient climate by fossil leaf shape

Dino Diets—match fossils to their foods, online

Finding Fossils—dig for fossils in cake!

Dinosaur hunter Matt Wedel likes getting his hands dirty when he’s unearthing fossils of the biggest creatures that ever tromped the Earth. He has discovered and dug out gargantuan fossil bones of dinosaurs known as the Sauropods, which included Supersaurus, a 50-60 ton vegetarian that was as long from head to tail as three school buses.

“Paleontology is a hands-on science. That’s one of the things I love about my job,” Wedel says. “You have to get your hands dirty, and the dirtier—the farther you get into the science.” 

Wedel has also helped turn his dinosaur-hunting into earth science education, with such materials as the Big Dinos Return web site from the Lawrence Hall of Science and the Exploring Dinosaur Bones two-part activity at howtosmile.org.

Drum roll, please…It’s the FREE SMILE Mobile App!!!

The FREE SMILE mobile app is here! The new app for iPhone and iPod touch lets you engage learners anywhere, any time, any age.

Download the howtosmile app on iTunes and search the entire SMILE collection—now more than 2,000 STEM activities. You can also filter your search, sample the Top 20 most popular activities, read the blog for fresh approaches, ideas and special events, and share favorite SMILE activities and posts with students, friends, family, teachers, and other educators.

Let us know how you use the SMILE mobile app in your museum or science center, during afterschool activities, at home, or in the classroom, so we can share your great ideas with the whole SMILE community!

Get two free tickets to visit a museum near you on Saturday, September 24, as part of Smithsonian magazine Museum Day.  You can search free museums by state and request your free tickets online. Tickets will be emailed to you. 

Competition is hot for this fall’s World Solar Challenge auto race in Australia and Solar Decathlon house buildathon in Washington, DC. Teams of university students across the U.S. and the world are sweating over final engineering details as they vie to create 2011’s fastest solar car or top solar house. 

The NASA/JPL Solar System Ambassadors Program (SSA), a nationwide network of space enthusiasts, is accepting applications from September 1 through 30. Highly motivated individuals have the chance to represent JPL as volunteer Ambassadors to the public for a one-year, renewable term beginning January 1, 2012. The announcement and application form are available at http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/ambassador/.

Young women who want to major in computing can apply for the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. The National Center for Women & Information Technology, a howtosmile.org activities contributor, plans to grow the award program to reach 10,000 young women and recognize 1,000 award recipients each year. Recipients receive long-term support for their computing interests through peer networking, mentorship, scholarships and access to opportunities. Applications open September 15, 2011 for the 2012 competition.  All high school young women residing in the U.S. are eligible to apply for regional awards if offered in their area, as well as the national award. Girls, parents and teachers should visit www.aspirationsaward.org for more information.

Do you have a favorite hands-on biology activity or experiment that you created, or that you adapted from a resource such as Howtosmile.org? You can enter it in the NIH K-12 LAB Challenge sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

NIH invites educators, students, scientists and anyone interested to submit entries to a new, national collection of activities about biology, biomedicine and bioengineering. Entries should underscore the scientific process of making a hypothesis, testing, and drawing conclusions. When contributing an activity or experiment adapted from an existing resource, the initial source must be noted.

Toni Legg makes lists—not just shopping lists, or chore lists, but science activity lists. Legg is an award-winning 7^th grade science teacher in Dallas, who created and mentors her middle school’s multigrade afterschool science club. She makes activity lists at howtosmile.org to help her plan more efficiently, and keep her teaching fun.

“When I search howtosmile.org, first I look for activities the kids are interested in,” she says. “Then I look at cost and time and other details. And I always think about what would be really FUN to do!”

That’s why setting up sites where kids and families can easily come to explore and build their own science and engineering projects is a critical goal of the Community Science Workshop (CSW) Network. Now howtosmile.org is helping the CSW Network set up an online collection of the best hands-on building activities created by CSW students and staff. 

“There is a rich collection of CSW activities that we want to put in a centralized database,” says Emilyn Green, CSW Network Coordinator.  “Some of the activities are ready to be gathered from different CSW sites and creators, and more will be developed in the future.”

This summer, SMILE catalogers began adding CSW activities to the collection of more than 2,000 STEM activities at howtosmile.org.