Posts on “ Science ”

The world lost a true pioneer yesterday.  Sally Ride, who flew through space in 1983 died of pancreatic cancer.  Though most well known as an astronaut, watch the BrainPOP animation to learn more about this dynamic and brilliant woman. Today we honor Ms. Ride by featuring her biographical animation for all to see.

Guts and Bolts?  It may sound gross, but it sure is fun!  Our newest BrainPOP developed game on GameUp leads students as they help Moby construct a cyborg Tim with a combination of organic tissue and re-purposed household objects.  Students will learn about the human body while arranging and connecting organs and systems into their complex configurations. This 11 level game encourages players to apply the scientific method while exploring the circulatory system, respiratory system, and digestive system.  A number of the movies in our Body Systems Unit, especially the Circulatory System and Digestive System topics, can assist students in successfully completing the game.  We’ve even created a lesson plan that outlines how to use the game in your classroom and includes some valuable teaching resources.  

8th Grade Science teacher, guest blogger and  superstar BrainPOP Educator Rachael Tarshes had some creative strategies for introducing game based learning in her classroom this year! Read about her strategies below, or better yet, if you’re attending the ISTE conference in San Diego, check out her students’ presentation at the ISTE playground on the morning of Monday June 25th. It wasn’t until March of this year that I was made aware of the new roll out at BrainPOP – online games! GameUP currently offers games in Math, Health, Science, and History all for free and linked to BrainPOP videos and lesson plans. At the end of the school year, I was ready to start incorporating games into my science class but I had to figure out a way to make it engaging.  I decided to get a little creative. My goal was to give my students the time and opportunity to play and evaluate some of the science games. This would help me decide which games to incorporate into my 8th grade instruction and which ones to highlight to the other grade-level science teachers for their potential use as well. Taking a hint from Tim and Moby, I started this… Read the Rest»

With all the hoopla about virtual experiences, there is still nothing like a real life, in person, field trip.  On May 31st, students from BrainPOP Educator Elizabeth Gitzen’s 5th grade class were welcomed to the the offices of JASONlive in Ashburn VA. The event?   A live webcast with NASA Systems Engineer Tracy Drain.  During the webcast, students from all around the world sent in questions and participated through interactive polling.  However, the 20 students in Ms. Gitzen’s class watched from the JASONlive screening room, just down the hall from the production studio.  After the webcast, Tracy and Patty, the host, joined the class for a personal Q&A, and students took a behind the scenes tour of the studio.  It was Interesting to not only hear the life and story of a successful NASA systems engineer,  but to visit the studio and observe the effort and planning that goes into creating such a substantial production.  We saw outlines, scripts, green screens, and computers displaying pre-recorded video questions and interactive polls. The event is archived and available at the JASONlive website, after viewing you may want to learn more about Jupiter and the projects Tracy is involved with.  Take a look at our… Read the Rest»

Ayiti is the latest addition to GameUp in conjunction with Global Kids! We’re really excited to share this unique game with you. Ayiti is a turn based, strategy game that challenges players to manage a family of five in rural Haiti, and keep them all healthy, educated and out of debt. At the start of the game, the player chooses a main goal for his/her family: achieve education, make money, stay healthy, or maintain happiness. During the course of the game, the player encounters unexpected events and must make many decisions that contribute to or detract from achieving the chosen goal. Ayiti corresponds with our movie topic pages on Budgets, Fighting Hunger, Money, and United Nations. It’s great for project-based learning because of the inter-disciplinary aspects. Use our Ayiti lesson plan to get ideas for elaborating on the science, social studies, math, and health topics covered in the game. After game play, there are lots of ways you can help students make a difference in the world. More details about each one are found on the Ayiti website (including the names and contact information for the individuals and organizations listed below). Write a letter to your Congressional or Senate Representatives to find out what they are doing… Read the Rest»

There’s a new free science game available on BrainPOP’s GameUp! Landform Detectives is a game which functions as a “digital lab” in which students take a fascinating virtual trip through the processes of geology. Students will look at mountains, valleys, rivers, canyons, and glaciers in a whole new way as they solve the puzzle of how they got to be that way and how long it took to happen. Landform Detectives is a fun way to allow students to explore and compare the processes of weathering and erosion. They’ll analyze how weathering and erosion affects Earth’s changing face and how it forms the soil that supports life on Earth. Students will also examine landforms and identify the processes that may have created them. You can use this lesson at any time during your geology study. Younger students, English Language Learners, and others who need basic background knowledge on the topic may want to explore BrainPOP Jr.’s Landforms and/or Slow Land Changes movies. Use the variety of related BrainPOP topics to help develop student understanding of plate tectonics and the earth’s structure: Continents of the World, Earth, Earth’s Structure, Erosion, Geography Themes, Geologic Time, and Plate Tectonics. You can also tie in social studies connections by exploring the topics on… Read the Rest»

  Things get a little weird this month on BrainPOP with June’s spotlight: Weird Science.  We’ve included everything from Bruises to Bats to Boogers.  Yuck!  Explore those strange carnivorous plants and follow up by playing Crazy Plant Shop, available on GameUp.  You’ll find content on creatures from under the sea, including giant squid and cnidarians, as well as a great extension activity to learn about the effects of an oil spill on the ocean.  We’ve even included some topics that are literally out of this world such as black holes and aliens, which has a related game on GameUp. K-3 topics include Fossils, Camouflage, and Ocean Habitats. June’s additional spotlight on Grammar includes topics that cover grammar, punctuation, and fun with words.  Help students put the brakes on those run-on sentences and polish their writing with the correct use of hyphens and dashes, semicolons and capitalization.  Encourage them to add some variety to their work with our Antonyms, Synonyms, and Homonyms movie while getting to the root of their words with the Etymology movie.  The BrainPOP Jr. spotlight offers Possessive Nouns, Tenses, Capital and Lowercase, Types of Sentences, and much more.    

Today, we’re down in Loudoun Virginia joining a group of students (and beloved BrainPOP Advisor Adina Popa) for a special “behind-the-scenes” experience at The JASON Project studio during today’s JASON live event webcast with NASA Systems Engineer Tracy Drain! After watching the 10:30am live events from a viewing room, we will have an opportunity to see how JASON’s Live Events are produced and distributed, check out the 3-camera green screen studio and the control room where the program is directed and switched. Most excitingly, we will meet our guest expert Tracy Drain and JASON Live’s program host, Patty Kim, in person and some of the JASON production team members that make it all happen! Tracy and Patty will host a special 20-minute Q&A session with the class.  Please follow along our livetweeting with the BrainPOP Though you can’t be with us at the studio, you can still join us for any of the four live events with Tracy at 10:30am, 1:30pm, 4:30pm, and 6:30pm Eastern. Each program will last approximately 45 minutes. You’ll have a chance to learn the physics that Tracy has had to master to succeed in her job, find out about the career path she followed to become a mechanical engineer, ask her questions,… Read the Rest»

Well, no, not really,  but two of our recently introduced topics to BrainPOP’s ever expanding library seem to reference everyone’s favorite “good man.”  Based on Bailey’s letter requesting an explanation of Cerebral Palsy, Tim’s answer touches on the various neurological, muscular and affective effects on people with the condition. Be sure to watch all the way to the end of the baseball themed movie for Tim’s deadpan “good grief!” You’ll find another “good greif” moment, beginning the Railroad History movie as Moby slams a locomotive into Tim’s house! Fortunately nobody is hurt so settle in to hear about engineering progress from horse drawn wagon ways, to bullet trains.  We also learn about the cultural impact that came with the worldwide growth of the railroad industry from the Transcontinental Railroad to the Orient Express.    Though Charlie Brown isn’t really on BrainPOP, his presence influences all kinds of animation, including our own!  

There’s a new math and science game available on GameUp! In Refraction, students in grades 4-8 have the opportunity to explore light refraction and apply knowledge of fractional concepts during online gameplay. Refraction is an online puzzle game in which the player must partition lasers in order to power spaceships containing various animals who have gotten stuck in space. These animal spaceships all require different fractions of the lasers, and the player is given several pieces that split and bend the lasers to reach the animals and satisfy these requirements. These mechanics can be used to teach many important fraction concepts, such as equal partitioning, addition, multiplication, mixed numbers, improper fractions, and common denominators. Check out the demonstration video below to see the game in action: You can use BrainPOP’s Light, Fractions, and Refraction and Diffraction movies to help your students build background knowledge prior to game play. A complete lesson plan for the game is also available on BrainPOP, or visit The Center for Game Science to see more related resources.