GeekDad Daily Deal: Supercharged Science for Kids
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Continue ReadingGet Supercharged Science for Kids: 98% off!
Continue ReadingOne of my favorite things to do, as a homeschool mom, is to pair a fantastic book with an educational game… and I have the perfect game to pair with this book.
Continue ReadingScience is awesome. And also gross.
Continue ReadingThe author and mom behind Fun at Home with Kids is full of good ideas. We’ve been trying out three books since the beginning of the summer, and this WAHM swears by them.
Continue ReadingHere’s a textbook from a Hogwarts Potions class, which, remarkably enough, can also be used as a textbook for fun chemistry experiments in your own Muggle home.
Continue ReadingHere are three great picture book finds with science superstars who know how to have fun while learning about the scientific method. (Didn’t think that was possible, did you?)
Continue ReadingWill patience be a lost skill in our kids’ on-demand lives?
Continue ReadingLearn how to extract fruit DNA at home!
Continue ReadingOn a lazy summer day, you can take the time to watch ice melt in these simple experiments for young children.
Continue ReadingMost will have heard the (sometimes mutilated) quote of Thomas Edison; “I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work.” I don’t know if he actually …
Continue ReadingThere are now three homeschooling parents (Russ , Jenny and me) on the GeekDad team, and I know many other homeschoolers love the site. Recently a commenter asked if there were any “other geeky homeschooling blogs” out there. Here are …
Continue ReadingConsider this the deep winter version of the Diet Coke-Mentos experiment: Take one very cold day. In our case, it was -2F when I awoke, although the temperature sensor (on the warm side of the house) was reading 8 above when we did this. We went to the back, where it was still shady and […]
Continue ReadingA week and a half ago, Wisconsin saw the coldest temperatures in a decade. For several days we never made it above zero (Fahrenheit) or out of the low single digits and had double-digit below-zero temperatures at night. We’ve warmed up a bit since then, but the extreme cold weather brought some interesting results. We’re […]
Continue ReadingI recently purchased a Cosmic Jet Racer kit for my 11-year-old son. He enjoys cars and science, so I figured that this would be a fun, educational toy, which (as it says on the box) demonstrates Newton’s Laws of Motion. Unfortunately, what this kit better demonstrated was frustration and lack of interest by my child. […]
Continue ReadingI got an alert about these Scholastic Harry Potter science kits from a homeschooling mom who recommends them highly. According to the seller’s website, Home and Family: The Harry Potter Activity Kits have been honored by The Oppenheim Toy Portfolio and Parenting For High Potential Magazine! They are a great item for any fan or […]
Continue ReadingThis is some space science we can get behind here at GeekDad. Students from Parkside and Colleridge schools helped to launch four teddies wearing space suits that they had designed. The teddies reached an altitude of just over 30 km and their temperatures were logged throughout the flight to see how they fared in the […]
Continue ReadingDavid Hahn was a geeky kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit during the early 1990′s. Like most geeky kids, he was socially awkward and had an intense fascination with very narrow subject matter; in his case, science. But when David began working on his Atomic Energy Merit Badge, his rather obsessive pursuits nearly […]
Continue ReadingWilliam Yuan, a seventh-grader from Portland, OR, developed a three-dimensional solar cell that absorbs UV as well as visible light. The combination of the two might greatly improve cell efficiency. William’s project earned him a $25,000 scholarship and a trip to the Library of Congress to accept the award, which is usually given out for […]
Continue ReadingGood news for geeks: New episodes of MythBusters start tonight! Adam, Jamie, and the rest of the team will be testing such diverse myths as tenderizing meat with explosives, fainting goats, and whether the first moon landing could have been faked. I’m particularly looking forward to that last one, partly because I’ve always loved space […]
Continue ReadingMy wife threw a surprise 40th Birthday party for me, a month early. Cake and balloons were all over the place so I was having fun. As the Geeky dads stood around, we looked at the helium tank and wondered how many helium-filled balloons it would take to lift a toddler. We were purely concerned […]
Continue ReadingA few years ago I started finding sticks around the yard covered with strange messages that looked like they had been seared right into the wood. It turned out that the unknown words were names sacred to the world of Bionicles – and that one of his friends had taught my son how to set […]
Continue ReadingOur friend Aaron Rowe over at Wired Science sends along this story for our readers: California has decreed that genetic testing companies must conduct their work in CLIA-certified labs, but biologists know that some experiments are best suited for a kitchen. Writing for The Spittoon blog, Erin Cline explained that some 23andMe employees, mostly on […]
Continue ReadingIn the spirit of the awesome maverick science-fair project[1], I give you Daniel Burd and his amazing plastic-eating microbes. "Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," he said. "One day, I got tired of it […]
Continue ReadingWe all remember doing science fair projects back in our school days. For my part, I recall creating a working two-way combination speaker/microphone with some wire and the cores dug out of big old flashlight battery (what a mess, and I’m scared to know what toxics I was exposed to). Well, this week in Atlanta, […]
Continue ReadingOne year ago, you were reading this by Jeffrey McManus: From KidScientist.com, the no-nonsense science blog for kids Principal Investigator: CelesteResearch Assistant: Jeffrey Date: April 21, 2007 This weekend we decided to do another experiment with a science kit. This time we used a Snap Circuits Jr. electricity set to create a motorized fan. To […]
Continue ReadingOne year ago, you were reading this on GeekDad, by Kevin Kelly: Crystal Radios are an old standby of GeekDads. For the early mists of time GeekDads have been showing kids how to pull radio stations from thin air with the barest snips from the basement. Here are some very simple radios that you can […]
Continue ReadingI was clicking through a collection of photos I’ve downloaded from my camera, but hadn’t quite gotten around to sorting around yet, when I came across this picture. It may not look like much, but it sparked a bit of a commotion last Fall. This photo is of the remnants of a suspected spontaneous combustion. […]
Continue ReadingOnce year ago, you were reading this on GeekDad: Which Materials Conduct Heat Best? From Kid Scientist, the no-nonsense science blog for kidsPrincipal Investigator: Celeste McManusResearch Assistant: Jeffrey McManus Over the weekend we picked up a Ein-O Science Kit at a local game store. On Sunday we did one of the experiments in the box. The […]
Continue ReadingI haven’t been able to verify this at all, but if it’s true it might be the Best Science Fair Project Ever. Ten-year-old (at the time) William T. Wood, fresh from his 2002 science fair win for a project on silica aerogels, he decided to kick it up a notch and see if silica aerogels […]
Continue ReadingA gigantic spot, large enough to swallow the Earth in one gulp, slides into view on the edge of the Sun’s surface. It creeps over a period of days across the Sun’s visible disk, growing ominously. As it nears the Sun’s center a massive solar flare erupts from the spot, triggering a coronal mass ejection […]
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