I posted about Sumo Paint a while ago (2011), but the same company has expanded their applications in the intervening time and can now be found at Sumo - Creative Tools for Curious Minds. In addition to the expanding featues of their Paint program, they also now have Tunes, 3D, Code, Photo, Audio, Video and Pixel tools. They have a student discount of only $19 per year versus the regular price of $9 per month. Unleash your creativity.
Continuing part three of the "Ultimate List of Educational Websites" and my efforts ot make it browsable and clickable, we move on to one of my favorite subjects.
Music theory sounds complicated, but at it's most basic it's the simple science of what music sounds good to most people and why. Some of it is learned and certainly some of it is cultural.
There are several times throughout the year where Google commemorates events with special doodles that replace their logo on the home page. Some of these are interactive, animated slideshows. And some are actual video games that you can play. These aren't usually archived together in the same place, but they were promoted this past month and I've collected all of them here for reference.
Use simple coding commands for turns and repeats to guide a bouncing rabbit through simple maps to pick up treat. Learn the basics of coding while having bouncy fun.
Learn to play the sport of cricket with a team of crickets vs. a team of snails. A simple clicking game where you time your swing using mouse clicks. Aim for the fences!
Music is not limited to the world of sound. There exists a music of the visual world.
--Oscar Fischinger
Click around to make your own visual music composition. There are a number of interesting musical and percussion options.
Learn to play the theremin with Clara Rockmore! A theremin is a special musical instrument that you don't have to touch to play. It uses static electricity to measure the position of your hands and you control the volume and pitch via distance.
Launch a variety of garden gnomes through the air and plant flowers along the path. This is a simple tap game where you time the launch of the swinging trebuchet.
Hot spicy peppers are measured in Scoville units. Learn more and toss some ice cream. Can you take the heat with inventor of the Scoville scale, Wilbur Scoville?!
Lotería is a Mexican board game of chance. Let's learn how to play!
Swipe away in this Halloween game. Help the black cat cast spells by waving their wand.
To celebrate the birth of Hip Hop music, learn to DJ your own mix with turntables & legendary beats...
Play the classic game of PAC-MAN!
I wanted to share this song from Invader Zim that we all know and love, but it would appear that the video cannot be embedded traditionally. So go to YouTube to see it in full.
Doom, doom-doom-doom, doom, doom-doom, doom-da-du-doo-doooom!
Okay, here is a fair warning. This is pretty spooky.
Despite the fact that space is a vacuum, it is remarkable to note that the planets and the sun do make sound --even our own planet. We would never hear these sounds with our natural ears, but special equipment can pick it up and reprocess it into a range our ears CAN hear and this is the result. Here's the description from YouTube.
Fascinating recording of Jupiter sounds (electromagnetic "voices") by NASA-Voyager. The complex interactions of charged electromagnetic particles from the solar wind, planetary magnetosphere etc. create vibration "soundscapes". It sounds very interesting, even scary. Jupiter is mostly composed of hydrogen and helium. The entire planet is made of gas, with no solid surface under the atmosphere. The pressures and temperatures deep in Jupiter are so high that gases form a gradual transition into liquids which are gradually compressed into a metallic "plasma" in which the molecules have been stripped of their outer electrons. The winds of Jupiter are a thousand metres per second relative to the rotating interior. Jupiter's magnetic field is four thousand times stronger than Earth's, and is tipped by 11° degrees of axis spin. This causes the magnetic field to wobble, which has a profound effect on trapped electronically charged particles. This plasma of charged particles is accelerated beyond the magnetosphere of Jupiter to speeds of tens of thousands of kilometres per second. It is these magnetic particle vibrations which generate some of the sound you hear on this recording.
There are other video clips available with the sounds of other planets. I need to reiterate that some of them sound so spooky that I hesitated to post them here. But they only sound scary because of the processing and the fact that these are sounds we would not normally hear. There are entire CDs worth of these sound effect recordings.
Need a calculator for back to school?
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We have previously heard about Yahooligans! The Web Guide for Kids. But Yahooligans! has become Yahoo! Kids (beta). They still have most of the best stuff for kids but are now new and improved.
