If you’ve been looking to shed your textbook in favor of some technology and scientific investigation, an iPad might be just what you’ve been looking for. Yes, you can have books on the iPad (in fact, there are many “reader” apps, including Apple’s iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle app, and a boatload of others). In fact, some of the most engaging examples of “books” on the iPad are interactive science resources such as “The Elements” and “Our Choice.” But, the range of apps available in science, combined with form factor and ease of use of most iOS tools, makes the iPad an amazing tool for scientific investigation and learning. I wish I could show you all of the amazing science you can explore with the tens of thousands of science specific apps available in the iTunes store, but this journal isn’t long enough, and I don’t want to upset our wonderful editor. So, here are a few apps that can change the way kids learn science.
these objects in greater detail, including information on how far away they are, how large they are, or who discovered them first. Most of these tools are open-ended, allowing students to explore on their own in real time. Use them at night, and the internal GPS, compass, and gyroscopes let you superimpose constellations and data over what you are actually looking at. This kind of heads-up display of information allows students to explore the night sky (or daytime sky) in ways that were only possible through hours of memorization and observation before (which, for 98% of our students, simply would not happen).
As if on cue while writing this, an earthquake shook much of the east coast of the United States. While I was a little too far away to use Seismometer, an app that uses the built in gyroscope to show even the most minute movement of the iPad as seismic waves on a digital tickertape, I was able to pull up real time earthquake data from USGS sources with Quakewatch, a beautiful app that maps incoming earthquake and volcano information from all over the world’s major seismological databases. But even this data may be a bit confusing for students, as it doesn’t really tell much about why such quakes happen, or how this 5.8 trembler centered in Virginia might be different than the western quakes, or the Guatemalan earthquake that occurred this same day. For that, we need to rely on some of the reference apps such as Folds and Faults HD, which provides animated diagrams that helped to explain how a thrust fault is different from a reverse fault, and so on.
StarWalk for iPad, from Vito Technology, can superimpose labels, the horizon, and constellations as you hold the iPad to the night sky to find out what you are looking at. It can do the same during the day, making for classroom “viewing” of the stars.
Making Earth Science Accessible
If you want kids to learn science through inquiry (rather than just reading about it), the Earth sciences are often the most challenging to explore in a classroom. It is hard for students to explore ideas about earthquakes, stars, or climate because there is no easy way to explore these concepts firsthand. This is often where the science curriculum resides in a book or video.
But, the iPad can change that. I used to tell students to go out and look at the night sky and try to note where certain stars might be or to observe the moon to figure out what phase it was in, and what it might look like tomorrow or next week. But, I could only hope that they would do this, and I could not realistically have them explore questions about what they were seeing. Now, apps like Star Walk, Sky View, and Orbits HD allow students to not only see the stars and constellations during the day, but they can also interact with the app to see how they change over the course of an evening, a year, or millennia. With a tool like Star Walk, you can hold the iPad (or iPhone or iPod) up to the sky and identify exactly what you are looking at. Reference information within these tools allows you to explore
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One particular earth science topic is addressed by a wide variety of apps for the iPad; there are dozens of weather related apps for both the iPad and iPhone. While many of these apps simply provide local or national weather and simple forecasts, others, such as Wundermap or The Weather Channel Max+, provide detailed information about precipitation, barometric pressure, winds, and other atmospheric data. With these apps, I not only see what has happened recently on a radar, but also can pull up current weather data from registered weather stations, along
Wundermap, a weather mapping tool from The Weather Underground, lets you view live radar data, satellite information, and data feeds from weather stations. Here, we can see Hurricane Irene make landfall on the east coast, while sunny skies and low humidity make for a pleasant day in Holland, MI.
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