Exhibition Chemistry
A bunch of chemistry demos that could be useful for outreach.
Microscale thermite reaction
A neat demonstration of thermite with two rusty steel balls and a sheet of aluminum foil. See linked video.
Top of the slops
In higher education, I'd argue our common goal, across all disciplines (we use that word for a reason) is to turn out humans who are less sloppy than they would otherwise be. At present LLMs stand to drive sloppiness upwards, because they are seen as ways to “relieve” humans of the tasks that deliver the real insights—the writing, programming and perhaps even proof through which we discover the ways in which what we previously thought was sloppy. When people don't go through that process of discovery, they don't get the skills to make them less sloppy. To become rigorous, you have to be confronted with your own sloppiness.
Giving university exams in the age of chatbots
Interesting perspective on how software engineering students see chatbots. It seems almost all of them don't trust them when things get serious, but they may be biased by the instructor's AI scepticism.
Hedy
A programming curriculum meant to be a step between things like Scratch and Python. It gradually introduces concepts and syntax so the student isn't overwhelmed by e.g. punctuation. It also localizes keywords to a student's language, so e.g. print and for are translated into Chinese, Spanish, etc.
FatNums: an alternative representation for school arithmetic
The idea is, rather than performing carries, just write down the "fat" number in its place.
For example, adding 1234 + 5678:
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8
----------
6 8 10 12
6 8 11 2
6 9 1 2The result is 6912.
Instead of carrying at each digit, you "normalize" at the end. This could be useful for elementary students struggling with the concept of carrying.