Visit Planet Science! So Cool!

Planet Science is a site from the UK, which sometimes causes educators in the USA to pass it by. I don’t know why - many of the interactive, educational sites worth visiting come from the UK. Ok, so they spell things a little differently and use the metric system (like everywhere else but here)! Their sites still rock!

Planet Science has interactive games for K-12 students. I played a few of them and have enjoyed ALL of them so far. The first one I tried was the Smoothie maker. You can choose the ingredients to add to a blender to make your own smoothie. When you’re done, start the blender! The site will tell you how nutritious your smoothie is complete with how many grams of sugar and how many carbs you just drank in your smoothie. The best part is the “Smoothie” song the site plays as it mixes your drink. So much fun!

Next I tried Planet 10: World Builder (because Earth can’t last forever). The student creates a new planet by choosing many, many different things such as: size, orbit, atmosphere, shape, moons, terrain, organisms, distance from sun, etc. After you make all of your choices, you launch your planet into the atmosphere and see if it “survives” in space. After a lot of careful planning, I managed to burn up all the living organisms, evaporated my atmosphere, and got hit by a comet. Disaster. But so much fun!

Planet 10: Solar System is also a nice resource. Students can zoom into different planets to learn more about them. Fun! It has better graphics than Google Sky, but I’m not sure if the information is as detailed as Google Sky.

The site also has a list of science games on the Internet that are worth looking into as well as a parent page to get them involved. I love this site! Thumbs up from me!