On my second day in Uganda, we went white water rafting on the Nile, near a town called Jinja. The rapids are just down river from Lake Victoria, which is where the Nile starts.
The rapids are caused by the force of the water as it crashes over rocks and around islands in the river. There used to be more rapids there, and the famous Bujugali Falls. However, a couple of years ago a dam was built across the river, which has made part of it more like a lake and has increased the water levels, wiping out lots of the rapids, including Bujugali. However, below the dam, the rapids are still just as scary! The rapids are a favourite for rafters and kayakers all over the world.
The rapids are caused by the force of the water as it crashes over rocks and around islands in the river. There used to be more rapids there, and the famous Bujugali Falls. However, a couple of years ago a dam was built across the river, which has made part of it more like a lake and has increased the water levels, wiping out lots of the rapids, including Bujugali. However, below the dam, the rapids are still just as scary! The rapids are a favourite for rafters and kayakers all over the world.
Where else can you find great Science Resources for Kids? You can browse our archives here on Jump! Mag or you can check out the following sites.
We will update this list in the coming months, and will concentrate on resources you can access online – lectures, TV Shows, YouTube channels, online archives, websites and blogs with science tutorials so that you can roll up your sleeves and get stuck into science.
We will update this list regularly, so if you have something cool to add, let us know.
Sparxx is an initiative bought to you by the Women’s Engineering Society (WES).
Their aim is to bring you all the latest news, views, events, opportunities, careers, interesting stuff, fun stuff and freebies to help girls find inspiration for future careers. Sign up for their newsletter here.
The CHRISTMAS LECTURES® are entertaining and informative science events for young people, broadcast on UK television every year. You can watch them online here. Prepare to be amazed
UPDATE
The Royal Institution have just launched Experimental, a series of YouTube videos with great and simple experiments for parents and children to try at home. Find their YouTube Channel here.
Real science, online – The Zooniverse is home to the internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. You can choose to help researchers characterize bat calls, or explore Mars, without leaving your house.
Six awesome courses in one awesome channel: John Green teaches you US History and Hank Green teaches you Chemistry. Check out the playlists for past courses in World History, Biology, Literature, and Ecology
Bill Nye is a scientist, engineer, comedian, author and inventor. His mission is to make science fun, and help people understand the science that makes our world work. Here are the Home Demos, the experiments you should try at home sometime. Keep clicking around and you’ll find the Episode Guides.
Edheads is an online educational resource that provides free science and math games and activities that promote critical thinking. You can design a mobile (cell) phone, repair a weakened aorta or learn about simple machines, and much more.
This is a site that links to lots of other sites – we loved the Amusement Park Physics – design your own roller-coaster but be careful because if you get the science wrong… DISASTER!
Silvia is a young girl from California, USA and she’s been making Super-Awesome webshows on making cool stuff since 2010. She demonstrates science experiments, and great craft projects. You’ll never be bored, when Silvia is around!
The kids pages on Nasa are awesome, and that is before we get to the videos of ELMO at NASA. Science and Sesame Street. It doesn’t get much better than this.
Veritasium is a science video blog featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science – these are at times more advanced, but well worth a look.
Engineering is Elementary is a project of the National Center for Technological Literacyat the Museum of Science, Boston (MOS). They have fantastic resources for teachers and home-ed families, on a range of topics. Some of the content is free to use, and the teaching guides and stories can be purchased on the site.
If your parents are on Twitter, get them to follow @realscientists – a rotational twitter account featuring real scientists, science writers, communicators and policy makers talking about their lives and their work. Tweeters from different fields of science and science-related fields.
Have you ever flicked through a dictionary to find a word, and then noticed that right next to it there is a set of symbols, some of which resemble the letters you are used to using, but some of which are completely different?
These symbols are there to give you a guide to how the word is generally pronounced, and they are part of the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA.
Until 3 billion years ago, Mars was a wet planet much like Earth. It had land, an extensive atmosphere and an ocean that covered two thirds of the northern hemisphere as well as smaller bodies of water. But significant climate change caused the water and atmosphere to boil away, leaving Mars a dry and arid planet. Or so we thought… then came the news from Nasa – Water found on Mars!
Do you think that our lives are set out before we are born, and things are ‘just meant to be’? That’s what we mean by ‘fate’, a force beyond our control that determines our future. Gabriela has been thinking about this since her English class held a discussion on the topic, and she shares her thoughts with us.
down river from Lake Victoria, which is where the Nile starts. 
