Inexpensive fun homeschool science project

Project Icarus – Home of the original $150 near-space launch! A group of MIT students seeking to share the artistic aspects of science with others. On Sept. 2, 2009, we launched a digital camera into near-space to take photographs of the earth from high up above.

Several groups have accomplished similar feats, but as far we know, we are the first group ever to:

(1) Complete such a launch on a budget of $150 total. All of our supplies (including camera, GPS tracking, weather balloon, and helium) were purchased for less than a grand total of $150.

(2) Create a launch vehicle without the use of any electronic hacking. We used off-the-shelf items exclusively (i.e., no electronic chips or soldering) to create our launch vehicle.

The results were fantastic. Our ultra low-budget balloon went 17.5 miles high into the uppermost parts of the stratosphere and returned 5 hours later.  We tracked the device with GPS and found it some 20 miles away from the launch site.

More free online education resources for homeschoolers.

CNN World Business is reporting on several collaborative efforts between Universities and iTunes, Youtube, etc… that will put more quality education resources online for free. Here are some direct links to the resources.

Youtube EDU

iTunes U

MIT Open Course Ware

Open Course Ware Consortium

Academic Earth

Tux Paint

Tux Paint is a free, award-winning drawing program for children ages 3 to 12 (for example, preschool and K-6). It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

Free books and textbooks for homeschoolers.

Here are three great sites for free books:

Project Gutenberg is the first producer of free ebooks. Hundreds of books in their collection.

Global Text Project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD.

Flat World Knowledge is a work in progress. The goal is to provide free college textbooks to all.

Go ask Alice.

Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student’s first exposure to object-oriented programming.

Stellarium – Bringing the stars alive

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.

Scratch – imagine, program, share

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Ideas worth sharing.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. The site has a hundreds of videos available for free that are enlightening as well as inspirational.

Welcome to Smeedoo

This is site was created to showcase many of the great free educational resources available on the internet. While the primary audience for this site is homeschoolers, anyone interested in free educational tools will find this blog useful.