Bring Some Magic Into Your Classroom!


Ted Beyer, Educational Innovationsby Ted Beyer

One of my favorite authors, Arthur C. Clark, once said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” This has been quoted, misquoted and reused for years.  Of course, it’s perfectly true, and magicians have been using science as part of their acts for centuries. Things that we take for granted today were once bleeding edge technology. I remember in high school reading that sometime ‘soon’ (this was more than 30 years ago) there would be TVs that would be so thin that they would hang on the wall like pictures – impossible! A generation before, the concept of television itself was astonishing, and a generation before that, moving pictures of any kind were magical.

As I started to think about this, I suddenly realized that there are many products that we sell here at Educational Innovations that are used – currently – by magicians as ‘tricks’ in their act. Let’s take a look…. Read the rest of this entry »


Dreaming of NASA and Meteorites


Ted Beyer, Educational Innovationsby Ted Beyer

Ever since I was a kid, I have been fascinated with space. I would look up at the stars, and I just knew that other people were up there somewhere, looking back at our little point of light, and thinking the same kind of thoughts.  On the day I turned seven, Neil and Buzz landed on the moon and I was sure that—somehow—when I grew up, I would get there, too.

Incidentally, that’s me in the red on the right in the picture below.  And on the left? Well, that’s Buzz Aldrin!

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X-Rays with Tape?


Ted Beyer, Educational Innovationsby Ted Beyer

Here at Educational Innovations we always keep an eye out for that new science related story or gadget that might turn into a great product for teachers to use in their classroom. More often than not, if we do spot something, it turns up at the lunch table as a topic of conversation. Recently, I heard something on the radio that made me think that it was, perhaps, April 1, 2008 rather than late October.

It seems that scientists have discovered that you can make X-rays with tape: If you pull 3M® brand Scotch Tape off the roll while in a vacuum, it will emit a significant quantity of X-rays.

This sure sounded like lunch conversation material, so I did a little research.

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