Stanford Office of Science Outreach

Microdocs: The Short Attention Span Science Video on Ecological Sustainability

Stanford Marine Biologist Steve Palumbi created a series of 2-4 minute micro-documentaries about sustainability, featuring coral reefs from around the world. His lab then developed this website that provides additional resources for teachers and students, built around the videos.

Woods Institute Curriculum for K-12 Teachers

The Woods Institute for the Environment, in collaboration with Stanford’s School of Education has developed entire environmental science units (with supplementary materials) for K-12 educators. Currently, there are units available on Contaminated Sediments, Hawaiian Ecosystems and Climate Change.

Stanford Engineering for "Teens and Teachers"

This website has resources for students and teachers, including activities, information, and examples of innovative ways that engineering is integrated into many different areas.

Virtual Labs Interactive Media for Human Anatomy and Biology

The Virtual Labs Project, begun in 1998 with funding from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, provides creative online interactive media and on-line tutorials to help students learn difficult concepts in human biology. Modules on the brain, nervous system, immunology, organ systems, and more are available for download, along with game and quiz frameworks for teachers to add their own content.

Stanford Solar Center Resources for K-12 Teachers and Students

The Stanford Solar Center web site provides a collection of multi-disciplinary, interactive exercises and activities based on the Sun and solar science, most geared to grades 4-12. Each lesson or activity comes with study guides, worksheets and quizzes and all are aligned with the national science teaching standards.

The Center also offers solar spectroscopes for students to cut out and put together. These come complete with gratings, as well as instructions for construction and use.

Bringing Nanoscience and Nanotechnology into the Classroom

Nanotechnology, which makes use of structures 100 nm or smaller (1 nm is a billionth of a meter), is now part of our daily experience. Products ranging from electronics and cosmetics to sports equipment and clothing are increasingly dependent on nanotechnology, harnessing the benefits of novel properties that materials exhibit at the nanoscale. The past years have seen a steady increase in nanoscience research and resulting applications, which has started a rapid growth that will continue over the next decades and change the way we live.
This site contains hands-on activities to engage K-12 students in exploration and scientific investigation. These activities, originally developed for teachers participating in CPN's Summer Institute for Middle School Teachers, are designed to help students learn about nanotechnology while supporting the California Science Content Standards. For teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area, CPN has also partnered with the non-profit Resource Area for Teachers (RAFT) to make available low-cost materials for some of these activities.

CPIMA Educational Resources for Teachers

The Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies (CPIMA) has created educational materials for use in the K-12 classroom. Working with partners such as the Tech Museum and teachers at different levels, CPIMA has created a number of educational modules including "Probing the Unknown," Electricity and Magnetism," and "Materials and Environment."

SPICE Multidisciplinary Curriculum Materials on International Themes

The Stanford Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education (SPICE) develops K-14 multidisciplinary curriculum materials on international themes that are available to teachers around the world. SPICE has produced over 100 supplementary curriculum units on Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the global environment, and international political economy. SPICE also offers a series of seminars for middle school and high school social studies, world literature, and language arts teachers.

The Virtual Urchin Project

Gametes of sea urchins yield exceptional experiences in the classroom; teachers and students alike are riveted by being able to observe fertilization, cell division and embryonic development. The gametes are easy to use, the developmental stages are readily seen with the microscope and the rapidity of fertilization and early cell divisions allows the student to ask questions and obtain answers within the bounds of a normal classroom schedule. The utility of urchins for inquiry-based science is unrivaled.

The goal of this project is to make these remarkable embryos readily accessible through development of inquiry based lessons, available on an open access website. Students can then move beyond the early embryo, and explore how scientists study sea urchins to understand larval development and metamorphosis, community ecology, pollution in the marine environment and biological evolution.

Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing

Stanford’s Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing (an affiliate program involving the School of Engineering and the Graduate School of Business) has developed an introductory website for kids and adults showing how various items are made, from jelly beans to cars, from denim to airplanes. It covers over 40 different products and manufacturing processes, and includes almost four hours of manufacturing video targeted towards non-engineers and engineers alike. Think of it as your own private online factory tour, or a virtual factory tour, if you wish.

Sea Urchin Embryology

The drama of fertilization and development is explored by laboratory modules using sea urchin eggs and a website developed by teachers and Stanford researchers.

Stanford Continuing Studies

Stanford Continuing Studies offers a broad range of courses in Liberal Arts & Sciences, Creative Writing, and Professional & Personal Development. Courses are designed to cultivate learning and enrich the lives of adults in the Bay Area. Courses are primarily taught by Stanford instructors and are open to everyone.

Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE)

Stanford Engineering Everywhere is an online portal offering ten courses from Stanford’s School of Engineering— including the three-course introductory sequence in Computer Science— free of charge.

EPGY Summer Institutes: Middle School Program

The EPGY Summer Institutes Middle School Program consists of three two-week sessions for gifted students going on to 6th or 7th grade. Students live on campus, experiencing academic enrichment, a taste of college life at Stanford, and the opportunity to meet others with similar interests and abilities.

EPGY Summer Institutes: High School Program

EPGY Summer Institutes are 3- or 4-week residential programs for gifted and highly motivated high school students. Students live on campus over the summer and focus on a course of study.

EPGY On-Line Classes for Gifted K-12 Students

Stanford's EPGY offers on-line, self-paced classes in math, physics, computer programming, English, and music theory to students ages 5 to 18 with very high academic abilities.

EPGY On-Line Middle and High School

This is a fully accredited, diploma granting, online independent school (grades 7-12) situated at Stanford University within the Education Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY). The school offers online courses designed for academically gifted students during the academic year and two- and three-week residential programs at Stanford over the summer.

Quake-Catcher Network

The Quake-Catcher Network is a collaborative initiative for developing the world's largest, low-cost seismic network by utilizing sensors in and attached to internet-connected computers in homes and schools. With your help, the Quake-Catcher Network can provide better understanding of earthquakes, give early warning to schools, emergency response systems, and others. The Quake-Catcher Network also provides educational software designed to help teach about earthquakes and earthquake hazards. Interested in participating? Download the software and join the network!

Folding@Home

Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world to help calculate how proteins fold (or misfold). Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved. Every computer that participates brings the project closer to its goals.