New Gizmos Released!

As Summer officially begins this week and most of you are relaxing after a long school year, we are as busy as ever at EL. This week we have released three new Gizmos and have enhanced several others. In the Refraction Gizmo, students can observe and measure the bending of light as it moves from one medium to another. Evolution: Natural and Artificial Selection is a follow-up to the current Evolution: Mutation and Selection Gizmo. Together, these two Gizmos provide an unbeatable simulation of evolution, as students can see how favorable mutations gradually accumulate in a bug population.

To complete our strong suite of evolution Gizmos, we have created the Human Evolution - Skull Analysis Gizmo. Many kudos go to our talented graphic artist, Beth Hollen, for creating the accurate drawings of real fossils you can see in this Gizmo. By measuring and analyzing the skulls like real paleoanthropologists, your students can come to their own conclusions about what this evidence shows. (By the way, check out the latest issue of National Geographic for an excellent article on the development of bipedalism, or walking on two legs.)

We have also continued to work on enhancing older Gizmos as well. First on our list was the classic Density Laboratory Gizmo, which has been updated with new graphics and several new objects to measure, including three "gold" crowns. (Can you find the two fakes?) This Gizmo is a great example of our new Gizmo "skin", which includes a larger display area, larger and darker text, and a cleaner look that is specially designed for projection. Keep your eyes open for more of these Gizmos coming in the next few weeks!

Other enhanced Gizmos include Tides, Distance-Time Graphs and Distance-Time and Velocity-Time Graphs.

Enjoy!