Kids lack perspective. We see it in our own kids when they moan, this is the worst day ever! and we remember it from our own childhood when a fifteen minute wait felt like hours. But here’s one cool way to give kids a little perspective, plus a science lesson to boot: A captivating interactive scale of the universe that shows how our world is both infinitesimally tiny and enormous.
Created by the Huang Twins, Cary and Michael, it’s not fancy at all–just a slider to let you zoom in and out through various stock images and basic drawings, but it’s a fantastic educational tool nonetheless. Start at the center, with the comparison of a human to a sunflower, a T-rex, and an FM radio wave (they’re huge, it turns out). Zoom in and look at microscopic and subatomic worlds, from chromosomes and bacterium all the way down to quarks. Zoom out, and compare a football field with landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Great Pyramids, or compare the US and the Great Wall of China to a few of the moons in our solar system.
Get even further out to compare nebulas and galaxies with astronomical distances, like parsecs and light-days. Trust me, it’s hard to stop.
While most kids won’t have the faintest clue what quarks or nebulas are, we’re betting this cool interactive will spark some serious curiosity about the world for both kids and parents. Plus, with the most recent update, you can click on individual objects to learn more about them — I checked out the planet Aldebaran (not to be confused with Alderaan in Star Wars); the Kuiper Belt of asteroids and dwarf planets outside Neptune’s orbit; and buckyballs, spheres composed of 60 carbon atoms.
Oh, science. You never fail to blow our minds.
Explore the Scale of the Universe interactive and others by Cary and Michael Huang on their website
[thanks asha!]
