Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Building a Dinosaur From a Chicken

For Students 9th - 10th
Renowned paleontologist Jack Horner has spent his career trying to reconstruct a dinosaur. He's found fossils with extraordinarily well-preserved blood vessels and soft tissues, but never intact DNA. So, in a new approach, he's taking...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: How Quantum Mechanics Explains Global Warming

For Students 9th - 10th
You've probably heard that carbon dioxide is warming the Earth. But how exactly is it doing it? Lieven Scheire uses a rainbow, a light bulb and a bit of quantum physics to describe the science behind global warming. [5:01]
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Why I Must Speak Out About Climate Change

For Students 9th - 10th
Top climate scientist James Hansen tells the story of his involvement in the science of and debate over global climate change. In doing so he outlines the overwhelming evidence that change is happening and why that makes him deeply...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Inside the Ant Colony

For Students 9th - 10th
Ants have one of the most complex social organizations in the animal kingdom; they live in structured colonies that contain different types of members who perform specific roles. Deborah M. Gordon explains the way these incredible...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: How Heavy Is Air?

For Students 9th - 10th
Too often we think of air as empty space- but compared to a vacuum, air is actually pretty heavy. Dan Quinn describes the fundamentals of air pressure and explains how it affects our bodies, the weather, and the universe at large. [3:19]
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: How to Speak Monkey: The Language of Cotton Top Tamarins

For Students 9th - 10th
Anne Savage teaches a few cotton-top tamarin chirps and calls, taking us through a day in the life of Shakira the tamarin as Shakira signals to her family, talks to her food and warns against potential predators. [5:14]
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Attack of the Killer Algae

For Students 9th - 10th
As benign as it may look up close, the tiny seaweed Caulerpa taxifolia can wreak quite a bit of havoc on coastal ecosystems. This super algae is very adaptable; it also grows fast and spreads easily. Eric Noel Munoz gives the details of...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Tycho Brahe, the Scandalous Astronomer

For Students 9th - 10th
Dan Wenkel dives into the history behind 16th century astronomer, Tycho Brahe explaining how he continued to inspire intrigue even after his death. [4:08]
Handout
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: The Colossal Consequences of Supervolcanoes

For Students 9th - 10th
In 1816, Europe and North America were plagued by heavy rains, odd-colored snow, famines, strange fogs and very cold weather well into June. Though many people believed it to be the apocalypse, this "year without a summer" was actually...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: The Fundamentals of Space Time: Part 3

For Students 9th - 10th
In this third and final lesson, CERN scientists Andrew Pontzen and Tom Whyntie explore what gravity means for space-time- or rather, what space-time means for gravity. [3:27]
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: The Fundamentals of Space Time: Part 2

For Students 9th - 10th
In this second installment of a three-part series on space-time, CERN scientists Andrew Pontzen and Tom Whyntie use a space-time diagram to analyze the sometimes confounding motion of light. [4:50]
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Making Sense of a Visible Quantum Object

For Students 9th - 10th
Physicists are used to the idea that subatomic particles behave according to the bizarre rules of quantum mechanics, completely different to human-scale objects. In a breakthrough experiment, Aaron O'Connell has blurred that distinction...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: How Tsunamis Work

For Students 9th - 10th
The immense swell of a tsunami can grow up to 100 feet, hitting speeds over 500 mph- a treacherous combination for anyone or anything in its path. Alex Gendler details the causes of these towering terrors and explains how scientists are...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Climate Change: Earth's Giant Game of Tetris

For Students 9th - 10th
There's a game of Tetris happening on a global scale: The playing space is planet Earth, and all those pesky, stacking blocks represent carbon dioxide- a greenhouse gas that is piling up ever more rapidly as we burn the fossil fuels that...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: How to Track a Tornado

For Students 9th - 10th
In this TEDYouth Talk, Kosiba describes how she and her team use observations and modeling to track super storms, while sharing some incredible footage from the field.
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: The Family Structure of Elephants

For Students 9th - 10th
In this TEDYouth Talk, O'Connell-Rodwell details her work observing these incredible, social animals, examining several individual characters that play, bond and argue in tight-knit extended families eerily similar to our own.
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: The Networked Beauty of Forests

For Students 9th - 10th
Deforestation causes more greenhouse gas emissions than all trains, planes and automobiles combined. Suzanne Simard examines how the complex, symbiotic networks of our forests mimic our own neural and social networks- and how those...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: How Whales Breathe, Communicate and Fart With Their Faces

For Students 9th - 10th
Comparative anatomist Joy Reidenberg explains how majestic whales "fart with their face" (a process more formally known as echolocation) to send their unique sounds through the water. [6:24]
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Why Is Ketchup So Hard to Pour?

For Students 9th - 10th
Ever go to pour ketchup on your fries and nothing comes out? Or the opposite happens, and your plate is suddenly swimming in a sea of red? George Zaidan describes the physics behind this frustrating phenomenon, explaining how ketchup and...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: The Weird, Wonderful World of Bioluminescence

For Students 9th - 10th
In the deep, dark ocean, many sea creatures make their own light for hunting, mating and self-defense. Bioluminescence expert Edith Widder brings some of her glowing friends onstage, and shows more astonishing footage of glowing undersea...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: The Fundamentals of Space Time: Part 1

For Students 9th - 10th
In this first lesson of a three-part series on space-time, hilarious hosts Andrew Pontzen and Tom Whyntie go through the basics of space and time individually, and use a flip book to illustrate how we can begin to look at them together....
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: From the Top of the Food Chain Down: Rewilding Our World

For Students 9th - 10th
Our planet was once populated by megafauna, big top-of-the-food-chain predators that played their part in balancing our ecosystems. When those megafauna disappear, the result is a "trophic cascade," where every part of the ecosystem...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: Making Waves: The Power of Concentration Gradients

For Students 9th - 10th
The constant motion of our oceans represents a vast and complicated system involving many different drivers. Sasha Wright explains the physics behind one of those drivers- the concentration gradient- and illustrates how our oceans are...
Unit Plan
TED Talks

Ted: Ted Ed: What We Can Learn From Galaxies Far, Far Away

For Students 9th - 10th
By studying the properties of the universe's largest pieces we can learn quite a lot about our own world and galaxy. [6:43]