Comedian Andy Samberg did impersonations of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and actors Mark Wahlberg and Nicholas Cage in the speech he gave for the 2012 Harvard College Class Day.

Here is the full speech which includes some other funny moments:

via The Next Web

Kinetic Creatures are cardboard walking animal sculptures by Alyssa Hamel & Lucas Ainsworth. The sculptures are made of cut cardboard parts that fit together with tabs and slots. They walk via a hand crank or on their own with an optional electric gear kit. Kinetic Creatures are intended to be learning projects for classroom or home use. Hamel and Ainsworth are raising funds on Kickstarter to finance production of the sculptures.

In this animated explanation of exponential growth from TED-Ed, educator Adrian Paenza show us how we can reach the moon by folding a piece of paper 45 times.

via Neatorama

Ancestry.com recently posted the yearbook photo of children’s author and illustrator Maurice Sendak. It reads: “Your delightful drawings make us all gay, A famous artist you’ll be someday.” Sendak graduated from Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School in 1946.

The iconic author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who died yesterday at the age of 83, was considered one of the most important children’s book artists of the 20th century, and will forever be remembered with his groundbreaking children’s masterpiece “Where The Wild Things Are”. Before he went on to become who we all know him to be, we found hints of his stardom in his 1946 Lafayette High School (Brooklyn, NY) yearbook, which he also was the art editor for.

via Sarah Elizabeth Murphy

“Beat School,” a 1961 news clip by British Pathé, depicts the Burgess Hill Boarding School, an unusually relaxed school in Britain that allowed students to wear whatever they pleased, dance to rock & roll, and even smoke on campus. The students look rather astonishingly like contemporary hipsters (of course it’s the actually other way around).

via Dangerous Minds

This clip from Rapist Beware! shows Lou Casamassa giving women pointers on self defense. Some of his unorthodox self defense methods include defecating on yourself to “gross out” your attacker and, shockingly, to bite off your attacker’s penis. This method is demonstrated in this clip with a cucumber. Casamassa, a 10th degree black belt, has authored a book titled Rapist Beware!.

The video comes with the disclaimer:

Following is a graphic demonstration utilizing a cucumber to simulate a penis. Viewer discretion is advised.

via Everything is Terrible

During last month’s solar storm, Bishop Union High School students from Bishop, CA sent a sensor-equipped rubber chicken into the stratosphere to study solar radiation. They hope to gain insight to the effect of solar radiation on life and promote conversations about space weather. The rubber chicken in question is “Camilla”, the official mascot of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (@Camilla_SDO on Twitter).

Video of the launch:

Camilla weightless:

San Francisco-based neo-burlesque and variety show venue Hubba Hubba Revue has released volume 1 of How to Dance Goth, a great educational video which shows how to negotiate all those imaginary spider webs on the dance floor and more. They first showed it at their Goth Show in March 2012.

via Violet Blue

photos by Audra Wolfmann

New York City based Grovo is an educational site that produces video tutorials about popular sites and web services.

For an example, see “What is Stumbleupon?”.

via Lifehacker

TED-Ed is a new initiative by TED to create fascinating video lectures by pairing outstanding educators with talented animators (intro video). TED-Ed is now accepting nominations for educators and animators. The first TED-Ed videos have been posted on YouTube—Here’s Adam Savage (of Mythbusters) on “How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries:”

Adafruit Industries has come up with some fun merit badges for their new Hacker Scouts project. With Hacker Scouts, kids are encouraged to make or publish cool projects in order to be awarded a badge (both digital and iron-on) by Adafruit co-founder Limor Fried. Adafruit has been making real iron-on patches for a few years and these are the digital extension of those badges. They have created a Leaderboard to keep track of who is earning what badges over time.

A few children have already been working on badges through the beta Scouts program. For example, Sylvia makes “videos, kits, electronics, soft circuits, chemistry…and anything else I can.” She has her own web show titled Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show! (it really is awesome) and has already earned the Drawdio skill badge.

the goal is to celebrate skill earning the same way kids play video games. unlocking achievements and earning badges…

we also think this may start people thinking about “hacker scouts” – a scouting program that’s more peer-to-peer, distributed, built in the
21st century utilizing the tools and technology we have.

via Geek Gestalt

Apple has unveiled three new tools to compete in the digital educational realm through their Apple in Education program: iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and iTunes U. The iBooks 2 app for the iPad will host digital textbooks, ones that are “an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive”. By using the iBooks Author app, Multi-Touch e-books can be created for the iPad by anyone with a Mac. Also unveiled today is an all-new iTunes U app that gives “educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to teach and take entire courses”. iTunes U will give access to the “world’s largest catalog of free educational content from top universities including Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford”. Beginning today, this content is provided free to K-12 schools to teach full courses through the app. All three apps are available to download for free from Apple.

images via Apple

YouTube is piloting a “teacher-friendly” educational program called YouTube For Schools to allow schools access to safe video content for students.

YouTube for Schools provides schools access to hundreds of thousands of free educational videos from YouTube EDU. These videos come from from well-known organizations like Stanford, PBS and TED as well as from up-and-coming YouTube partners with millions of views, like Khan Academy, Steve Spangler Science and Numberphile.

via YouTube Blog

Denver Westword has posted this series of classroom discussion posters from 1973.

Age 13 is a melodramatic 1955 educational “social warning” film from director Sid Davis that depicts a grieving teenager named Andrew as he struggles to cope following his mother’s death. As the story goes begins, Andrew’s radio coincidentally stops working the same time his mother dies which sets him in the wrong direction. Later, Andrew is sent to the school psychologist’s office for a Rorschach test after shooting off a gun in the schoolyard (!). In the end, he runs away from his bitter stepfather but eventually is taken in by family members and shows the ‘first signs of winning his inner struggle’ with the love of his adopters. As campy as the film can be, it does show a fun slice of 1950s life of the “working-class Inglewood, Hollywood and other parts of the Los Angeles basin” where it was filmed. Age 13 is in the public domain and available from the Prelinger Archives.

“60-Second Adventures in Thought” is a fast-paced animated overview of six famous thought experiments from Achilles and the tortoise to Schrödinger’s cat. The animation is by the Open University in the UK. We previously wrote about another Open University animated lecture “The History of English.”

via The Daily What

Dressed to the nines, trumpet player Gabriel Angelo busks at the corner of Mission and 4th in San Francisco to earn money to continue his music education at San Francisco Conservatory and JazzSchool in Berkeley. Fabian Sixtus Körner of Stories of a Journeyman filmed a short documentary on Gabriel doing his thing in The Trumpet Kid.

From Fabian Sixtus Körner of Stories of a Journeyman:

Gabriel Angelo is a 12 year old trumpet enthusiast who earns the money for his music school by performing on the streets of San Francisco.

…He plays on the streets to earn money for his music lessons at the S.F. Conservatory of Music and Berkeley Jazz School. And when you see him out there just passing by, it feels like he is a professional and experienced performer. Kind of a grown-up in a childs costume, handing out business cards to people who are interested in booking him for an event. But after I got to talk to him I realized, he’s a kid like all the others but also a kid like no other.

via Nerdcore

photo by Daniel Castro

Kio Stark, an author who teaches at NYU’s graduate program ITP, has launched a fundraising campaign on Kickstarter to get her handbook on independent learning, Don’t Go Back to School, off the ground.

If you’re thinking about going back to school or about the possibility of self-taught learning, Don’t Go Back to School will help you figure out if you can do it on your own—and it’ll show you how. The book explains the basic infrastructure that school provides—things like resources, expertise, evaluation, and a learning community. And it features profiles of fascinating, self-taught people, showcasing the practical ways they meet those needs.

In 2009 chemistry teacher Chris Bergmann showed his students The Exploding Pumpkin Trick for Halloween demo day.

via Daily Picks and Flicks

Blackboards in Porn is a site that reviews the blackboards found in school-themed pornography for accuracy and educational level.

The handwriting is large and generally clear, even though this class appears to only have one student in it, and he sits at the very front. It might be worth advising the student to have his eyes tested if he is unable to read smaller text at this distance. Remember that poor learning may be as a result of poor vision – the student might not even be aware that he has a problem. If the teacher does keep her handwriting that size she will have to get a bigger whiteboard when she starts doing quadratic equations. Finally, when writing algebraic equations, it is preferable to do a more cursive x for the unknown symbol, to avoid confusion with a multiplication sign.

via Nerdcore

“Live the Language” is a video series directed by Gustav Johnansson that promotes studying abroad with short, beautifully shot films about various international destinations (see Vancouver, Barcelona, and Beijing). The series is for Education First, an international education company.

The series includes the wonderful typographic designs of Albin Holmqvist, which we wrote about previously.

via Doobybrain

The Oatmeal takes a look at what we should have been taught in our senior year of high school.

Codecademy is a free website that provides interactive lessons on coding for web development. Founders Ryan Bubinski and Zach Sims have started the site with eight Javascript lessons, and plan to expand the coursework to other programming languages.

Codecademy was created when Zach got frustrated with learning how to program. For years, Ryan taught Zach the basics of HTML and CSS, but books and videos didn’t help. Ryan and Zach teamed up to create Codecademy, a better, more interactive way to learn how to program. This is just the beginning. Join us as we make it easy for everyone to love and learn how to program.

via VentureBeat

Rachel Walsh, a second year illustration student at Cardiff School of Art & Design, was given an assignment to “explain something modern/internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900″. She decided that Victorian era author Charles Dickens needed to be schooled on Amazon’s Kindle wireless electronic reading device. To do so, she cleverly devised a way for a big book to hold forty miniature books and did so by cutting spaces in the pages to hold the shrunken titles. The end result is simply beautiful and certainly illustrates an e-reader to someone not at all familiar with technology.

via Kuriositas

photos by Rachel Walsh

Radioactive Orchestra is a collaborative project between Swedish nuclear scientists and musicians to demystify radioactive isotopes by turning them into music. Nuclear scientist Bo Cederwall, musician Axel Boman, and artist Kristofer Hagbard collaborated to translate the decay of isotopes into musical melodies (see how they did it in this video). At the very addictive Radioactive Orchestra website, users can create their own musical pieces composed of isotope melodies. The project was produced by the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology and the Nuclear Safety & Training organization.

via Brain Pickings