Silent Science Videos To Entertain Teens?

March 24, 2013 12:26 PM

Looking for videos to create a youtube playlist to entertain a group of science-minded teenagers for about 30 min that are largely visual. Sound is fine but the bulk shouldn't be someone talking to the class like an instructor - visualizations are best - ideally they should look really, really cool. Class is engineering focused, but chemistry, robotics, wobbly bridges, comp-sci, biology, are all welcome.

Backstory: the kids are going to be holed up in a room for a while without their phones, the projector will be playing a pre-selected set of youtube videos.

posted by The Whelk to Science & Nature (6 answers total)

Science Friday (NPR) has a video podcast that should be just what you need. There's one staff member who seems devoted to coming up with one of these per week, and they're really nice. Some are more visual than others (I'd avoid the scientist's desk videos). There are some beautiful and fascinating videos in there.

Here's a link: http://www.sciencefriday.com/video/scifrivideo.xml.
posted by amtho at 12:49 PM on March 24, 2013

Take a look at Dimensions. There's a narrator, but the videos themselves are composed of computer graphics.
posted by Bokmakierie at 12:49 PM on March 24, 2013

You might be super interested in two mega posts I made here a while ago collecting all of the 3D molecular movies I know of.
posted by Blasdelb at 12:54 PM on March 24, 2013

Protein Synthesis: an epic on the cellular level, skipping the first three minutes of guy talking to camera.

Also, there's a LOT of good space stuff out there -- amateurs ballooning video cameras up to near-space, the guy who painstakingly cleaned up the mars lander footage, the shuttle launch as seen from the orbiter... (sorry, don't have time now to track down the links, but I think all of those were on the blue!).
posted by pont at 12:58 PM on March 24, 2013

The website TheKidShouldSeeThis.com lists interesting videos from youtube and vimeo that touch on a variety of topics. The amount of narration varies.

Also, the OK Go video that uses a rube goldberg machine is pretty cool: Official Video Here
posted by rakaidan at 3:49 PM on March 24, 2013 [1 favorite]

Go look at all the stuff from Don Pettit, astronaut physics nerd, who posts lots of cool videos.
posted by LobsterMitten at 4:11 PM on March 24, 2013