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Miscellaneous => The Lounge => Topic started by: piratePenguin on 15 September 2010, 05:18

Title: Free High School Science Textbooks (not spam!!)
Post by: piratePenguin on 15 September 2010, 05:18
This (http://www.fhsst.org/node/8097) is pretty cool stuff. FHSST (dumb name but it stands for Free High School Science Texts) have written textbooks for three different grades of both science and maths subjects at high school level, encouraging users to share (they do this pretty aggressively too, the first time I read this (http://a.nnotate.com/php/pdfnotate.php?d=2010-08-25&c=LfHSuInt#page3) I cringed, but trying to get children excited about this "new" concept i.e. sharing, is perhaps a good approach, even if it sounds silly when we read it).

I've skimmed through one of the maths books and they've done an impressive job I think - the content is actually fairly advanced and thorough, but broken into manageable pieces for the reader. A healthy amount of applications are included which I've always thought are under-rated in my experience of learning maths through secondary school and college.

From the homepage:
Quote
The Free High School Science Textbook (FHSST) project is our contribution towards furthering Science Education in South Africa. As young South Africans who believe in building up our country, we want to use our skills as scientists to help our next generation by providing free science and mathematics textbooks for Grades 10-12 to all South African learners.
I like this.


Edit Related, dunno why I'm not talking about this in the first place: Khan Academy (http://www.khanacademy.org/): This guy Khan a few years ago started making maths and science videos and putting them up on youtube, I think it was just because his cousin needed help. He ended up with more than a thousand videos and the interest was mind-boggling. He didn't ask for money (he was pretty rich), but he's had millions donated to him (Bill Gates even tweeted that he uses them with his child), hence the foundation. Pretty useful work, it has to be said.
Title: Re: Free High School Science Textbooks (not spam!!)
Post by: adiment on 30 September 2010, 20:18
Just wanted to say thank you posting this I never heard of it. Especially the Khan Academy link, this would help me and a lot of people I know. There's more than just maths there too.
Title: Re: Free High School Science Textbooks (not spam!!)
Post by: WMD on 10 October 2010, 03:21
I see Khan redesigned his site.  It's kinda funny how the same guy knows so much about finance and hard sciences (math, physics, chemistry)...I watched the Bailout series some time ago.