You are Never Alone

Many thanks to my friend Maxine who is the publishing executive editor of Nature, the scientific magazine, who pointed to this statue and the history behind it in her blog today.

In case you can’t work out what it is, it is a periodic table. It is called the chemical elephant and is found in Washington, DC, outside the American Chemical Society building.
The elephant was decorated with pictures of elephants depicting the periodic table of the elements by the students of Patapsco High School. Read more at Maxine’s blog about some of the creative ideas the students used.

The elephant was part of a city scheme to decorate the streets with two Washington icons - elephants and donkeys - and they provide landmarks on tourist trails. The Party Animals art project behind it all is described here. I have seen others such as Chicago Cows on Parade, the Dubai Camel Caravan, Bears in Berlin, and somewhere recently I saw black and white cows everywhere.

But I have digressed from learning objects. Maxine has based her post on one by a colleague at Nature called The Great Beyond. Following the links back in this posting I found The Periodic Table Printmaking Project. That project can be seen in greater detail here. It will all mean much more to the scientists and chemistry teachers among you than to me, but what a great project! Courtesy of links on The Great Beyond, I located The Comic Book Periodic table, Chemsoc’s Visual Elements Table and more.

But the “chemical elephant” fired my imagination and made me think of all those tangle learning objects that we see everyday, and probably just ignore. When did you last take your class on a tour of the city/town streets to look at the statues (and read the plaques), follow the tourist trails, read the inscribed pavers, even look at the biggest of them all, the buildings that show the city’s history!

For me too, this learning curve of mine today, is yet another illustration of the educative and connective power of blogging.