On March 8, a total solar eclipse will be visible in Southeast Asia. The Bing team wants young students to embrace science, not be bored, or worse, think of it as too difficult to understand. This starts by making scientific concepts easy to grasp and fun to learn. So on this eclipse day, we want to tell you about the work that the Bing Education team has done to develop entertaining and interactive education answers.
Solar System
If you search on the term “solar system” you’ll see this interactive diagram:
How did we get the idea for this one? Our users told us. Well, sort of. We noticed that people were searching for queries related to the Solar System and information around it such as "how far is the sun from the earth?" We also found that many wanted to see the planets in order of distance from the sun, in order of size, and shown at distance to-scale.
Now, a search for ‘solar system’ gets the animated, interactive answer we developed and you get answers to all the above questions. You can hover over individual planets to see their orbits, get details about that planet, and clicking on a planet will take you to the Bing search page for that planet.
You can even use the slider at the bottom of the answer to play with the speed the planets travel, or type in any date to see what positions the planets were in (or will be in) at any point in time. Want to know the distance between any two planets at any point in time? Type the question into the Bing search box (see below), or by clicking on one planet and dragging the cursor to another planet.
We could talk about the solar system all day, but we encourage you to play with it to enjoy the full experience! Click on this link to check it out from your desktop or mobile internet browser: http://aka.ms/solarsystem.
Periodic Table
The periodic table of elements is the ABCs of chemistry. Given its importance, we made Bing's version interactive, useful, and beautiful. Standard periodic tables list atomic numbers, masses, and symbols for each element. But we found that our users were also searching for boiling and freezing points, orbital structures, dates of discovery, and densities. So we included this information on our table as well. Hovering over each element brings up a snapshot with details about that element.
Each tab on the Bing periodic table paints the table in a different set of colors to show how the elements vary according to their group, physical state, discovery date, predominant location on earth, or density. The physical state has a slider to demonstrate how the elements change with the temperature, while the discovery date slider shows when each element was discovered. On any of these tabs, typing an element name or symbol into the text box at the top of the answer will highlight that element on the periodic table so you can find it quickly. To access this feature, simply type "periodic table" into the Bing search box and give it a shot: http://aka.ms/periodictab.
Periodic Element
A natural extension of the Bing periodic table is the Bing "periodic element" answer, which goes into more detail about any chemical element. In addition to seeing many properties of that element such as mass, density, etc., Bing displays the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus. Hovering over the center of the atom shows information about its nucleus, and hovering over any electron shows the orbital and energy level of that electron. By clicking on the left or right arrows, you can scroll through and view the periodic element answer for an element with a neighboring atomic number.
Trigger this feature by typing an element name into the search box or by clicking on an element in the periodic table utility. Check it out right now: http://aka.ms/periodicelement.
These answers represent just the latest chapter in our drive to help bring science to life in a fun and engaging way that inspires a passion for life-long learning.
You can always see a list of Bing’s educational tools at the following webpage: http://www.bing.com/classroom/search-tools and share your feedback at Bing Listens.
- The Bing Education Team