Slicing Fruit
Students identify and draw slices through fruit, as practice for drawing slices through more complex features.

Slicing Cylinders
Students identify and draw slices through cylinders and partial cylinders, and use gestures to visualize slicing planes. This practice with visualizing slices through idealized geometric shapes is preparation for visualizing slices through geological features.

Fault Separation
Students use gestures to explore the relationship between fault slip direction and fault separation by varying the geometry of faulted layers and the slip direction.

Slices Through 3D Objects
Students identify and draw slices through an ice cream cone, a pyramid, and a beverage six-pack.

Sketching Block Diagrams
Students watch a video of the instructor sketching two geologic block diagrams (of flat stratigraphy and of an upright anticline), then practice sketching additional geologic block diagrams.

Introduction to 3D Sketching
This activity provides an introduction to 3D sketching. Students sketch a cube, boxes, and cylinders. They watch a video about how to sketch boxes and cylinders, and then sketch a few more.

Understanding Polyhedral Diagrams
Students identify individual polyhedra in a variety of diagrams and answer questions about shared oxygens in diagrams of common silicate structures.

Using Gesture to Support Spatial Thinking
This activity highlights the value of gesture in communicating spatial information. It consists of two short exercises. In the first, students are asked to pair up and describe to their partner how to navigate from one place to another in their home town. In the second, a volunteer is asked to sit on his or her hands and describe how to tie a bow with a piece of ribbon. In the first exercise, students spontaneously gesture; in the second, the volunteer will very much want to gesture and may be unable to complete the task under the restriction given (sitting on hands).

Slicing Rocks
Students examine images of a bowl of rocks, then several rock piles, then outcrops of conglomerate and breccia. They sketch slices through the bowl of rocks, match photos of rock piles to sketches of slices through those piles, and then apply what they've learned to describe the conglomerate and breccia.

Slicing Fossils
Students examine images of brachiopods, mollusks, and coquinas. They identify, visualize, and sketch slices through a variety of shelly organisms, then apply what they've learned to identify fossils in several samples of coquina.

Sketching 3D Ripples and Dunes
Students watch a video of the instructor sketching 3D ripples, then practice sketching 3D bedforms, both as seen by the viewer and as annotated 3D block diagrams.

Deciphering Mineral Structure Diagrams
Students compare mineral structures shown in ball-and-stick, space filling, and polyhedral diagrams.

Understanding Crystal Symmetry via Gestures
Students use a small mirror to explore the meaning of mirror symmetry, and then use their hands to gesture mirror planes for a group of familiar objects. They also explore the rotational symmetry of a group of familiar objects, and then use their hands to gesture the rotational axes and rotation. Finally, they use gestures to show mirror and rotational symmetry of wooden crystal models.

Folds and Cleavage
Students explore the geometric relationship between bedding/cleavage intersections and fold axes for axial planar, fanning, and transecting cleavage.

Primary Structures and Rotation
Students gesture the orientations of cross-bedded sandstones, and in particular the relationship between a single cross bed and the bed sets. They do this for photos of undeformed and deformed cross-bedding.

Gestures for Miller Indices
Students use one hand to gesture crystallographic axes and the other hand to represent planes designated by Miller Indices.

Linear and Planar Features
Students gesture the orientations of linear and planar features. In the first part of the exercise, students can only see one surface of a wooden block, and are asked to speculate about how planar features penetrate through the interior. Later, they uncover the other faces of the block and gesture the actual orientations.

Contractional Strain
Students use gesture to describe the bulk deformation and local deformation apparent in images of a contractional analog experiment. Students then calculate bulk shortening and bulk thickening for the experiment and describe the structures accommodating that strain.

Comparing Phyllosilicate Structures
Students compare the chemistry and structures of biotite, muscovite, and chlorite.

Slicing Channels
Students examine 3D channel-shaped objects and 2D slices through those objects. The purpose is to get them thinking about how the 3D geometry of a channel is reduced to a random 2D slice through the channel in a typical outcrop, so that they can recognize channel deposits.

Understanding Mineral Cleavage via Gestures
Students use gesture to convey information about mineral cleavage and the relationship between crystal structures and cleavage planes.

Comparing Quartz Polymorphs
Students compare the structures of low-temperature and high-temperature polymorphs of quartz, relating their differences to symmetry and crystal systems.

Gestures for Silicate Structures
Students use gestures to show the structures of single and double chain silicate minerals, paying attention to where silica tetrahedra share oxygen ions and the relative positions of the tetrahedra.

Deformation Mechanisms and Microstructures
Students match microstructures to the deformation mechanisms by which they form; compare pairs of photomicrographs chosen to highlight key differences between some common microstructures; and complete a self-quiz in which they identify microstructures and infer deformation mechanisms from photomicrographs.

Restraining Bends and Releasing Bends
Students use gestures to re-create the motion of fault blocks adjacent to restraining bends and releasing bends. They then answer a few questions about a map view of the San Andreas Fault and two of its bends.