Teaching Activities

These teaching activities have a strong spatial thinking component. Search the collection to find activities suitable for your classes.



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Reef Builders through Time
Peg Yacobucci, Bowling Green State University-Main Campus
Students will use the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) to explore the history of reef-building animals through time. They will document diversity and extinction patterns through time for seven reef-building marine ...

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Data Analysis Activity Using MATLAB
Michael Ray, California State University-Sacramento
In this activity students will develop a model of air resistance, then perform an experiment using coffee filters, rulers and a stopwatch to test it. They will collect the data, then analyze it and produce a high ...

MATLAB Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching Computation in the Sciences Using MATLAB Exemplary Teaching Activities collection.
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Teleconnections
Kaitlin Farrell, University of Georgia; Cayelan Carey, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ
Ecosystems can be influenced by teleconnections, in which meteorological, societal, and/or ecological phenomenon link remote regions via cause and effect relationships. Because it is difficult to predict how ...

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What's in the Water? Lesson 4: Drinking Water & Environmental Justice
Kelsey Bitting, Elon University
In this lesson from the "What's in the Water?" PFAS Contamination Unit", students explore equity in drinking water across the U.S. For homework, students read segments of two recent reports ...

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Engaging With Earthquake Hazard and Risk
Jennifer Pickering
This introductory activity engages learners in the study of earthquake hazards and the risk these hazards pose to humans in the communities in which we live. Learners will compare three maps of Anchorage, AK, depicting spatial information related to seismic hazards to generate questions about the factors that influence shaking intensity and damage to the built environment during earthquakes.

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Discover Plate Tectonics
Angela Daneshmand, Santiago Canyon College
This is a student-centered activity for a synchronous online course where students access google slides to complete during a video conferencing session (eg. Zoom) in break out rooms. Students will be introduced to ...

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Remote Sensing of Plants and Topography in R
Kyla Dahlin, Michigan State University
This module introduces students who are already familiar with remote sensing and R to doing quantitative analyses with large spatial data sets. Students will explore different possible abiotic drivers of plant ...

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Erosion in a River
Nicole LaDue, Northern Illinois University
× Formative assessment questions using a classroom response system ("clickers") can be used to reveal students' spatial understanding. Students are shown these diagrams and instructed to ...

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Molecular Parasitology
Swati Agrawal, University of Mary Washington
In Spring 2021, we piloted a mini-CURE where student groups from University of Mary Washington and Georgia State University collaboratively completed research projects as part of a research-intensive course on Molecular Parasitology. The benefits of this approach were immediately obvious as students interacted across institutions, learned from each other's disciplinary expertise while informing their own research with data collected by their collaborators.

CUREnet Exemplary Collection This CURE has been identified as exemplary based on CUREnet's review criteria.
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Making Sense of Gait Ground Reaction Force Data
John Rogers, U.S. Military Academy
Students analyze a data set containing ground reaction forces from a human walking on an instrumented treadmill.

MATLAB Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching Computation in the Sciences Using MATLAB Exemplary Teaching Activities collection.
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NAE Grand Challenges Project
Dan Burleson, University of Houston-University Park
The project requires a group of students to explore one of the National Academy of Engineering Grand Challenges using MATLAB as a tool. Students explore a grand challenge by researching data and performing ...

MATLAB Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching Computation in the Sciences Using MATLAB Exemplary Teaching Activities collection.
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Lesson 1: Water Resources and Water Footprints (Middle School)
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
This lesson helps students understand why Earth is considered the "water planet." Students analyze how much of Earth's water is available for humans to use for life-sustaining purposes, and they ...

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Karst Hydrogeology: A virtual field introduction using Google Earth and GIS
Rachel Bosch, Northern Kentucky University
Students will have the opportunity to select and virtually explore the hydrogeology and geomorphology of a karst landscape using Google Earth, lidar data-sourced DEM(s) and geologic maps, and GIS software (QGIS) ...

Online Field Experience Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching with Online Field Experiences Exemplary collection
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Mars Virtual Field Camp: Geologic Mapping of Jezero Crater
Casey J. Duncan, New Mexico State University; , University of Utah
This virtual capstone field mapping project is centered around geologic mapping of Jezero crater, Mars and is composed of six modules and four synchronous live online lectures. Students work in mapping groups (of ...

Online Field Experience Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching with Online Field Experiences Exemplary collection
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Detecting Cascadia's changing shape with GPS | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Shelley Olds, EarthScope Consortium
Research-grade Global Positioning Systems (GPS) allow students to deduce that Earth's crust is changing shape in measurable ways. From data gathered by EarthScope's Plate Boundary Observatory, students discover that the Pacific Northwest of the United States and coastal British Columbia — the Cascadia region - are geologically active: tectonic plates move and collide; they shift and buckle; continental crust deforms; regions warp; rocks crumple, bend, and will break.

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Activity 6: Creating a Systems Diagram
Cameron Weiner, Middlebury College
In this activity students learn the steps to create a systems diagram and then apply those steps to create a systems diagram of the wastewater system. Students are provided with additional written information that ...

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Module 7: Mammal Responses to Climate Change in the Past and the Future with Neotoma Explorer
Russell Graham, Pennsylvania State University-Main Campus
Animal distributions are frequently controlled by climate extremes, especially seasonal ones. Therefore, if the climate changes from cold to warm (or vice versa) then using modern mammal distributions and modern climate conditions it is possible to make predictions about how the mammal will respond to the climate change -- whether it is past or future. In this module students use the Neotoma Paleoecological Database to test predictions, or establish hypotheses, about how certain species of mammals have responded to climate change in the past and how they might do so on the future. Part of the Neotoma Education Modules for Biotic Response to Climate Change.

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Student-Generated Sustainability Short Stories Anchored in Science and Information Literacies and the SDGs
Laura Guertin, Penn State Brandywine
To build and improve upon their science and information literacies, students create a collection of short non-fiction stories that connect to at least one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ...

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Online Discussion Prompts for Introductory Geology
Karen Kortz, Community College of Rhode Island; Jessica Smay, San Jose City College
This set of 17 online discussion prompts are designed to encourage students to apply, explore, and reflect on course topics. Some are content-specific (e.g. investigate misconceptions about a certain topic or take ...

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Conduction and Convection in a Fin of Uniform Cross Section
Yuxin Zhang, Washington State University-Tri Cities
Conduction and convection are two important modes of heat transfer. To understand the mechanisms of these two types of heat transfer processes, we study the temperature distribution in a fin of uniform cross ...

MATLAB Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching Computation in the Sciences Using MATLAB Exemplary Teaching Activities collection.
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