Teaching Activities
These teaching activities have a strong spatial thinking component. Search the collection to find activities suitable for your classes.
Resource Type: Activities
Results 1 - 20 of 6159 matches
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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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 ...
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Bottle Design via MATLAB with Volume and Surface Area
Bree Ettinger, Emory University
In this activity, students design a bottle silhouette using parametric splines in MATLAB and compute its volume and surface area using numerical integration. The project connects numerical methods and computation ...
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ERP Peak Detective: Introduction to Event-Related Potential Analysis with MATLAB
Brian Rivera, Saint Olaf College
This scaffolded laboratory activity introduces students with minimal programming experience to Event-Related Potential (ERP) analysis using MATLAB. Students progress from interactive visual exploration of neural ...
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Getting started with Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry
Beth Pratt-Sitaula, EarthScope
Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry method uses overlapping images to create a 3D point cloud of an object or landscape. It can be applied to everything from fault scarps to landslides to topography. This ...
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Geology of Yosemite Valley
Nicolas Barth, University of California-Riverside
This is a four-part module designed to be flexible in duration and student grade-level. (1) Geology of Yosemite Valley Virtual Field Trip. A 43-stop web-based Google Earth tour with embedded views, hyperlinked ...
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Climate Change Effects on Lake Temperatures
Cayelan Carey, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ; Kaitlin Farrell, University of Georgia
Climate change is modifying the thermal structure of lakes around the globe. Because it is difficult to predict how lakes will respond to the many different aspects of climate change (e.g., altered temperature, ...
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An Arabidopsis Mutant Screen CURE for a Cell and Molecular Biology Laboratory Course
Jinjie Liu, Michigan State University
This CURE is designed from a crucial component of a chloroplast lipid signaling research project and has been implemented for a cell and molecular biology laboratory course at Michigan State University. The research laboratory generated an engineered plant line producing a lipid-derived plant hormone and mutagenized this line. The research question is "what transporters or receptors are involved in the hormone signaling transduction or perception processes?". Students form research hypotheses based on the research model, design experiments, perform experiments, collect and analyze data, make scientific arguments, and share their findings with the learning community. Specifically, the students culture the mutagenized plant population and select the desired mutant phenotypes, followed by genotyping the mutants and characterizing the mutants by basic biochemical approaches. Mathematics is also integrated into the course design. As the students studied the relevant genetic, molecular and biochemical concepts during this CURE, they use the core idea of information flow and data they generate in the lab to make claims about their mutant plants and support these claims with evidence and reasoning.
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Modeling Mono Lake's Water Balance
Phil Resor, Wesleyan University; Gregory Hancock, College of William and Mary
In this activity students build a hydrologic model of Mono Lake in MATLAB and then use the model to evaluate the California State Water Board's 1994 decision regulating diversions from the watershed and ...
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Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics Project
Dan Burleson, The University of Texas at Dallas
This activity is a project designed to introduce undergraduate chemical engineering students to chemical engineering thermodynamics in the context of MATLAB. The project requires students to learn concepts they ...
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Magnetometry at home: a hands-on survey with your smartphone
Charly Bank, University of Toronto
Using a free app downloaded to their smartphone or tablet device students engage in collecting magnetic field data. Students have to design and document a survey, and are encouraged to do simple quality control. ...
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Assessing the Risk of Invasive Species Using Community Science Data
Matthew Heard, Belmont University
This module introduces students who are already familiar with GIS to doing comparative analyses with large-scale community science (often called citizen science) data sets. Students will explore how we can use ...
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Climate Change Module
This module was initially developed by O'Reilly, C.M., D.C. Richardson, and R.D. Gougis. 15 March 2017. Project EDDIE: Climate Change. Project EDDIE Module 8, Version 1.
Scientists agree that the climate is changing and that human activities are a primary cause for this change through increased emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. There have been times in ...
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Wakemup Pluton
Basil Tikoff, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Students work through a set of questions about a geologic map of an igneous intrusion and surrounding rock units. These questions focus students' attention on the topography, geomorphology, lithology, and ...
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Bomb Cyclones - They're Explosive!
Jacqui Degan, Cape Fear Community College
Storms can have devastating impacts on coastal communities. Typically, tropical storms like hurricanes get the most attention, but there are other types of storms that occur at more northern latitudes that can be ...
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Are we in a modern mass extinction?
John Fronimos, Auburn University Main Campus
A lab activity evaluating the hypothesis that Earth's biosphere is currently undergoing a mass extinction, the so-called "sixth extinction." Students practice quantitative skills by calculating ...
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Macro-Scale Feedbacks
Cayelan Carey, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ; Kaitlin Farrell, University of Georgia
Environmental phenomena are often driven by multiple factors that interact across space and over time. In freshwater lakes and reservoirs worldwide, carbon cycling and subsequent carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane ...
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Introduction to MATLAB for Oceanographic Data
Anna Pfeiffer-Herbert, Stockton University
This activity introduces students to loading and plotting data in MATLAB. Students explore scalar and vector time series and profile data commonly used in the field of Oceanography using data sets from publicly ...
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A Bioinformatic Look at Iron Uptake in Insects
Emily Ragan, Metropolitan State University of Denver
Students will perform BLAST searches, make phylogenetic trees, identify putative orthologs, and investigate secondary structure elements of 5' untranslated regions (UTRs). The sequences used will be related to iron uptake in insects.
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Igneous Rocks Inquiry Lab (In Person)
Jennifer Cholnoky, Skidmore College; Mary Abercrombie, Florida Gulf Coast University
Average inquiry level: Guided inquiry This is an in-person inquiry lab for igneous rocks, but it could be converted to an online lab through use of igneous rock photos available online (see links provided in the ...
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