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 6136 matches
Nutrient Loading Module
This module was initially developed by Castendyk, D.N., T. Meixner, and C.A. Gibson. 6 June 2015. Project EDDIE: Nutrient Loading. Project EDDIE Module 7, Version 1. Module development was supported by NSF DEB 1245707.
Estimating nutrient loads is a critical concept for students studying water quality in a variety of environmental settings. Many STEM/Environmental science students will be asked to assess the impacts of a proposed anthropogenic activities on human water resources and/or ecosystems as part of their future careers. This module engages students in exploring factors contributing to the actual loads of nitrogen that are transmitted down streams. Nitrogen is a key water quality contaminant contributing to surface water quality issues in fresh, salt, and estuarine environments. Students will utilize real-time nitrate data from the US Geological Survey to calculate nitrate loads for several locations and investigate the interplay of concentration and discharge that contributes to calculated loads.
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Virtual Geologic Mapping Exercise at Lough Fee
Steve Whitmeyer, James Madison University
The Virtual Geologic Mapping Exercise is designed to simulate an introductory field mapping exercise. Students load a KML file in Google Earth that includes real outcrop data in the form of dots and orientation ...
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Getting started with Structure from Motion (SfM) photogrammetry
Beth Pratt-Sitaula, EarthScope Consortium
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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Stress Map
James Conder, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale
Use earthquakes from the global CMT catalog to look at crustal stresses in a given region of the Earth. Students will download earthquake data from an online catalog and make 2 tectonic maps. One map is of the ...
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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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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.
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Data Representation in MATLAB: From Raw Data to Insight
Ray Senior, University of Technology, Jamaica
This activity is a hands-on computational lab where students import, validate, inspect, and visualize three heterogeneous data types (spreadsheets, audio, images) to discover MATLAB's unified array-based data ...
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Dimensional Analysis and Flow Visualization Using MATLAB
Kianoosh Yousefi, The University of Texas at Dallas
In this MATLAB-based activity, students develop two general computational modules, one for automated dimensional analysis using the Buckingham π theorem, and another for streamline and pathline visualization for ...
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Control Systems using Simulink
Kelvin Loutan, The University of Trinidad and Tobago
Analytically solving differential equations representing dynamic systems can sometimes distract from the physical implications of the model. In this module, the dynamic equations of a DC motor are used as a ...
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ERP Peak Detective: Introduction to Event-Related Potential Analysis with MATLAB
Brian Rivera, St 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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Let's Look Inside the Earth
David Zelenka
Students will analyze USGS seismology data in the classroom using spreadsheets and scatter plots to look for patterns and structure in the Earth's crust. Before analyzing data, students will learn about the ...
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Lesson 3: The Value of a Water Footprint (High School)
Kai Olson-Sawyer, GRACE Communications Foundation
Session 1 of this lesson begins with a quick activity to get students thinking about their direct and virtual water use. It introduces a few new ideas for virtual water use that may surprise students, including the ...
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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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Example False position Method Problem in MATLAB Live Script
Adrian Quesada Martinez, Instituto Tecnologico de Costa Rica
Interactive MATLAB activity to implement and analyze the False Position Method (Regula Falsi) for finding roots of nonlinear equations. Includes theoretical introduction, step-by-step graphical visualization, ...
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What's in the Water? Lesson 1: Water Cycle and Watersheds
Kelsey Bitting, Elon University
In this lesson from "What's in the Water?" PFAS Contamination Unit", students collaboratively explore water and contaminant cycling through the natural environment. They identify pathways each ...
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Sustainability Metrics
Natalie Hunt, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
Sustainability is a complex term applied to many different contexts in a variety of ways. As a result, it can be challenging to determine how sustainable something really is. In this module, students will use an ...
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Remote Sensing Applications in Hydrology
Emad Habib, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
The module offers background content on the fundamentals of remote sensing, but also integrates a set of existing online tools for visualization and analysis of satellite observations. Specifically, students are ...
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Battleship
Blain Patterson, Virginia Military Institute
This activity aims to engage students in a low-stakes activity to build confidence and review basic topics including indexing matrices and vectors, extracting data from a matrix, operating on data from a matrix, ...
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Measuring voting districts and distributions
Eugene Mahmoud, Mt San Antonio College
This project-based activity allows students to use MATLAB to analyze voting district boundaries and their relationship to social and environmental justice. Students recreate geographic borders, calculate centroids, ...
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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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