Teaching Activities

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



Results 121 - 140 of 5951 matches

Interactive Anti-Harassment/Discrimination Training
Michael Hubenthal, EarthScope
An interactive workshop designed to encourage a more inclusive geoscience culture that is resistant to harassment and discrimination by educating and empowering undergraduate students. The curriculum is targeted ...

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Chemical Kinetics lab
Bhavna Rawal, Lonestar community college, chemistry
"Iodine Clock" refers to a group of reactions which involve the mixing of two colorless solutions to produce a solution which remains colorless for a precise amount of time, then suddenly changes to a ...

Transitioning from Excel to MATLAB Diffusion Models
Kendra Lynn, University of Delaware
This activity is part of a larger module that introduces students to two different ways to model chemical diffusion in minerals: 1) 1D diffusion in Excel using finite differences and 2) 1D diffusion in MATLAB using ...

Vector Fields
Sayonita Ghosh Hajra, California State University-Sacramento
This activity is exploratory and collaborative MATLAB activity. Students will explore and visualize vector fields. Students will also learn about the flow lines of the vector fields.

MATLAB Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching Computation in the Sciences Using MATLAB Exemplary Teaching Activities collection.
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Exploring Groundwater
Bridget Garnier, Blue Valley School
Average inquiry level: Structured This groundwater lab is designed for online, asynchronous instruction and uses Google slides (or Powerpoint) so student can use the draw features. Within this lab, students will: ...

Episodic tremor and slip: The Case of the Mystery Earthquakes | Lessons on Plate Tectonics
Shelley E Olds, EarthScope Consortium
Earthquakes in western Washington and Oregon are to be expected—the region lies in the Cascadia Subduction Zone. Offshore, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate subducts under the North American plate, from northern California to British Columbia. The region, however, also experiences exotic seismicity— Episodic Tremor and Slip (ETS).In this lesson, your students study seismic and GPS data from the region to recognize a pattern in which unusual tremors--with no surface earthquakes--coincide with jumps of GPS stations. This is ETS. Students model ductile and brittle behavior of the crust with lasagna noodles to understand how properties of materials depend on physical conditions. Finally, they assemble their knowledge of the data and models into an understanding of ETS in subduction zones and its relevance to the millions of residents in Cascadia.

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Hypoxia in Coastal Marine Ecosystems
Annette Brickley; Kathy Browne, Rider University; Gabriela Smalley, Rider University
Aquatic ecosystems are home to a complex intersection of physical and biological factors and an intersection of natural and anthropogenic factors. In the Chesapeake Bay, low oxygen events have occurred periodically ...

Flooding, flood risks, and what populations are impacted
Kaatje van der Hoeven Kraft, Whatcom Community College
In this lab, students learn about four different types of flood: flash floods, regional floods, storm surges, and tsunami. They then explore the human experience of flooding and who is impacted the most by flooding ...

Feedback Loops
Alexandra Davatzes, Temple University
This assignment requires students to use analogical reasoning to identify the key attributes, the causal structure, that make a feedback loop positive (by amplifying/accelerating the effect) or negative (by ...

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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Petrographic Microscope Home Kit for Smartphones
Lynne Elkins, University of Nebraska at Lincoln
This is a useful set of design instructions to build a home microscope kit for illustrating the properties of polarizing/petrographic microscopes with a smartphone camera. It can be used for any number of class ...

Reconnaissance stratigraphy and mapping of the Frying Pan Gulch, MT
Sinan Akciz, California State University-Fullerton
Students are required to create a reconnaissance geologic map and report for a small area (approximately 0.5 sq. mile) Frying Pan Gulch just NW of Dillon, Montana. This project is designed to make students familiar ...

Online Field Experience Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching with Online Field Experiences Exemplary collection
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Metamorphism and Metamorphic Rocks Lab F2F
Revising author: Maria Mercedes, Central Michigan University Original authors:Maria Mercedes, Central Michigan University; Stephanie Sabatini, North Carolina State University
Average inquiry level: Structured In this lab, students will use observations to compare and contrast metamorphic processes and features to draw conclusions about the geologic history of metamorphic rocks. As ...

Lake Ice Phenology Module
This module was initially developed by Carey, C.C., J.L. Klug, and D.C. Richardson. 1 April 2015. Project EDDIE: Lake Ice Phenology. Project EDDIE Module 1, Version 1: cemast.illinoisstate.edu/data-for-students/modules/ice-phenology.shtml. Module development was supported by NSF DEB 1245707.
Lakes are changing worldwide due to altered climate. Many lakes that were historically frozen in the winter are now experiencing fewer days of ice cover and earlier ice-off dates. In this module, students will ...

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Numerical Simulation Basics: Accuracy and Model Validation for a Finite-difference Equation
Jim Boyle, Western Connecticut State University
This activity teaches students a few of the basic concepts for numerical simulation of physical systems by modeling the simple and well-known problem of free-fall. The recursion relation for the finite-difference ...

MATLAB Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching Computation in the Sciences Using MATLAB Exemplary Teaching Activities collection.
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Data Processing with MATLAB: Formation Energies of Titanium Oxides
Kristi Closser, California State University-Fresno
Titanium dioxide (TiO2) is an extremely common chemical substance and finds uses ranging from serving as a pigment for white paint, sunscreen and even toothpaste, to serving as a photosensitizer in waste water ...

MATLAB Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the Teaching Computation in the Sciences Using MATLAB Exemplary Teaching Activities collection.
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Snow Avalanches
Alessandro Zanazzi
In this activity, students have to select the most convenient backcountry ski route to climb a peak located near Brighton ski resort (Utah). In order to select the route, they have to evaluate the information ...

On the Cutting Edge Exemplary Collection This activity is part of the On the Cutting Edge Exemplary Teaching Activities collection.
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Modeling Folds: Block Diagrams and Structure Contours
Basil Tikoff, University of Wisconsin-Madison Naomi Barshi, University of Wisconsin-Madison Carol Ormand, SERC, Carleton College
Working in small groups, students build Play-Doh models of 3 folds (one upright, one vertical, one plunging). They slice each of their models to create 3D block models, sketch block diagrams of each fold, and ...

Lesson 1: Water Resources and Water Footprints (High 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 ...

Virtual Marine Sediment Core Collection
Kristen St. John, James Madison University
A primary objective of marine science classes is to learn the location and formation of ocean sediment types. Nearly 50 years of scientific ocean drilling has produced a tremendous scientific collection of cores ...