Frequency of Large Earthquakes
Jennifer Pickering
Using the IRIS Earthquake Browser tool, students gather data to support a claim about how many large (Mw 8+) earthquakes will happen globally each year. This activity provides scaffolded experience downloading data and manipulating data within a spreadsheet.

Intro to Image Processing with MATLAB
Duncan Carlsmith, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This short project introduces students to image processing with MATLAB including importing images from the web, color transformations, circle finding, and edge finding. These techniques are broadly applicable in ...

Major Ions in Freshwater Systems
Megan Kelly, Loyola University Chicago
Dissolved ions are present in all freshwater systems, but humans can change the chemical composition of freshwater in several ways. In this activity, students will examine the concentration of major ions in ...

The Art of Microbiology: an Agar Art Microbiology Lab CURE
Jeffrey Morris, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Students use agar art made with freshly isolated microbes as a source for developing their own novel research projects.

Relative and Absolute Geologic Time with Maps and Spreadsheets
Eileen Herrstrom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and takes ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students apply stratigraphic principles for relative dating and basic equations of isotopic systems for absolute dating and ...

Modeling Unconformities
Basil Tikoff, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Students make models of various kinds of unconformity: disconformity, angular unconformity, and buttress unconformity. They examine those models from a variety of perspectives and consider how each one appears in ...

Exploring eukaryotic protein structure and post-translational modifications.
Erica Jacobs, St. John's University-New York
This CURE will provide opportunity for students to think and act as researchers by using computational, biochemical, and bioanalytical techniques to examine tick antigen proteins. The CURE is designed as a lab for upper-level students who are taking or have taken a one-semester introductory biochemistry course, but two semesters would be even better. It could also be adapted for cell/molecular biology or (bio) analytical chemistry instrumentational analysis labs. It has been taught for classes ranging from 12-24 students. Ticks are notorious vectors of viral, protozoan, and bacterial diseases, including Lyme disease. While an anti-vector vaccine capable of protecting people from diseases transmitted by a particular tick species is an alluring goal, only one such anti-tick vaccine is currently available. This vaccine targets Bm86, a protein from the midgut of Rhipicephalus microplus, a cattle tick. Not only does the vaccine limit parasitism of the cattle by ticks, data suggests that it can also prevent transmission of tick-borne diseases including bovine anaplasmosis and babesiosis. However, similar vaccination approaches have not succeeded thus far against ticks that transmit diseases to humans, and little is known about the antibody response to the antigen, or about the protein itself. Since the protein's structure and function are unknown, the research goal of this CURE is to purify Bm86 using an insect cell/baculovirus expression system and characterize it, including domain structure and post-translational modifications (glycosylation sites). There are homologs to Bm86 in every sequenced tick species examined, and future CUREs will characterize some of the homologs including those in Ixodes scapularis, the tick that is mainly responsible for transmitting Lyme in the eastern US, and Haemaphysalis longicornis, the Asian longhorned tick, a newly-discovered invasive species in the area that also has significant disease-transmitting potential. By understanding the structure and post-translational modifications of this protein, we hope to gain a better understanding of how to make effective anti-tick vaccines, including those for humans, that may prevent transmission of Lyme disease. Importantly, the basic parameters of this CURE can be used to examine other proteins besides tick antigens. For example, during the pandemic, the CURE pivoted from the tick antigen to the SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein, which was also expressed in an insect cell system. Instead of characterizing glycosylation sites, we characterized phosphorylation sites. It's therefore possible to use this same framework for many different eukaryotic proteins that may be of research interest.

Introduction to Terrestrial Laser Scanning
Sharon Bywater-Reyes, University of Northern Colorado; Beth Pratt-Sitaula, EarthScope
In this assignment, students analyze terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) data in a similar manner as done previously with structure from motion (SfM) data, earlier in the course. Students compare and contrast the SfM ...

Design2Data
Ashley Vater, University of California-Davis
The D2D program is centered around an undergraduate-friendly protocol workflow that follows the design-build-test-learn engineering framework. This protocol has served as the scaffold for a successful undergraduate training program and has been further developed into courses that range from a 10-week freshman seminar to a year-long, upper-division molecular biology course. The overarching research goal of this CURE probes the current predictive limitations of protein-modeling software by functionally characterizing single amino acid mutants in a robust model system. The most interesting outcomes of this project are dependent on large datasets, and, as such, the project is optimal for multi-institutional collaborations.

Isolation and characterization of antibiotic-producing soil bacteria
Maria Messner, Lenoir Community College
One of the biggest threat in hospitals is the rising cases of people who harbor antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains. Therefore, it is critical to find and characterize novel antibiotics to combat the resistant strains. Most of the antibiotics used in healthcare settings come from anti-biotic producing bacteria and fungi found in the soil. The goal of this CURE will be to isolate antibiotic-producing bacteria and fungi from the soil in the local area, and to determine the chemistry of the antibiotics. An extension of the project will be to determine how the presence of antibiotic-producing microbes affect other organisms resident in the soil, as it is unclear as to why microbes use energy to produce antibiotic factors.

Using StraboSpot for Field Sedimentology & Stratigraphy
Casey J. Duncan, New Mexico State University
This module uses StraboSpot (free mobile app for iOS and Android devices and web API, backend database) and two Utah datasets to facilitate teaching field methods related to sedimentology and stratigraphy. The data ...

Pangaea Breakup
Steve Whitmeyer, James Madison University; Mladen Dorevic, Old Dominion University
A Google Earth animation files was developed to show the Pangaea breakup. The animation is utilized to illustrate the evidence for plate tectonics and plate motion. Three student exercises are build around this ...

Paleoclimate
Lenore Teevan, School of Innovation/Springfield City School District
This is a unit plan for project-based learning. Students will learn about paleoclimate proxies and their importance in understanding past climates. Students will focus on one region-specific aspect of paleoclimate ...

Design a basketball shooting machine
Richard Goldberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
In this assignment, students will determine the appropriate exit velocity from a basketball shooting machine as it passes the ball back to the shooter on the free throw line. Students will simulate the trajectory ...

Dino Doom
Sina Kirk, Arizona State University at the Tempe Campus
This is an online learning experience that transports learners around the world to different locations related to the Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event. Students will collect and analyze evidence to ...

BASIL (Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Laboratory)
Arthur Sikora, Nova Southeastern University; Rebecca Roberts, Ursinus College
This curriculum from the BASIL (Biochemistry Authentic Scientific Inquiry Laboratory) biochemistry consortium aims to get students to transition from thinking like students to thinking like scientists. Students will analyze proteins with known structure but unknown function using computational analyses and wet-lab techniques. BASIL is designed for undergraduate biochemistry lab courses, but can be adapted to first year (or even high school) settings, as well as upper-level undergraduate or graduate coursework. It is targeted to students in biology, biochemistry, chemistry, or related majors. Further details about the BASIL biochemistry consortium can be found on the BASIL blog, http://basiliuse.blogspot.com/ The curriculum is flexible and can be adapted to match the available facilities, the strengths of the instructor and the learning goals of a course and institution. These lessons are often used as part of upper-level laboratory coursework with at least one semester of biochemistry as a pre-requisite or co-requisite. The lab has been designed for classes ranging from 10-24 students (working in teams of two or three) per lab section. This lesson can be adapted to laboratory courses for introductory biology, cell and molecular biology, or advanced biology labs.

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, ...

Earthquake Intensity
Jennifer Pickering
Introductory lesson that compares ShakeMaps between earthquakes in the same location but different magnitudes, and earthquakes of the same magnitude but different depths, to acquaint learners to the fundamental controls on intensity of shaking felt during an event: magnitude and distance from the earthquake source.

Neurogenetics Laboratory: Mapping a functional circuit for cold nociception in Drosophila
Sarah Clark, Georgia State University
Students will work in small groups to identify neural populations that may be involved in the Drosophila larval response to noxious cold. They will use the GAL4/UAS expression system to excite or inhibit neural populations and assess the impact of their manipulation on the larvae's behavioral response to cold. If a relevant neural population is identified, students will then identify (based on current literature) genes that are likely to be involved in neurite development and/or maintenance in that population. They will use mutations and/or RNA interference to disrupt the function of these genes in the population of interest and assess the effect of the disruption on neuronal morphology and larval behavior.

Introduction to Modeling Faults
Basil Tikoff, University of Wisconsin-Madison Naomi Barshi, University of Wisconsin-Madison Carol Ormand, SERC, Carleton College
Students use Play-Doh to explore the map patterns created by faulting + erosion. We begin with simple scenarios and progress to more complex possibilities.