This activity uses hands-on interaction with 3D-modeled fossils to guide students and educators through an exploration of critical geoscience concepts (deep time, paleoclimate, functional morphology, and extinction). I have adapted three different versions of the activity to address a varying range of competency levels – from middle school through college – but each targets similar outcomes at grade-appropriate levels, including: - gaining confidence in tackling big-picture questions about the importance and relevance of paleontology and geology,- identifying potential stumbling blocks when defining a new species based on fossil remains,- using critical thinking to discuss new ideas and concepts with peers,- collecting, plotting, and analyzing numerical data relating to the dental morphology of the fossils, and- proposing hypotheses based on the trends they recognize in quantitative data as well as qualitative observations.The middle and high school versions of the activity also address age-appropriate Science and Engineering Practices, Disciplinary Core Ideas, and Crosscutting Concepts from the NGSS guidelines for both Life Science as well as Earth and Space Science.

An objective of many entry-level earthquake exercises is to use S-P wave travel time differences from multiple seismic stations, and then "triangulate" to determine the location of the epicenter of a seismic event. Our lab activity does this, but our students then go on calculate a body-wave magnitude for the event and also analyze 1st P-wave "ups" and "downs" to narrow down the focal plane solution and the possible types/orientation of faulting that could be responsible. Follow-up topics include: why there is variation of magnitude as measured at different stations; why the epicentral distance circles don't perfectly intersect at a point (like they do in textbooks); whether the faulting matches the plate tectonic setting; whether a nuclear bomb test could have been responsible for the waves rather than fault displacement; and how likely it was that the earthquake would have generated tsunami.

It is not unusual for students to search the web for sources to use for their classes. It is also not unusual for some of those sources to be unacceptable for a variety of reasons. To help students recognize which sites are appropriate to use for their classwork and which are not, we use a library instruction lesson that helps students devise their own "gold standard" criteria to apply to sites. First, in groups, students are given "bad" websites on a specific topic (one that students have tried to use in the past) and asked to determine what makes them unacceptable for the class. Then, using these unsuitable characteristics, students individually conceive a set of "gold standard" criteria that would identify a site as good to use for subject information. Finally, back in groups, students use their "gold standard" criteria to identify sites on the same topic that would be good choices for them to use. Students then present these to the class, with explanations on what criteria they used and how they found their sites. The information and criteria generated during the lesson are collected and posted to the class LMS for the students' future use.

In this multi-part activity students investigate the location, width, and depth of, as well bathymetric features present in, different ocean basins. They first explore elevation and bathymetric profiles that span the entire globe at multiple latitudes. Goals for this part are for them to match each profile with the latitude it represents and to identify the location of continents and ocean basins in each profile. They are then provided with higher resolution profiles of different ocean basins, as well as maps showing the locations of the transects (the transects and maps do not provide information on which corresponds with which). Using these data, they estimate the widths and depths in each basin with the goal of identifying which bathymetric profile corresponds to each ocean basin. The culmination of the activity is a group discussion of Earth's hypsometric (hypsographic) curve.