Information from Seismograms: Beyond Epicenters, For Even the Novice Student
Laurel Goodell, Princeton University
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 ...

Geoscience career-readiness seminars, featuring geoscience and related professionals, enhance student's career skills, guide their coursework and career-planning decisions, and increase their potential for success beyond graduation
Robert Graziano, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Dyanna Czeck, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Career-readiness seminars have been developed in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) through a NSF-sponsored program, LET'S GEO (Learning Ecosystem for Training Student ...

On the Air: Exploring air pollution sources
Elizabeth Spike, FCPS and Clean Air Partners; Alexander Hume Spike, Air Alliance Houston
Air quality is less familiar to the public, resulting in a deficit of air quality lessons compared to water and soil within K-12 science education. On the Air overcomes this barrier to environmental literacy and ...

Inquiry-based modeling in Earth Science
Beth Dushman, Howard Community College
Two activities are presented here, both using the Model-Based Inquiry method, in which students are introduced to a phenomenon, model an explanation, test those models with real scientific data, and share and ...

Exploring Earth's Surface Through Remote Sensing
Elizabeth Joyner, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, SSAI; Michael Taylor, NASA Goddard
This hands-on mini-workshop introduces participants to the exciting world of remote sensing for studying Earth's surface. We will guide participants through remote sensing, from understanding the fundamental ...

Understanding feedback loops to approach systems-level thinking
An Nguyen, Temple University; Alexandra Davatzes, Temple University; Kim Kastens, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; Thomas Shipley, Temple University
Systems-level thinking and analysis, where a problem is viewed broadly as a whole rather than as its parts, is a necessary skill when attempting to solve systemic problems; one, however, which students can ...

Horses and Their Ancestors - A Geologic Time Scale Card Sort of the Cenozoic Era
Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim, Front Range Community College
The concept of geologic time can be difficult for students to grasp because of the vast scale of the Earth's 4.56-billion-year biography. This hands-on, minds-on activity highlights events during the Cenozoic ...

PANNING FOR "GOLD": HELPING STUDENTS EVALUATE WEB PAGES FOR CLASS USE
Fred Marton, Bergen Community College; Lynn Schott, Bergen Community College
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 ...

Bergeron M&M's
Alicia Mullens, De Anza College
After explaining the concepts of Vapor Pressure and Saturation Vapor Pressure to my students, I use an "activity board" to represent a cloud along with M&M's to represent water vapor molecules to ...

Designing Activities to Engage Students and Enhance Learning in Mathematically-Intensive Geoscience Courses
Casey Davenport, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Lauren Burns, University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Zachary Handlos, Georgia Institute of Technology-Main Campus; John Knox, University of Georgia
Across the geosciences, math is used to represent physical processes within the Earth system. However, students routinely struggle to make connections between equations and real-world applications. In this ...