Pamela Gore: Using Carbon, Climate, and Energy Resources at Perimeter College, Georgia State University.

Unit 1

• The handout explaining the logical fallacies was great. I never realized that there were so many types of logical fallacies, and neither did my students. The students had fun making up their own fallacies, and working in small groups to identify the various types of fallacies. They had all heard many of these types of arguments before, but now they can identify them as fallacies. Then we watched the YouTube video in which Pete's appearance changed a little bit for each fallacy. He has since redone the video and now wears a variety of funny costumes, which makes it even better. The PowerPoint presentation showed us logical fallacies and facts about climate change, and the students had to determine which statements were true and which were false. We worked through the slides and checked our answers at the end. Then we went back over each statement. There are detailed explanations in the presenter notes below each slide, and in an accompanying document, which I read to the class, but this began to feel like too much reading. It probably works best to give the handout of these statements to the class, and let them determine the explanation for each of them, and have them report back to the class. The instructor can then use the presenter notes to evaluate their answers.

Unit 2

• I found that my students had not watched the pre-lab videos, so we watched several of them in class. To see all five videos would take about 20 minutes. The instructor should be sure to watch all of them before class, and note the comments on the instructor notes pages about what to possibly omit.
• We cut out the atom cartoons, but ran into questions about whether we needed to arrange the atoms in the correct shape for the molecules, or just put them in a pile. I was thinking that they needed to be arranged, so we looked up the shapes online and I drew them on the board. We also found that if we tried to make all of the molecules and lay them out on the table together, that we ran out of hydrogen atoms. We were given 12 of each, but we needed a total of 18 hydrogen molecules.
• In order to do the chemical reactions (photosynthesis, respiration, etc.), we first tried to write out the equations on the board and balance them, and looked them up online to be sure. For example, photosynthesis is 6CO₂ + 6H₂0 = C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂. In order to show both sides of the equation, we would have needed more atom cutouts (24 hydrogens to show this complete reaction), so maybe we were over-complicating it. We did not end up with dramas or stories. We struggled to get through creating all of the reactions.
• When we did the "Where is the Carbon on Earth?" activity, I found that students had little or no conception of what sorts of materials contained carbon, so this was confusing for them and took a lot of explaining.
• The video version of the PowerPoint presentation is great, but we had trouble getting it to work on our lab computer initially, so it might be best to try it out in advance.
• Be sure to read the instructions to the class before you do the carbon cycle game, and be sure you have lots of dice on hand — one per student!! There was a lot of reading involved. We were not sure whether to have the students read the section out loud, or if everyone was supposed to read it to themselves.
• We did not do the circle drawing activity because we did not have large enough paper to draw them on. Rolls of bulletin board paper would probably have been needed. We tried taping printer paper together, and tried to scale the activity down to be able to use a 12-inch ruler, but that did not work well. And the students had trouble drawing the circles because there was nothing to stick the thumbtack into, to hold it in place. (I suggest getting a piece of wood or cork board to put under the thumbtack). I would skip this activity next time if I did not have large rolls of paper available.

Unit 3

• We worked on the foram coiling activity, but my students were unsure about what a foram was or how to use Excel, so they ended up calculating the percentages by hand with a calculator, which took a while. Then they graphed them by hand on graph paper.
  Instructions of how to add formulas to calculate the percentages would be helpful, such as:
  "In the white line above the spreadsheet, type = and click on the two squares you want to add, with a + sign in between. Example: =C5+D5
  Then click off of the table so the answer will appear. Then once the answer appears, click on the lower right corner of the spreadsheet cell, and a + sign will appear. While holding it down, use the mouse to move down through the rest of the spreadsheet and the answers will appear."
  "To calculate percent, type = in the white line above the spreadsheet and click on the first cell for right coiling, which should add C5 to the blank line. Then type /. Then click on the total of the two numbers, cell E5. This will calculate the percentage. Follow a similar procedure for left coiling percentages."
• For the Vostock activity, I showed the graph to the students from the Instructor's copy of the spreadsheet, and the students answered the questions in the Word document.
• We did not have time to get to the Snowball Earth activity.

Unit 4

• The students enjoyed the PowerPoint with the interactive questions on fossil fuels, renewable and non-renewable energy resources and got a pretty good understanding of the basics.
• The short video "Coal, Oil and Natural Gas" includes an activity, about 5 and a half minutes in, where students compare and contrast oil and coal resources using paper cutouts which they place on a Venn diagram. They enjoyed working on this and it tied closely to the video.
• Since I was teaching this module in a lab class, we used the optional activity and I had the students look at hand specimens of the various types of coal. They got to identify and describe them, which was great, because my environmental science class had not had any experience with rocks before. The activity on the origin of oil, in which students organized slips of paper into the correct order, turned out to be a lot of fun, and almost everybody got everything correct because of the way in which the statements are written.
• The origin of oil activity was a lot of fun. Students put various stages of oil formation in order using the clues provided, and we reviewed the order of events using the PowerPoint presentation, which contains the answers in order at the end.
• After class, one of the students told me that this was the best lab we had done all semester, and he really learned a lot!

Unit 5

• My students watched the two introductory videos while I taped the Gallery Walk diagrams and questions up in the hall, along with some large chart paper. I gave everyone a washable colored marker, and they went into the hall to work on the diagrams and questions. It was great to see small groups of students having intelligent conversations about graphs of changing CO₂ concentrations. This was the first time that any of the students had done a Gallery Walk activity, and they seemed to enjoy having the opportunity to escape from the classroom for a few minutes. We regrouped in the classroom and looked at the PowerPoint so we could discuss the diagrams as a group. I projected the questions and asked students to respond with answers. Once they came up with the correct answer on their own, I clicked the PowerPoint and the correct answers appeared. The students needed hints before they came up with photosynthesis as a cause of seasonal declines in CO₂. They were mainly thinking about temperature rather than plants. At the end of the PowerPoint, I had students write the answers to the review questions. We ended with the two videos on ocean acidification. I offered to let the students do the optional activities for extra credit. Overall, the lab went smoothly and the students grasped the information.

Unit 6

• The students really enjoyed reading and discussing the mock proposals. Some of them were funny or outlandish, and some made sense. Students read them in class, because we had a little extra time. The students learned a lot, were able to review and think about concepts covered in each of the units, and apply what they had learned about logical fallacies from Unit 1.