An integrated view of the Glendale Landscape
Students work in groups to develop posters that communicate their concept of landscape following several field labs (soils, sediment analysis, river discharge, vegetation survey, aquatic life) at one location. They ...

Quantifying Greenhouse Gas Emissions at the County Level: A Collaborative Term Project to Enhance Understanding of Climate Modeling and Quantitative Reasoning

Action to Enhance Sustainability
This assignment is a 10-hour, out-of-class project where each student designs and carries out an action plan to enhance sustainability. Students select from a large suite of alternative actions, most of which can be quantified for reductions in CO2 and energy consumption, as well as in dollar savings.

Visualizing Carbon Pathways
DATA: NASA Satellite Images TOOLS: ImageJ and Image Composite Explorer (ICE) of NASA Earth Observations (NEO). SUMMARY: Build animations of satellite data to illustrate and explore carbon pathways through the Earth system.

Comparing Carbon Calculators
Carbon calculators, no matter how well intended as tools to help measure energy footprints, tend to be black boxes and can produce wildly different results, depending on the calculations used to weigh various ...

Home Energy Audit/Retrofits
Home energy audit/retrofits allow students to apply thermodynamic principles to planning and executing a retrofit to make an existing home more energy efficient.

Where does your energy come from? Analyzing your energy bill
Students use utility bills to determine the cost and sources of energy in their households.

Oil Demand and Consumption
Data modeling activity using oil reserve and consumption data. Students predict when oil reserves meet or exceed reserves.

From Grid to Home
This one-period classroom activity is designed to have students analyze energy use, cost, and source patterns from household to regional scales and relate these patterns to CO2 emissions. This idea was generated at ...

Calculation of your personal carbon footprint
This worksheet walks the students through the steps for calculating their personal carbon footprint. Additionally it helps them consider options for reducing their carbon footprint and the potential costs of those ...

Energy Gallery Walk
This is a cooperative learning activity using the Gallery Walk Strategy (strategy from the Starting Point Gallery Walk web pages) to enrich student understanding of the complex nature of solving our nation's ...

Energy and the Poor - Black Carbon in Developing Nations
In this activity, students will explore impacts of the use of wood, dung and charcoal in developing countries for fuel, producing black carbon. In-class discussion will generate a list of several broad topics, ...

Power Source
In this lesson-opening activity, students or groups are tasked to make concept sketches that track the source of electrical power as far back as they can conceive. The concept sketches reveal students' prior ...

Carbon Footprint Exercise
We designed a three-step assignment for students in introductory geoscience that asks them to calculate their carbon footprint during one specific week. The goal of the assignment is to increase student awareness ...

Is There a Trend in Hurricane Number or Intensity?
This lab guides students through an examination of the hurricane record to determine if there is a trend in hurricane intensity over the past 40 years and introduces some issues related to statistics and ...

Poleward Heat Transport Jigsaw
Based on great plate tectonic exercise by Sawyer et al. (2005 JGE), this small-group exercise with maps of data about earth's energy balance helps students visualize poleward heat transport.

Student Lead Discussions: Articles from the Literature and Final Writing Assignment
This is a two-stage assignment. The first stage is a student-led discussion of a set of closely related articles selected by the instructors from the climate change literature. The second stage is an 8-12 page ...

Confirmation of the IPCC Prediction re: Increased Storminess
A two-part culminating activity for a meteorology/climatology unit in an Earth Science course centered upon data acquisition and analysis regarding the confirmation of the IPCC predicition regarding increased ...

Hybrid Vehicles: Are They Worth It?
In this project, students analyze the costs of gasoline nationwide. They also investigate the cost-effectiveness of purchasing a new hybrid vehicle as opposed to purchasing a new vehicle that runs solely on gasoline.

One day it is too hot and other days it is too cold. Do we need to replace the HVAC system?
This project will allow students to create a mathematical model to help in making decision about replacing HVAC units on a large scale.