Biomass conversion into highly useful chemicals
This is CURE based course that aims at bridging the gap between theoretical knowledge in chemistry and its practical applications at solving real-world problems. It gives students an opportunity to construct and synthesize their knowledge and skills by learning to apply theoretical knowledge to practice by the laboratory research. The purpose of this course is to acquaint students with the fundamental concepts of chemistry, synthetic methods and techniques. The emphasis will be on novel catalysts synthesis and evaluating their activity towards biomass conversion to liquid fuel and useful chemicals. Students will design synthesize, deduce identities of the biomass conversion products from chemical and spectral clues, and predict reaction products.

Working with State, National, and Global Petroleum Data
This activity takes place in a laboratory setting and requires ~1.5-2 hours to complete. Students work with data on oil production in Illinois, the United States, and the world, creating graphs to interpret data on ...

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 ...

Investigating the Effect of Warmer Temperatures on Hurricanes
Students investigate the link between ocean temperatures and hurricane intensity, analyze instrumental and historical data and speculate on possible future changes.

Climate Change and Atlantic Hurricanes: A GIS Inquiry
Students make hypotheses about how hurricane numbers, locations, or intensities have been changing, and then use hurricane tracks, wind speed, barometric pressure, and dates to test their hypotheses.

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.

Are Clean Tech Startups Sustainable and/or Circular?
Students apply what they have learned from the common exercise to a clean tech startup company. They map out the lifecycle of the product or service, identify potential impacts in each phase, and evaluate the ...

Tropical Cyclones, Sea Surface Temperature, and Beyond
The activity will use historical data of sea surface temperature and tropical cyclone origin and/or tracks to identify trends. Students use Arc GIS to explore projected SST changes and predict areas where tropical ...

Forecasting Lake Effect Snow in Lake Superior region
This exercise is designed to present the realistic problems of forecasting weather. Lake effect snows are hard to forecast because they depend on information that isn't part of the regular set of information ...

Analyzing Hurricanes
The exercise uses GIS to explore historical data on hurricanes (path, strength, name). Students identify trends in hurricane records, the impact of hurricanes on major U.S. cities, and how hurricanes change through ...