Glacial Landscapes Jigsaw with an Augmented Reality Sandbox

Sheldon Turner, Triton College
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Summary

A jigsaw style activity where students learn the basics of topographic maps and teach their peers about glacial landforms through use of an augmented reality sandbox.

Used this activity? Share your experiences and modifications

Context

Audience

I use this in an introductory geology survey course at a community college. If you have an AR sandbox, I think it would also work well at a middle school or high school.

Skills and concepts that students must have mastered

This was used as an introduction to not only glacial landforms, but topographic maps as well, so no previous skills with contour maps are required if the instructor gives a brief explanation before the activity.

How the activity is situated in the course

This was a stand alone classroom activity when discussing glaciers. I was focused on local landforms (in the Great Lakes region) so I only had students work on ice-sheet created landforms that were mostly depositional in nature. This would also work well for alpine and erosional features.
However, this same type of instruction could be used for any type of geomorphology, including alluvion and aeolian features, as part of a series of activities.

Goals

Content/concepts goals for this activity

Student should be able to both create and read topographic maps and identify features using those maps.
Student should be able to explain to others how glacial landforms are created.
Student should be able to explain what glacial landforms tell you about the glacier that is no longer present.

Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity

Students will create real-world models of objects described in text.
Students should be able to translate a 3-dimensional object onto a 2-dimensional representation and vice versa.

Other skills goals for this activity

Students will practice presenting information to their peers.
Depending on the instructions, students could use other sources, such as textbooks, phones, or laptops to look up further information.

Description and Teaching Materials

Students are paired up or put in small groups and assigned one glacial feature per group. Student go up the AR sandbox one group at a time and are given a few minutes of free-play to discuss and create the glacial landform in the sandbox based on the description. For more information on making an AR sandbox go here: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/SARndbox/

I show them how to turn on and off colored bathymetry and dynamic water so they can see only the topographic lines. Once they have figured out what their feature looks like, they draw and describe it on their worksheet.

After all groups have had a chance to create their landform, they each give a short presentation to the whole class by drawing the contour map of their feature on the whiteboard in the front of the room and describing how they are formed and what they can tell you about the ancient glacier.

Once presentations are done, all students complete the last pages of the worksheet where they are asked to identify features from real topographic maps.
Student Handout for Glacial Landform assignment (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 2MB May31 17)

Teaching Notes and Tips

I did this without ever teaching topographic maps and contour lines and it worked very well. In fact, students that had learned contour lines in other classes before said they wished that they had done this activity first.

I provided very little guidance on the features when students were using the sandbox, the description and small picture in the worksheet were enough. Everyone in the class was able to identify every feature in the worksheet without any help or instruction from me expect for the following:

In the post-activity discussion, students had excellent questions that we were then able to discuss such as "how do you tell the difference between an esker and a moraine in topography" so we were able to talk about scale. Students (again with their first exposure to contours) also realized that kettle lakes and kames look the same if there is no water and you would need a way to show one is going up and one in going down toward the center. This allowed us to then discuss contour labels, which they had not yet been introduced to.

Assessment

The worksheet questions of topographic maps that have features for them to identify was my assessment of the peer-learning.

References and Resources

AR Sandbox: https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/SARndbox/