Virtual Lab: "Big Nine" Silicates in Thin Section
Summary
This virtual lab activity uses Virtual Microscope to help students create their own ranked lists of diagnostic properties for the "Big Nine" silicate minerals/groups, which includes quartz, muscovite, biotite, plagioclase feldspar, potassium feldspar, clinopyroxene, orthopyroxene, amphibole, and olivine. Students synthesize all of their optical mineralogy skills and utilize reliable resources to complete this lab.
Collapse
Context
Audience
This is for an undergraduate introductory mineralogy or optical mineralogy course, or as a review in petrology. It is intended as an asynchronous, remote optical mineralogy lab.
Skills and concepts that students must have mastered
This activity requires that students have already learned basic optical mineralogy skills/concepts, including relief, plain polarized light, cross polarized light, pleochroism, birefringence/interference colors, cleavage, and twinning. It is helpful if they are familiar with interference figures and how to determine optic class and sign, but not necessary.
How the activity is situated in the course
This is a lab activity I use after students learn the basic optical mineralogy skills, but they don't have a lot of experience trying to identify minerals yet.
Goals
Content/concepts goals for this activity
mineral identification in thin section, practicing optical mineralogy skills, communicating features of common silicate minerals in thin section, classifying minerals, determining diagnostic properties of silicates in thin section
Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity
ranking information in terms of usefulness for a specific purposes, identifying which pieces of information can be used to distinguish between minerals
Other skills goals for this activity
annotating figures
Description and Teaching Materials
This is a virtual optical mineralogy lab using Virtual Microscope. Students will read a strategy for how to identify minerals in thin section, then use Virtual Microscope to positively identify the "Big Nine" silicate minerals/mineral groups, which include quartz, plagioclase feldspar, potassium feldspar, muscovite, biotite, amphibole, orthopyroxene, clinopyroxene, and olivine. The students are given some resources to help them in their identification (linked in document) and asked to rank the optical properties they used in terms of usefulness in identifying each mineral. There are also some questions to get the students to practice mineral classification.
Virtual Lab: Big Nine Silicates in Thin Section (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 32kB Nov13 20)
Teaching Notes and Tips
This assignment was originally created as a Google doc, and the video linked this document (explaining how to document and annotate their mineral IDs) is applicable only for using the assignment as a Google doc. Therefore, I recommend either using the Google doc link provided in References and Resources (below), changing the instructions in the Word doc, or linking your own video instructions.
Assessment
This assignment can be graded for accuracy and effort.
References and Resources
Link to assignment as a Google Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14AZB26ofKMOeMkoroPcFXZHkn718kW38xBCw9iMRZpc/copy
This is the format the assignment is best used in. See teaching notes above for reason.