Hazards Exploration
Summary
The purpose of this assignment is to allow students to explore how likely natural hazards are in different areas of the United States. It includes a deeper dive into North Carolina hazards, and may be adapted to examine natural hazards and risks in your home state or territory. It provides practice using interactive maps. This is used as an engagment activity to get students interested in hazards.
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Context
Audience
Undergraduate introductory level courses, introduction to surface processes course.
Skills and concepts that students must have mastered
Students may benefit from knowing the difference between risks and hazards, and having definitions of different hazard types.
How the activity is situated in the course
This is used in the introductory portion of this course as a student engagement mechanism, to demonstrate relevance of studying natural hazards.
Goals
Content/concepts goals for this activity
This activity will help you identify where various natural hazards occur and hazard exposure levels in North Carolina and around the United States.
Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity
Students are asked to hypothesize about correlations between hazards.
Skills goals for this activity
Students will practice using interactive maps. This activity can be modified to help students learn how to navigate between map layers.
Description and Teaching Materials
This activity only includes a task prompt, relevant websites, and short-answer questions that are used as the basis for an in-class discussion.
It is intended to be used in a lecture course as an in-class activity that students complete using their laptops. It could easily be assigned as homework, or given in as an online course assignment. If given as homework, I recommend reserving time in class to discuss with classmates and the instructor, as I have found this to be a valuable component of this lesson in my course.
Student Handout for Hazards Assignment (Microsoft Word 2007 (.docx) 4.3MB Apr9 26)
Assessment
Students complete short answer questions as part of this assignment. Classroom discussion of student responses acts as a formative assessment.
References and Resources
Websites used (note: you may want to add additional websites to the activity for your state or territory)