Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module. Students use field data from rivers to understand how river discharge is calculated.

In this video scientists discuss possible rates of sea level rise, storms and resulting damage, rising temperatures and melting ice, and their collective effects on ecosystems.

In this video segment adapted from NASA, students in Matsuyama City, Japan, interview Expedition 8 Commander and NASA Science Officer Mike Foale and Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri about life and work aboard the International Space Station.

1. Instructor identifies an appropriate number of key dates in the Precambrian to investigate.
2. Students break into groups (method to be determined by instructor) and each group will be assigned a particular time in the Precambrian (one author likes to have groups draw assignments out of hat!).
3. Students investigate their time period using appropriate source materials (we suggest the class notes, textbook and perhaps supplementary materials identified in the form of popular articles (e.g., Scientific American, Smithsonian, National Geographic, etc.) or websites.
Questions

Using your prior knowledge of your time period, what scientific equipment might you want to take with you?
What will you experience on your time travels?
Is there a place to land?
What is the temperature?
Can you breathe the atmosphere?
Do you need a life support system?
What is the atmosphere composed of?
Is there any water? What is its phase? Can you drink it?
Do you see any life, or evidence of its presence? How would you recognize the life?
What life do you expect to observe or not observe, and why?
What questions were you able to answer with your trip?
What questions were you unable to answer?
What aspects of the environment at this time most surprised or stuck you?

4. Group presentation
a) Create a very simple PowerPoint presentation (10 minutes) for the class.
b) Each group member must present part of the information.

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The Externalities Game is a non-cooperative game that teaches students about the concept of environmental externalities and allows them to directly experience the moral dimensions of collective action problems. It has been particularly effective for teaching students about the moral aspects of the climate change. Grades are used to create the tension between earning individual grade points at the expense of group benefit. This is part of a research project funded by the National Science Foundation.

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The classic physical optics textbook approach to double-refraction starts from Huyghens constructions of wave fronts and from the optical indicatrix. Optical indicatrices are useful for a systematic description of optical properties in crystals, but students do not usually consider them an easy subject, and, therefore, shy away from optical crystallography. This is unfortunate since a basic understanding of optical crystallography is prerequisite to a correct interpretation of phenomena observed with the polarizing microscope, the most commonly used tool for the detailed study of rocks.
Generally, students are comfortable with simple optical terms like reflection and refraction, while it is uncommon that they actually have seen double-refraction and noticed that crystals polarize light. Many have an unnecessarily complicated idea about vibration directions, interference colors, and interference figures; they assume such phenomena always require a microscope to observe. This is not so. Students well trained in thin section microscopy are often surprised that interference figures can be made visible macroscopically.
The purpose of the experiments below is to impart an intuitive understanding of the interaction between light and crystals and, thus, of optical crystallography. This will help to demystify what is seen in the polarizing microscope, and will better prepare the student for the introduction of optical indicatrices as 3-D models to describe the directional dependence of light velocities, and thus refractive indices in anisotropic crystals.

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In this experiment, students use a solar cooker to model the greenhouse effect. Students collect, track, and compare data including insolation, ambient temperature, and water temperature with various instruments such as a pyranometer, thermometers, and temperature probes. They also develop their own experiments (incorporating set up, controls, data collection and presentation) to examine the strength of ultraviolet radiation from the sun with various protective materials using uv-sensitive beads. They must then analyze the data, finding correlations and conclusions, and determine the best way to present the results (tables, graphs, write-up).

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In this activity, students experiment with the effects of Reynolds numbers (viscosity), particle shape, and particle concentration (flocculation) on settling velocity.

This activity asks students to explain earthquake hazard probabilities to a lay audience of citizens, government officials and others.

Using the 5E instructional model, students discover the value of using color maps to visualize data. The activity requires students to create a color map of the ozone hole from Dobson data values derived from the Aura satellite. Students then interpret that map and compare and evaluate different color scales. Note that this is the Spanish version of Exploring Color Maps: Using Stratospheric Ozone Data.

This article provides an overview of orienteering and geocaching as well as suggestions for incorporating these activities into elementary classrooms

This activity is designed to do a number of things. Topically, the exercise provides the students with the chance to examine the data from which the diversity curve of marine invertebrates has been constructed. The trends that the students notice both in the overall diversity and which fossil groups are making it up segue into the organismal half of the course. Analytically, the exercise gives students practice with online databases, spreadsheet analysis and display, and hypothesis testing as they compare the diversity histories of different groups.

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Students conduct a regional seismic hazard analysis of a region of the United States of their choosing*. Using on-line data, they bring together and investigate the interaction of multiple types of data [ground motion (measured by GPS from UNAVCO), historical earthquake data and fault data] to associate rates of deformation and earthquake activity with hazard potential. Students would develop an assessment of seismic hazard potential. This project also introduces the idea of fault loading and qualitative earthquake interaction.

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In this activity, student teams conduct a quantitative exploration of the connections between parts of the Earth system, through examination of a time series of environmental data maps. By investigating the connections between environmental data, they see how Earth processes interact on varying time and spatial scales.This is one of six interrelated learning activities in the student activity guide associated with the GLOBE Earth System Poster, “Exploring Connections in Year 2007.” A series of assessment and extension activities are included.

This assignment allows students to utilize real soil data/information presented online to learn how the some of the physical properties of the soil influence the chemistry of the soil and health of the ecosystem.

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This activity has students work together to summarize regional effects of climate change and other environmental issues, which a focus on how these issues may influence agriculture and water availability. Students present a region to the group and create a layperson summary of the effects of climate change and other environmental change on their region.

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Through the use of the 5E instructional model, students discover the value of using color maps to visualize data. The activity requires students to create a color map of the ozone hole from Dobson data values derived from the Aura satellite. Students then interpret that map and compare and evaluate different color scales.

At the end of this exercise students will be able to use computer-based software to draw crystal structures and visualize symmetries present in minerals. By varying the way in which atoms or groups of atoms are displayed, they will begin to see how atoms link through bonds. Students will also begin to investigate the effects of variable composition on bonding on unit cell parameters.

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Each student will load a database file into ArcGIS software during the class period. Following the written instructions, each student will work through various steps necessary to analyze the earthquake hazards. Uses online and/or real-time data Addresses student fear of quantitative aspect and/or inadequate quantitative skills

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Students learn far more from doing than from viewing. By seeing relationships that they have developed themselves, by diagraming those relationships themselves, students learn far more than merely reading over what someone else has done. It is argued that especially for the dynamic problems encountered in environmental and resource economics, Excel has a comparative advantage as a learning aid. We develop a simple, flexible Excel assignment to illustrate the Brander and Taylor (1998) model of the Easter Island economy. Brander and Taylor argue that on Easter Island a crucial natural resource, the island's palm forest, was an open-access (res nullius) resource, leading to over harvesting and eventual societal collapse. Brander and Taylor's simple model showing the interaction of human population with a renewable resource, a forest, mimics what is known about the human population and forest from archaeological evidence.

The open access institutional protection of renewable resources is illustrated by a simple diagram of population and resource stock over centuries, a model much like ordinary predator-prey models in biology. Variations on the basic Brander and Taylor model, such as changes in propoerty rights institutions and/or changes in technology, based on published work in the literature, can be explored and compared to the original Brander and Taylor results of boom and eventual collapse.

Brander, J.A. and M.S. Taylor (1998). The simple economics of Easter Island: A Ricardo -- Malthus model of renewable resource use. American Economic Review

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