This activity is an investigation to determine the effect of soil type on plant growth. The students will develop an understanding of the plant as producer.

Teaching sustainability through Habitat for Humanity.

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Compiled by Kyle Gray, University of Akron, 'krg10@uakron.edu' and David N. Steer, University of Akron, 'steer@uakron.edu'

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This towing lab students use a active learning activity to develop planning, problem solving and conceptual skills to clarify understanding of applied and net force. The assessment is the correct composition of a vector diagram.

This activity is a guided lab where the students gather data from different swinging pendulums, compares the results to equation results, and finally draws general conclusions on these results.

In this activity, students create and interpret a water table contour map. Students utilize groundwater well elevations and the depth to the water table at each well to determine the water table elevation at each well location. Then they utilize that information to create a contour map of the water table and determine the direction of groundwater flow.

This is a lesson dealing with a new subdivision of bioethics called neuroethics. As our knowledge of the brain and nervous system expands, so do the ethical issues that result from this knowledge. This new area of study results from our increasing research in the field of neurobiology. In the first part of this activity, students will discuss the stigma associated with psychological illness. They will then be introduced to Dr. Kay Jamison who discusses some of the ethical implications of bipolar disorder. The class will take part in an activity called a Topical Barometer where they will have to choose a position regarding an ethical decision. In Part 2 of the activity, they will write a position paper after exploring the topic of drug enhancement, another controversial issue in the world of neuroscience. From the original handout text by Caren Gough

A hands-on lab to explore Superfund, Toxics Release Inventory and TOXMAP online data to examine geographies of hazardous waste, toxic releases into the environment and their connections with socio-economic, environmental and health impacts. The lab includes directed and self-directed components.

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Students first study the movement of water in aquifers through a lecture on Darcy's flow experiment. Then they practice applying the concepts of hydraulic conductivity and head differentials to 1 dimensional column examples. Next they use flow simulators to view flow through a cross section of an aquifer model. This activity is the final piece in the development of the idea of head driven flow. Students are given data about the thickness and head values of an aquifer member. They plot the aquifer thickness and potentiometric surface then determine the flow direction and estimate the groundwater flow velocity.

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Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module. Students calculate the number of days it takes for participants in a hypothetical weight-reduction program to reach a target weight. QL: rates of change.

This activity is a mock investigation into different macroinvertebrates found in the streams in your local city. Students will record and analyze data that will lead them to learn if the water quality is good or bad in their backyard.

Minerals are inorganic chemical compounds with a wide range of physical and chemical properties. Geologists frequently measure and observe properties such as hardness, specific gravity, color, etc. Unfortunately, students usually view these properties simply as tools for identifying unknown mineral specimens. One of the objectives of this exercise is to make students aware of the fact that minerals have many additional properties that can be measured, and that all of the physical and chemical properties of minerals have important applications beyond that of simple mineral identification.
Please do not let the title of this exercise scare you away. Introducing students to thermodynamics is not the primary objective. Getting students to "do" science - to observe, record, and interpret experimental data - is the primary goal. Heat capacity just happens to be a good vehicle for this purpose.

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This activity is a classroom demonstration activity in which students make predictions and explore the concepts and applications of heat transfer and heat absorption.

This exercise follows several class lectures and reading assignments that focus on solar energy fluxes, wind, and ocean circulation as separate components. Students are split into small groups (2-4 depending on class size) and are asked to answer the questions presented based on the graphed data. Student groups are given approximately 20 minutes to discuss their answers. This is followed by instructor moderated discussion of the different group answers in the context of the role of heat as the engine of the climate system. Most students have little background in graph interpretation (especially understanding negative values) and the small group format creates a less-threatening peer environment which helps to involve all students in the exercise. The group discussion provides a great lead in for further lecture on interactions between different elements in the global climate system in following class periods and assignments.

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The is a curriculum module from the project Data Sets and Inquiry in Geoscience Education (DIGS). The module consists of a week-long unit and two-day performance assessment in which students apply the inquiry skills to problem-based investigations of urban micro-climates. The unit and performance assessment present semi-parallel tasks but about different cities (Phoenix and Chicago).

Sudents draw conclusions about the extent to which multiple decades of temperature data about Phoenix suggest that a shift in local climate is taking place as opposed to exhibiting nothing more than natural variability. The data are from the Global Climate Historical Network (GHCN) database. GHCN is a large, multi-year, international project to measure temperature, precipitation, and air pressure from near the ground. Each monthly maximum and minimum temperature is the highest and lowest temperature reading for the month, measured in Celsius. In Phoenix and in most other places, the temperature data are collected at local airports. The performance assessment for this module requires that students apply the methods and findings from the investigation of the climate data for Phoenix to climate data for Chicago. The Chicago data shows less evidence of trends in temperature change, and this is most evident comparing the night-time minimum temperature fluctuations between the two cities. Chicago also exhibits less increase in urban development and population growth than does Phoenix. In contrast to the curriculum unit, which primarily uses constructed-response tasks to encourage student explanation and discussion, the climate assessment tasks pose explicit selected- and constructed-response questions to ensure that the items elicit the intended thinking and hence provide evidence of the targeted standards-aligned skills and understandings.

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This activity allows students to better understand radiometric dating and absolute dating techniques by calculating radiometric ages of zircon crystals. Their calculated ages then serve as tools to practice creating graphs, interpret analytic data, and reconstruct geologic events.

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Students learn the basic relationship of Snell's Law, practice applying it to a situation, then are given another situation where it "doesn't work."??? This situation turns out to be one in which total internal reflection occurs. Students are then shown what happens with classroom apparatus.

An online brain dominance inventory provides students with information on their brain dominance and information processing style. This relates to perception and learning styles.

In the hierarchical alignment activity, students are given multiple opportunities to align time to space in a linear representation. They begin by scaling a familiar amount of time (e.g. a personal time line) to a spatial representation (e.g. a meter stick), and progressively align increasing/decreasing amounts until completing the target unfamiliar time line (e.g. geologic time). For example, in the hierarchical alignment of geologic time, students can work through 10 time lines: personal, human lifespan, American history, Recorded history, human evolution, Cenozoic, Phanerozoic, Proterozoic, Archean, and then Hadean.

While the amount of time varies, the amount of space remains constant: in this example, students align all new temporal scales to one meter. For each time line, students are asked to locate specific events, hierarchicaly organized divisions of time, and the length of the time line in order to engage the students in thinking about that temporal scale. Additionally, every time students align a new temporal scale to space, they locate all previous scales relative to the current scale.

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