This module teaches basic concepts in igneous petrology through relating hand specimen identification of lavas to major element geochemistry, using the Central American volcanic arc as an example.

This activity is a indoor lab where student gather data about centripital acceleration and write up a lab based on their findings.

Developed by a team of scientists from two national laboratories, education researchers, gamers, and a professional game developer, Challenge and Persuade is a highly social, fast-paced, fun-to-play card game in which players compete in applying skills in argumentation. Through game play, players come to understand the many manifestations of how the extreme amplification of the human population, exploding worldwide demand for energy, increasing exploitation of water resources, and alteration of the planet's climateâare tightly intertwined at the nexus of energy, water, and climate; one cannot be considered in isolation from the other two. Development was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Students carry into class pre-conceptions based on stories they've heard, articles they've read and experiences they've had. One of the best opportunities to teach metacognition is at a 'gotcha' moment when they come to realize their pre-conception is amiss.

In this assignment students receive six air photos of a 4 km stretch of Fountain Creek in El Paso Country, Colorado (38.7 N, 104.715 W) taken between 1989 and 2006 and are asked to evaluate and discuss how Fountain Creek has changed through the years. The main nuts and bolts of the assignment are an analysis of these repeat air photos and production of a map that depicts how the course of the river (or its cut-banks, point bars and bank-to-bank width) changes through time. To make this map, students can use trace paper/Mylar, or software such as ArcGIS or Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, but whatever their method they use they need to be able to establish a scale allowing them to measure and calculate rates of change. What change to quantify is purposely left open ended - students typically focus on measuring rates of cut-bank erosion, point bar migration, bank-to-bank width changes, channel length or sinuosity variation over the prescribed study area - and is usually linked directly to what they decide to map, such as the course of the river or the extent of the 'active' channel. After producing their map and making measurements, the final part of the assignment is synthesis. In the final questions, students are asked to summarize and describe in words what's happening to the channel through time, with reference to their map and calculations, and to consider the environmental conditions that are driving the changes observed.

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This activity is a hands-on activity to help students learn the behavior of gas particles.

This activity will include the students observing the monarch life cycle inside the classroom, a field experience observing monarch life on a milkweed plant and drawing it, and back in the classroom students will make a pop-up book of the monarch's life cycle with a short description on each page.

This lesson plan is written around a brief role-play in which students learn about and act out plants and animals in a salt marsh habitat as the tides change.

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This investigation will have students testing how heating and cooling can change the state of matter. They will test a variety of materials determine whether a change takes place through heating/cooling.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module. Students build spreadsheets to explore conditions that lead to chaotic behavior in logistic models of populations that grow discretely.

Character coding has been called the bete noire of phylogenetic analysis. As you may have seen from class, the definition of "character" is squishy and varies between authors. Although there isn't agreement on exactly what a character is, it is possible to predict how certain character definitions and coding strategies affect phylogenetic analysis.
This activity focuses on character coding, specifically about how different coding strategies can affect analysis. In this exercise we will try to look at different coding strategies by considering the simple shapes below.

(1) What is a character, and what qualities do characters have?
(2) Given the 'morphology' depicted above, what features vary?
(3) Given the variation you identified, come up with as many character codings as you can; i.e., different ways that this variation can be coded into characters.
(4) For each of the coding strategies you come up with in question 3, identify its assumptions, limitations, and strengths.
(5) Identify your preferred coding strategy and defend your choice.

Students asked to define what a character is and to discuss what they 'require', and then to come up with an exhaustive list of coding strategies for the sample morphology. They are then asked to list assumptions/limitations of each strategy.

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This activity examines the characteristics of light. Students demonstrate that light travels straight and does not bend around an object.

To prepare for this exercise students read about the processes that operate at plate boundaries and how they are related to the distinct patterns of seismicity, volcanism, surface elevations (e.g., ridges versus trenches), and seafloor ages characteristic of different boundary types. During the week the assignment is available online, students have access to:
(1) an index map that locates three boundaries they are to study; and
(2) four maps from Sawyer's Discovering Plate Boundaries website that provide the data mentioned above.Â

Student tasks are to:Â
(1) document patterns in each type of data along the three targeted boundaries; andÂ
(2) use these observations in conjunction with their understandings of the processes that operate along different types of boundaries to decide whether each of the targeted sites is most likely to be a divergent, convergent, or shear boundary.Â

This activity gives students practice in map reading, interpreting the likely tectonic setting of a boundary by pulling together constraints from several types of data, and collaborating with their classmates in an online environment. The activity also provides a foundation for understanding a wide range of phenomena that are discussed later in the semester in the context of plate tectonic processes.
Modifications on this activity from the community

Show More
Show LessContributed by Tom Hickson
I also use a version of Dale Sawyer's Discovering Plate Boundaries exercise in an online course. I used the basic idea of this activity and moved in onto Canvas, our LMS. Here is my adaptation of the activity, with maps and examples, illustrating how I have implemented it:

Description of the assignment: Student handout, ONLINE_ Characterizing Plate Boundaries (adapted).pdf (Acrobat (PDF) 166kB Feb19 21)
Answer sheet for students to record observations and interpretations: Target Boundaries: Student answer sheet (Acrobat (PDF) 1MB Feb19 21)
World map with Target Boundaries (Acrobat (PDF) 483kB Feb19 21)

Maps of the "target boundaries" -- my selected areas of focus for the exercise:

Example map, Boundary 3

Provenance: Thomas A. Hickson, University of St. Thomas
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.












Example map, Boundary 2

Provenance: Thomas A. Hickson, University of St. Thomas
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.












Map example, boundary 1

Provenance: Thomas A. Hickson, University of St. Thomas
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.

Teaching Tips
Adaptations that allow this activity to be successful in an online environment
Sawyer's Discovering Plate Boundaries is a jigsaw exercise in which students collaboratively develop an empirical classification of plate boundaries by first studying an individual data set (e.g., seismicity) and then working as part of a multidisciplinary team to develop a composite classification for the boundaries of a single plate using several types of data. In order for the classification to be truly empirical, students are not introduced to the "traditional" classification of plate boundaries till the end of the exercise.Â

In adapting this assignment to the online environment I have:

(1) asked students to prepare by becoming familiar with the standard classification of plate boundaries and the processes that operate at them;Â
(2) limited their work to three targeted boundaries of different types; andÂ
(3) provided guidance about which features to look for in the each data set. I have found that these modifications help online students, who often work alone "on their own schedules", to avoid getting "lost" and frustrated with the assignment and to compensate for the lack of collaborative input they would receive in a classroom setting.

Elements of this activity that are most effective
The success of this exercise is really seems to depend on how well a student follows the directions. If a student learns about the geologic differences among plate boundaries, makes careful observations, and thoughtfully compares his or her observations to the expected patterns he or she typically does quite well based on answers to the follow-up questions. If, on the other hand, a student simply looks up the types of the targeted boundaries on a map and then attempts to "back out" the observations that he or she thinks should fit, the result is often inconsistency and a poor score on the questions. (I can often tell which approach a student is taking based on the queries they post to the discussion board, but rarely seem to be able to get those who are trying to work backwards through the assignment to change direction.)
Recommendations for other faculty adapting this activity to their own course:
To date my experience developing an engaging online exercise to help students learn the principles of plate tectonics has only been partly successful. I think that having such an exercise is critical, however, because this topic provides the framework for so much of what we learn in the geosciences. Based on my efforts to adapt elements of Discovering Plate Boundaries to an online environment I would offer three recommendations.

(1) Provide examples. Confronted with an unfamiliar map students are sometimes confused when asked to decide if seafloor age, for example, is uniform or variable along the length of a boundary. Showing them what you mean using snapshots from a map can often clear questions like this up quickly. Similarly, for written work a single example that gives them a clear sense of "what you're looking for" and can often head off a lot of questions.
(2) Choose the boundaries you ask students to study carefully. The scarcity of documented volcanism along a mid-ocean ridge or the burial of seafloor age belts by sediment along a trench can result in student observations that are correct, but problematic for correctly assessing the nature of a boundary.
(3) Stay on top of student questions and comments, and be prepared to make well-publicized "mid-course corrections" if something you thought was clear turns out to be misunderstood. These minor corrections happen naturally in face-to-face classes but can require real diligence to catch and correct in the online environment.

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This activity is a 2 part lab activity where students record properties of various bars of soap, and make models of molecules as they are cooled or heated. Students develop a new experiment changing one variable.

This activity is a lab where students make qualitative and quantitative observation on a chemical change. They will see that gases have mass in accordance with the conservation of matter.

The purpose of this assignment is for students to synthesize field observations, petrography, and whole-rock chemical analyses in order to investigate chemical differentiation processes in a basaltic magma chamber. The students first complete a petrography lab on both hand samples and thin sections that represent a complete stratigraphic section through sill at Fort Lee, NJ. I then provide them with major- and trace-element data and a table of distribution coefficients for common phases that would be crystallizing from basaltic magma. I then ask them to discuss the chemical differentiation of the sill by writing up a 1-2 page interpretative summary based on their petrographic observations and the chemical data.

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This STELLA modeling and writing assignment helps students confront and replace common misconceptions about chemical equilibrium.

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This STELLA modeling and writing assignment helps students confront and replace common misconceptions about chemical equilibrium.

Spreadsheets Across Curriculum module. Students build spreadsheets to compare the time course of a reaction that goes to completion to that of an equilibrium reaction.

In this exercise students utilize data from geochemistry databases to analyze inputs and outputs associated with arc volcanism.

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