This activity is an inquiry-based investigation where students discover the indicators of chemical reactions (endothermic and exothermic) by collecting data and using that data to develop a testable question for further experimentation.

This activity provides students with the opportunity to gather data from a controlled experiment setting, interpret their findings and use the data to draw conclusions to solve a mystery.

Students will compare ingredients in two different pancake recipes, then taste the difference. We will talk about the chemical reaction that happened when the recipes are mixed and why there are bubbles in the pancakes.

This tombstone weathering lab is designed to provide students with tangible understanding of chemical weathering and weathering rates. To prepare for this lab, students will have learned in previous labs to identify common minerals and rocks and will have attended lectures about the process of chemical weathering. During the first part of the lab we travel to the city cemetery to collect data on the age and extent of chemical weathering of tombstones that are made of limestone and igneous rocks. After collecting data for ~1 hour, we return to the computer lab where students use Microsoft Excel to analyze and interpret their data. Their task is to calculate a chemical weathering rate for limestone for our region and compare that rate to those from other regions. This activity gives students experience in the process of scientific inquiry: data collection, data analysis and data interpretation. Students develop Microsoft Excel skills: writing formulas, producing charts, understanding trendlines and R2 values.

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This activity is a classroom lab where students observe and classify chemical and physical changes using the five characteristics of a chemical change, interpret their findings, and use evidence to support their findings.

From the scientific viewpoint, this evaluation will help the students see a process instead of just a data collection event, and they will get to practice estimating amounts. They will also need to determine the products of any reactions performed during the experiment. From the standpoint of sustainability, this evaluation is intended to help the student recognize the environmental "cost" of an experiment-in consumables used and in waste products generated.

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Matching game, including matching common ionic charges and ions and the compounds they form and naming of greek prefixes for covalent molecules.

This activity provides a demonstration and lab exploration of one of the main "building blocks" of the periodic table of elements: chlorine. During the lab, students compare physical and chemical properties of chlorine compounds.

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Click to watch Alain Plattner discuss his activity or watch the full webinar.We use MATLAB functions available from https://github.com/NSGeophysics/Seism-O to simulate the superimposition of different seismic waves recorded in a simple near-surface geophysics setting. The choice of the geophone layout influences how easy it is to discern the different wave types, which is crucial for the success of a near-surface seismics survey. Students learn which parameters they should try to estimate before the survey, why these parameters are crucial, and how they influence the setup of the survey.

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Students research various options for new appliances and make purchasing decisions based not merely on purchase price, but also on energy efficiency, which has implications for the planet AND for longer-term personal finances. Students calculate the "payback period" for the more energy efficient appliance and calculate long-term savings.

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In an upper-level seminar course, students bear significant responsibility for their learning. This activity provides the framework to help them identify the exact topics that they will discuss throughout a course in Environmental Analysis. The students are given constraints so that they don't either wander completely aimlessly through the environmental literature or pick only papers on their favorite topic. They are instead asked to dip into the literature to find papers that deal with analysis of pollutants in air, water, and solid matrices, and to have at least one that is relevant to climate change.

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GIS techniques, data sources, and other resources are so numerous and varied that, even if someone is doing GIS work regularly, it's common to say, "Now how did I do that last time?" or "Where did I get that data?". One of the main goals of my GIS course is to have students create a personal GIS portfolio that will be useful to them in the future, either for projects at Hamilton or in a job after graduation.
Portfolios must include, at a minimum, a spreadsheet of data sources and information about downloading and prepping data from each site; an annotated Word doc of useful web sites; a DVD collection of projects and data from the course; and an organized notebook that contains the items listed above plus all class handouts, exercises, and printouts of products.

What I stress in this assignment is that portfolios need to be more than collections of GIS stuff – they must be useful for the future. To make portfolios useful for the future, students have to give significant thought not only to organization but how they will be able to find information in their portfolios in the future and how they can build indexes, annotations, flow charts, etc. to make their portfolios more than a collection of pieces of paper in a binder.

This lesson has students solving the mystery of a note by conducting chromatography. They will test different washable markers and see that different marker colors are made up of various pigments. They will compare and contrast the note chromatography with other chromatography results from a variety of markers.

This is a laboratory investigation where students will use the scientific method to solve a new, experimental question in chromatography.

The 'A Civil Action' 1-D Contaminant Transport Game is an EXCEL spreadsheet that enables students to compute concentrations of TCE traveling in the groundwater flow system toward well H that emanate from the W.R. Grace site. The idea of the game is to draw students into learning some of the fundamental concepts about (1) how contaminants move in the subsurface and (2) how models can be used to test hypotheses. These concepts are taught within the context of the famous 'A Civil Action' trial described in the book by Jonathan Harr (1996) and the movie starring John Travolta (1998).

The spreadsheet computes values of hydraulic head, advective flow velocities and traveltimes, contaminant velocities, and contaminant concentrations at 20 locations along the flowpath from W.R. Grace to the Aberjona River. Breakthrough curves showing changes in concentration versus distance and changes in concentration versus time pop-up automatically (see below). The spreadsheet also creates graphs of advective and contaminant velocities versus distance.

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Students were provided with drawings of snowflakes and were asked to construct a cladogram of the snowflakes. The drawings were provided by the students themselves during a quiz a few weeks earlier. (The quiz was 1: write your name, 2: draw a snowflake). There were 17 students and therefore 17 snowflakes. Students are asked to construct a character table and determine various character states. Then students construct a second table showing each snowflake and its state for each of the characters. Finally, students are asked to use this to construct a cladogram, as best they can, from their character matrix. Students note homologies and count the steps in their cladograms.

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lab assignments intended to teach the basics of reading phylogenetic diagrams and parsimony optimization.

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The first page of the presentation includes photos of 12 animals. I print this page, cut up the photos, and give a set of photos to each group of students. Working in groups of 2 or 3, the students spend ~10 minutes arranging the photos to depict the evolutionary relationships among the animals. This exercise is followed by 4 clicker questions about relationships that students commonly misconstrue due to convergence or shared primitive features. I use the clicker questions to initiate class discussion of group results. Then we discuss the evidence (anatomy, biochemistry) for current thinking about these relationships. Once we have established a consensus, students are asked to place pictures of a subset of the animals at the tips of the branches on a pre-designed cladogram. The activity gives me insight into students' preconceptions regarding vertebrate phylogeny, encourages students to identify their own misconceptions, promotes peer instruction and highlights problems associated with determining relationships based on shared primitive features. Placing the animals on a pre-designed cladogram allows students to translate their hypothesis about relationships into a visual diagram, an exercise that I hope will help students to extract the phylogenetic hypotheses depicted on cladograms in papers and textbooks. Once we have established a consensus cladogram, students must go one step further and add evidence (synapomorphies) to their cladograms. Students spend ~ 10 minutes brainstorming with their group to place synapormorphies at each node of the diagram. An example is provided for whales and hippos, groups for which the evidence of shared ancestry is difficult to recognize based on the anatomy of living specimens. After adding synapomorphies to their diagrams, students will work together as a class, contributing shared derived features to a group cladogram. If time permits, it would also be possible to complete the exercise with a gallery walk, where each group posts a copy of their cladogram + synapomorphies on the wall for other groups to examine and edit.

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Students observe clams (Mercenaria) in a salt water aquarium, paying attention to siphons and any burrowing. They then remove the clams and describe the external morphology. The clams are then dissected, with special attention made to features (siphons, muscles) that leave observable marks on the shells. They are then provided the shells of a different genus (Mya) and asked to predict the soft tissue morphology and life mode.

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