A realistic mass and spring laboratory. Hang masses from springs and adjust the spring stiffness and damping. You can even slow time. Transport the lab to different planets. A chart shows the kinetic, potential, and thermal energy for each spring.

Marie Hartford's class of 5th grade scientists learn about the importance of water quality and its benefits to wildlife and the environment. Within the narrow confines of pH necessary for their tank of red-legged frogs, students use a combination of pond and tap water to keep the tank healthy, using their collected data to make the decision on the proportion between the two.

Measure and Map Our Galaxy: The Milky Way Project needs your help looking through tens of thousands of images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. By telling us what you see in this infrared data, we can better understand how stars form. The scale of this project necessitates group participation. We need the help of the public to classify the thousands of images we have on file. If all 900,000 Zooniverse members classified a few images, this project would be done in no time!

In this activity, students explore the importance of adequate sampling strategies when conducting a scientific investigation. They are tasked with determining the average temperature of the Earth, using data sets easily found on the Internet, and determine the kind and size of sample necessary to calculate a representative average. The resource includes a student data sheet and an authentic assessment for the module, where students discuss the establishment of a habitation site on Mars. This is Activity C in module 2, titled "Modeling Hot and Cold Planets," of the resource, Earth Climate Course: What Determines a Planet's Climate? The course aims to help students to develop an understanding of our environment as a system of human and natural processes that result in changes that occur over various space and time scales.

Students learn the physical properties of sound, how it travels and how noise impacts human health—including the quality of student learning. They learn different techniques that engineers use in industry to monitor noise level exposure and then put their knowledge to work by using a smart phone noise meter app to measure the noise level at an area of interest, such as busy roadways near the school. They devise an experimental procedure to measure sound levels in their classroom, at the source of loud noise (such as a busy road or construction site), and in between. Teams collect data using smart phones/tablets, microphones and noise apps. They calculate wave properties, including frequency, wavelength and amplitude. A PowerPoint® presentation, three worksheets and a quiz are provided.

The goal of the Moon Zoo website is "to provide detailed crater counts for as much of the Moon's surface as possible." On the website, interested parties can help out with this effort by examining images of the moon's surface and providing feedback to be used by the team of researchers in charge of the Moon Zoo project. First-time visitors should click on the "How To Take Part" for a tutorial that will help determine which project they might be best suited for. Visitors who wish to take part in the project will need to register on the website, and that process only takes a few minutes. Moving on, the website has an online forum where users can trade information as well as a blog.

In this group task students collect data and analyze from the class to answer the question "is there an association between whether a student plays a sport and whether he or she plays a musical instrument? "

Edward Snowden's revelations about government surveillance of private citizens sparked debate around the world about the trade off between privacy and security. The Institute for Humane Studies invited Professor Ronald Sievert of Texas A&M and Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation to answer questions about government data collection. This is their debate.

Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I. These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.

Vision is the primary sense of many animals and much is known about how vision is processed in the mammalian nervous system. One distinct property of the primary visual cortex is a highly organized pattern of sensitivity to location and orientation of objects in the visual field. But how did we learn this? An important tool is the ability to design experiments to map out the structure and response of a system such as vision. In this activity, students learn about the visual system and then conduct a model experiment to map the visual field response of a Panoptes robot. (In Greek mythology, Argus Panoptes was the "all-seeing" watchman giant with 100 eyes.) A simple activity modification enables a true black box experiment, in which students do not directly observe how the visual system is configured, and must match the input to the output in order to reconstruct the unseen system inside the box.

Students apply concepts of disease transmission to analyze infection data, either provided or created using Bluetooth-enabled Android devices. This data collection may include several cases, such as small static groups (representing historically rural areas), several roaming students (representing world-travelers), or one large, tightly knit group (representing urban populations). To explore the algorithms to a deeper degree, students may also design their own diseases using the App Inventor framework.

Students will raise questions about the natural world and seek answers by making careful observations about the weather. Students will measure, record and describe weather conditions using common tools, like thermometer, anemometer, rain gauge and possibly, light meter.

On December 16, 2010, the Zooniverse launched the original Planet Hunters to enlist the public's help to search data from the NASA's Kepler spacecraft for the characteristic drop in light due to an orbiting extrasolar planets (exoplanets) crossing in front of their parent stars. Back then we didn't know what we would find. The project was a gamble on the ability of human pattern recognition to beat machines just occasionally and spot the telltale dip from a transiting planet that was missed by automated routines looking for repeating patterns. It may have been the case that no new planets were discovered and that computers had the job down to a fine art. The gamble paid off. The original Planet Hunters project discovered a bounty of unknown planet candidates and several confirmed planets, resulting from the efforts of nearly 300,000 volunteers worldwide.

In this activity, learners work in groups to determine the mass and volume of four samples: glass marbles, steel washers or nuts, pieces of pine wood, and pieces of PVC pipe. Learners then plot the data points on a large class graph of mass vs. volume to discover that data points for a particular material form a straight line, the slope of which gives the density of the material.

In this lesson designed to enhance literacy skills, students learn about population sampling by watching how a Native American tribe measures the number of fish in their lake.

Students learn about probability and the law of large numbers. Through increasingly large trial sizes, students witness the way in which results get closer and closer to 50%.

After a car and pedestrian accident occurs near the local school, concerned students, parents, and neighbors launch a neighborhood safety project. Students consider potential hazards and then collect traffic and pedestrian data that might shed light on the situation. A survey is conducted to determine how children in the neighborhood travel between home and school, and students challenge their classmates to increase their use of human-powered (foot and pedal) transportation. Students use spreadsheets to enter and represent data, analyze their observations and survey data to determine the most significant problems, and study possible solutions. They develop a proposal for improving traffic safety, create slideshows and brochures, and present their ideas to the local city council.

This unit plan was originally developed by the Intel® Teach program as an exemplary unit plan demonstrating some of the best attributes of teaching with technology.

This activity uses simulation to help students understand sampling variability and reason about whether a particular samples result is unusual, given a particular hypothesis. By using first candies, then a web applet, and varying sample size, students learn that larger samples give more stable and better estimates of a population parameter and develop an appreciation for factors affecting sampling variability.

The purpose of this document is to provide information to graduate and undergraduate research assistant (RAs) on how to conduct focus groups for purpose of collecting qualitative research data in the field of education. It also provides information on institutional requirements, such as ethics, the expectations of the principal investigator (PI). Though it may have applicability in other disciplines or contexts, this guide was originally prepared for RAs working in the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary.This guide is intended to supplement, rather than replace, direction from the PI offered in research team meetings, electronic communications or face-to-face conversations.

Add different salts to water, then watch them dissolve and achieve a dynamic equilibrium with solid precipitate. Compare the number of ions in solution for highly soluble NaCl to other slightly soluble salts. Relate the charges on ions to the number of ions in the formula of a salt. Calculate Ksp values.