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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As a segment in PBS's Coping with Climate Change series, Hari Sreenivasan reports on the actions the city of Chicago is taking to mitigate climate change in an urban landscape.

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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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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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This worksheet walks students through how to use the igneous rock composition chart to identify rock types. Students are shown three different rocks and given the mineral percentages for each. Using the mineral percentages, student build a scale bar using colored segments to show the amount of different minerals. Students can then move their scale bar with the colored mineral segments across the igneous rock composition chart until the boundaries in the scale bar match the mineral field boundaries on the chart. Once the student finds a match, the student can see whether the rock is a granite, diorite, gabbro, or peridotite.

This worksheet allows students to complete this task physically, rather than mentally, and walks them through the process of igneous rock identification based on mineral composition. We find that it also makes the chart more understandable and approachable.

This worksheet uses the sketch-understanding program with built-in tutor: CogSketch . Therefore, students, instructors, and/or institution computer labs need to download the program from the CogSketch website: http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/software/cogsketch/. At any point during the worksheet, students can click the FEEDBACK button and their sketch is compared to the solution image. The built-in tutor identifies any discrepancies and reports pre-written feedback to help the student correct their sketch until they are done with the activity. Once worksheets are emailed to the instructor, worksheets can be batch graded and easily evaluated. This program allows instructors to assign sketching activities that require very little time commitment. Instead, the built-in tutor provides feedback whenever the student requests, without the presence of the instructor. More information on using the program and the activity is in the Instructor's Notes.

We have developed approximately two dozen introductory geoscience worksheets using this program. Each worksheet has a background image and instructions for a sketching task. You can find additional worksheets by searching for "CogSketch" using the search box at the top of this page. We expect to have uploaded all of them by the end of the summer of 2016.

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In this activity students will observe and investigate rocks in order to classify them in terms of color, shape, texture and size.

This activity is a classroom and schoolyard investigation where students collect daily temperature and precipitation readings, weather observations, and weekly phenology reports in a phenology binder and in nature journals. Students then analyze this data and compare to recorded values in the Weatherguide calendar.

This video and accompanying essay examine ways to reduce the environmental impact of burning coal. Two technologies are discussed: turning solid coal into a clean-burning fuel gas (syngas), and capture and storage of CO2.

The push to modernize Mexico's water and sanitation systems not only saved human lives, it also spurred economic growth, as illustrated in this video segment adapted from Rx for Survival.

In this activity, students learn about the scientific evidence supporting climate change, use this information to evaluate and improve conclusions some people might draw about climate change, and participate in a role-play to negotiate solutions to climate change.

This article continues an examination of each of the seven essential principles of climate literacy on which the online magazine Beyond Weather and the Water Cycle is structured. Principle 2 covers the complex interactions among the components of the Earth system. The author discusses the scientific concepts underlying the interactions and expands the discussion with diagrams, photos, and online resources.

This activity introduces students to global climate patterns by having each student collect information about the climate in a particular region of the globe. After collecting information, students share data through posters in class and consider factors that lead to differences in climate in different parts of the world. Finally, students synthesize the information to see how climate varies around the world.

Bell Telephone Science Hour produced this video in 1958, explaining how the production of CO2 from factories and automobiles is causing the atmosphere to warm, melting the polar ice caps, and causing the sea level to rise.

This 3-activity sequence addresses the question: "To what extent should coastal communities build or rebuild?" The activity uses social science and geoscience data to prepare an evidence-based response to the question, in targeted US coastal communities.