This is a three-part project spanning five weeks that uniquely interweaves individual and cooperative learning in the context of health care reform and the 2008 United States presidential campaign.

This is an activity that involves students modeling the behavior and competition that Charles Darwin's finches would have gone through as they competed for food and space on the Galapagos Islands. Some will survive. Some won't.

Teach students about P-waves and S-waves by having them model them with their own bodies.

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This activity will allow students to see light bending. The students will be able to calculate the amount of bend or refraction that occurs with various mediums.

Research reveals that if students are presented with negative information about environmental issues and they are not also provided with a plan for action, they often manifest denial on many levels. This exercise is designed to get students to directly address the emotions they face when learning about environmental issues and to make an action plan to address them in their individual lives.

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Demonstrate Bernoulli's Principle using balloons and and pop cans. Real world concept of lift can be applied to an airplane demonstration.

This activity is designed to help students understand the structures and functions of the cell by building a model.

Working with data, students develop 3-D understandings of Earth structures using inference to construct a block diagram from a collection of 2-D information.

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X-ray diffraction is a quick and valuable tool for identifying minerals. Minerals are an integral portion of our everyday life, in addition to composing our planet! They help bring electricity into our homes and remove our bathtub rings. In this lab, students analyze the X-ray diffraction patterns of three household cleansers, Ajax, White Magic, and Soft Scrub, in order to identify the abrasive minerals in each.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This activity features a problem set designed to make students think carefully about the link between phase diagrams and textures.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

In this activity students work through a binary eutectic phase diagram in small groups and try to determine a set of generalizations that explain the behavior of such systems (e.g., "the first liquid produced upon heating is always the eutectic composition").

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This Ology game site contains rules and a board for a board game dealing with extinction, particularly the modern biodiversity crisis. The players need to read endangered species facts from the board to answer questions on the spaces that they land in so that they can progress. Users can follow links to what to do and materials needed for the game.

This exercise contains two interrelated modules that introduce students to modern biological techniques in the area of Bioinformatics, which is the application of computer technology to the management of biological information. The need for Bioinformatics has arisen from the recent explosion of publicly available genomic information, such as that resulting from the Human Genome Project.

A weekly bioregion homework assignment exploring for the student local landscape changes. What were the past natural conditions and native uses to todays uses, as well as projected changes in the coming decades.

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Sample Socratic questions and answers regarding the biosphere.

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In this laboratory exercise students create a fence diagram cross section of the Atlantic Coastal Plain by correlating a sequence of well logs recorded along a NW -- SE transect through coastal North Carolina. The well logs in this exercise are based on actual well logs published by the United States Geological Survey, providing a realistic cross section of the Atlantic Coastal Plain when the exercise is completed. Students must make intelligent decisions as to how best to draw lithostratigraphic correlations between well logs, guided by information provided by biostratigraphic correlations. After completing this lab, students should have a better understanding of how strata are deposited in time and space under the control of transgressions and regressions, how geologists correlate strata, and they should be able to recognize disconformities and angular unconformities in cross sections.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

Students use the evolutionary distribution of oceanic phytoplankton fossils to date the age of pelagic and hemipelagic sedimentary rocks. They correlate this section to another as an exercise in oil prospecting.

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Students are given data for three unidentified hypothetical environments and asked to determine the relative effects of mixed layer thickness, sediment accumulation rate, and bioturbation rate based on a simple diffusion-based model of bioturbation.
Students are asked to identify the three unknown environments based on the data.
Students are then asked questions regarding the effects of the model on temporal resolution and porewater chemistry and the resulting fossil assemblages.

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The 50-minute group-based activity for hundreds of students starts by constructing bio-zones for a given set of fossil ranges. Results are reviewed using a sequence of clicker questions to discuss the optimal biostratigraphic decisions, the necessary types of thinking, and how to articulate a concise yet complete textual description of corresponding biozones.

A set of stratigraphic logs is then used to interpret changes in depositional environment across space and time. Students also decide (and justify decisions) on the optimal choice of fossils for use when interpreting variations in depositional environment. The final result is an interpreted geologic section based on stratigraphic and biostratigraphic data.

This interpretive exercise is only three weeks into a first course on Earth and life through time, so guidance is provided using carefully designed question sequences posed using "clicker" (personal response system) and/or for individual or whole class discussion.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

This activity is an introduction to the study of birds. Students will gain observation and classification skills.