Loopy dot diagrams uses fruit loops as a manipulative to help students develop the basic skills for making Lewis dot structures to model covalent bonding.

In this lab students will explore first hand what sorts of processes occur when scientists and engineers try to identify a landing site for a mission to Mars. This will mimic the process used to select the MER rover landing sites, and what will be used for future missions. First, students briefly become a planetary geologist, engineer or astrobiologist. Second, from the point of view the students feel is appropriate for their new position, and using the same constraints employed by the scientific teams preparing for forthcoming Mars missions, students will identify their top list of candidate landing sites and submit a short report describing them to me by the following class period. Third, in the following class period, all three groups of experts will work together to narrow down the site selection to a top candidate. Where would you send the next lander if the choice was up to you?
Each student group, constituted randomly, is provided with the appropriate role-playing sheet from the lab assignment.

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This cooperative classroom activity will allow students to apply their knowledge of magnetism and electricity. The students will create a circuit that lights a flashlight bulb and simultaneously practice the skills of prediction, observation, inferrence, recording, investigation and communication.

This activity is a classroom investigation where students test the impact track shape has on vertical distance of a rolling object.

Upon arrival in the lab, students are designated as an engineer, a biologist, or a geologist. Working in these groups, each group uses available Mars data (including, but not limited to, Mars geologic maps, topography, thermal inertia data) to identify their top three landing sites on the basis of provided criteria. In jig-saw fashion, new groups are generated consisting of one geologist, one engineer, and one geologist. These new groups must agree on their top three landing sites. Finally, the entire class must agree on a landing site.

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In this activity, a six-foot length of nylon rope is suspended at both ends to model a mathematical curve known as the hyperbolic cosine. In a write-pair-share activity, students are asked to make a conjecture concerning the nature of the curve and then embark on a guided discovery in which they attempt to determine a precise mathematical description of the curve using function notation.

This activity is an guided inquiry based lesson where students measure and graph data on a two-coordinate graph the growth of a toy animal submerged in water over a period of time.

This activity is an inquiry approach to term and concept introduction. Students will work in a jigsaw format to read through the descriptions of eyewitness accounts from earthquakes and assess a Mercalli value. In the jigsaw groups, they will compare the different Mercalli and Richter values and describe the basic events that occurred during different earthquakes. They will share this information in order to collaboratively assess the strengths and weaknesses of this scale relative to the Richter magnitudes provided. They will also begin to determine what types of hazards result from earthquakes.

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Included in the activity description
Metacognitive components of the activity
Describing one's thoughts to another person requires the problem-solver to listen and attend to their own thoughts as well. The questions and clarifications that the listener describes is yet another window into the problem-solver's thinking.
Metacognitive goals for this activity:
Promote reflective thinking, communication skills, better reasoning, listening skills, and better problem-solving and conceptual understanding.
Assessing students' metacognition
There have been several studies of this instructional strategy. I have used it in my own instruction of mathematics and science for more than 25 years.

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Students in a learning community that includes classics and geology complete labs involving rocks and minerals. The class meets at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a weekend; in groups, the students document and describe the earth materials displayed in art halls of ancient cultures. The following week reformed groups meet in class to compare and contrast their museum-based findings and explore the geological concepts that underlie the use of materials by ancient cultures (jigsaw assignment). It is assumed that students have some prior knowledge of the ancient cultures being studied at the museum through a paired course, assigned reading, or introductory lecture.

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In this biology field experience, students will explore trees of Minnesota. Working in cooperative groups, students will discover biodiversity of trees and determine populations of tree species through observation and use of dichotomous keys.

At the end of a six-week class or unit on global warming, students role-play representatives from various countries and organizations at an international summit on global warming.

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This jigsaw exercise has students study national parks from different perspectives. Groups can be divided up depending on the nature of the class: historian, meteorologist, geologist, and biologist.

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Students characterize how climate change impacts natural hazards and pose research-based solutions to the county Emergency Management Agency. Presentations require the use of local data, created figures, and reliable sources. This activity builds from an assignment which has students identify and describe projected local climate trends using the USGS National Climate Change Viewer followed by Unit 1 and 2 of the Map Your Hazards InTeGrate Module.

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In this jigsaw activity, students discover four different aspects of natural hazards on the Island of Hawaii. The goal for students is to design a hazard zone map that combines these four topics and that could be used for making land-use decisions before future natural hazards occur. Students will first be assigned to one of four Hazard Specialties (lava flows, explosive eruptions, earthquakes, tsunami), where they complete an exercise and make a preliminary hazard zone map with their specialty group from a single hazard map. Then the students will reorganize into Hazard Assessment Teams, with one student from each of the four Hazard Specialties, to develop a final hazard zone map based on information on all four hazards. Each Hazard Assessment Team will make a recommendation about the risks of natural hazards to existing and future development in Hilo, Kailua-Kona, and Kalapana on the Island of Hawaii.

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In this jigsaw activity, students discover four different aspects of natural hazards on the Island of Hawaii. The goal for students is to design a hazard zone map that combines these four topics and that could be used for making land-use decisions before future natural hazards occur.

Students will first be assigned to one of four Hazard Specialties (lava flows, explosive eruptions, earthquakes, tsunami), where they complete an exercise and make a preliminary hazard zone map with their specialty group from a single hazard map.
Then the students will reorganize into Hazard Assessment Teams, with one student from each of the four Hazard Specialties, to develop a final hazard zone map based on information on all four hazards. Each Hazard Assessment Team will make a recommendation about the risks of natural hazards to existing and future development in Hilo, Kailua-Kona, and Kalapana on the Island of Hawaii.

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Students work in teams to design a tabletop supply organizer inspired by the natural home of an insect species. Their prototype stores the group’s classroom supplies (scissors, crayon boxes, pencils, and glue sticks). In addition to following measurement constraints that apply to their prototype, students must design their supply organizer with the idea that supplies must be easily retrievable and the organizer must be sturdy enough to withstand everyday classroom wear and tear. Students test their prototype in the classroom for a period of 5 days and evaluate its effectiveness.

This activity is designed to help deepen our language and understanding of taking observations. We will also learn that water molecules are in constant motion.

In this optional activity, students analyze maps of wind patterns from three levels in the atmosphere in order to infer global atmospheric circulation patterns and their role in balancing the radiation budget they established in Units 4 and 5. The main activity is a jigsaw in which students explore a single map on their own prior to class, confer with their classmates in specialty groups, and then synthesize atmospheric circulation for an assigned latitudinal zone. In these synthesis groups, students create maps and cross-section concept sketches to use in a full class discussion at the end of class. A follow-up assignment asks students to infer the relationship between global atmospheric circulation patterns and precipitation and then predict possible consequences of changes in these patterns due to global warming.

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Students learn how to use the Paleobiology Database (PBDB) to produce maps of fossils on the present-day Earth's surface, as well as past continental configurations. They will then use these maps to understand the biogeographic distributions of fossil organisms, and how these distributions constitute evidence for past continental plate positions.

This activity is designed to be flexible and can be used as a lecture, lab, or homework activity. The duration of the activity ranges from 1-1.5 hours, depending on how many fossil distributions are plotted.

Students can work as individuals or in pairs and class size can range from a small seminar (< 10 students) to a large lecture (> 100), as long as sufficient computer facilities are available.

Each student or student pair will need access to a laptop or desktop computer connected to the internet, running an internet browser.
The Pangea Puzzle (Acrobat (PDF) 62kB Jul5 17)

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