In this short lab, students observe the movement of an air bubble in a small level, attached to a toy truck, as it is moved from a stop, to a steady speed and back to a stop. This gives a visual to the concepts positive acceleration, zero acceleration and negative acceleration.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module. Students use spreadsheets to help find the difference in percentages of salaries between dirty and clean jobs.

This activity is a field investigation where students will observe three areas with high sensitivity to pollution, and test water quality in two of the locations.

Students are divided into small groups. Each group chooses a channel cross section and makes a discharge measurement both using a current meter and a surface float. Students share the data collected in the lab but each student calculates discharge on their own and answers related questions.
Designed for a geomorphology course

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In this quantitative field activity, students collect field data on channel geometry, flow velocity, and bed materials. Using these data, they apply flow resistance equations and sediment transport relations to estimate the bankfull discharge and to determine if the flow is sufficient to mobilize the bed.

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This is a student-centered activity for a synchronous online course where students access google slides to complete during a video conferencing session (eg. Zoom) in break out rooms. Students will be introduced to plate tectonics through a series of scaffolded mini activities which includes: active learning jigsaws, group research and presentations, and assessments. Students will familiarize themselves with types of plate boundaries as well as features found at plate boundaries using the Jules Verne Voyager Jr. website, and will use GPS data to visualize direction and speed of plate motion. Additional activities suggested include using Google Earth to visualize plate boundaries, drawing a transect across a plate boundary, and calculating the rate of plate motion using the Hawaiian Islands.

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This unit provides pre-service teachers in methods courses with resources for teaching geoscience content and utilizing the methods of geoscience. Pre-service teachers will prepare an annotated bibliography of instructional resources in the areas of geology, meteorology/climatology, oceanography, and astronomy. They will select one of these resources and prepare a full lesson plan based on the resource that emphasizes the methods of geoscience and also incorporates interdisciplinary material from either biology, chemistry, physics, or the social sciences.

This activity is a guided inquiry on the density of two liquids and salt. Students will then create their own experiment to back their findings.

In this unit, students make regular journal entries about a plant/animal/insect community in the natural area around our school and use this to create a Non-fiction Class Book. They also interview family/resources to discover, record and present stories about human relationships with nature from their culture(s).

Students are initially assigned to one of four maps of the world: Seismology, Volcanology, Geochronology or Topography. They are also given a map of the world's plate boundaries and are asked to classify the boundaries based upon the data from their assigned map. Students are then assigned to a tectonic plate, such that each plate group contains at least one "expert" on each map. As a group, they must classify their plate's boundaries using data from all four maps. Recent volcanic and seismic events are discussed in the plate tectonic context. Has minimal/no quantitative component Uses geophysics to solve problems in other fields

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The exercise is built around 4 global data maps: 1) Earthquake location and depth, 2) Location of recent volcanic activity, 3) Seafloor Age, and 4) Topography and Bathymetry
The exercise is based on the "jigsaw" concept, mixing the students to work in different groups during the exercise. DPB includes opportunities for all students to make oral presentations to their fellow students. The exercise is done over about 3 hours. I usually do it in 50 minute periods on three separate days, but it can also be done in a three hour lab period.
Although the data used in DPB are state-of-the-art, the exercise does not depend on student access to computers. Unlike many others, this exercise is based on observation and classification, rather than learning computer data manipulation skills.
The students enjoy DPB and many report it as the best activity of their semester! I hope that you will find it useful in your classroom!

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This activity is an outside the classroom teaching with data experiment. It allows students to collect and analyze data in ordet to create a distance versus time graph and calculate average velocity from the graph.

This is an investigation where students observe what happens to land after it is mined. Students will create a hypothesis, observe their model, conclude what happens to land after it is mined, and discover the role humans play in land conservation.

Students will become familiar with the properties of magnets. They will design a data collection sheet to show where magnets are hidden in a closed box with their explanation of their findings. They will also design a game or activity using magnets and present their activity to the class.

In this in-class activity, students are challenged to identify rock units and geologic features and determine the relative ages of these features without prior instruction in the classical methods of relative age determination.

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Students examine a video clip showing dead albatross chicks with their guts full of plastics. They are asked to write down a list of all the steps that lead to the chicks ingesting the plastic. Through pooling of information and group work the class creates a mind map of the steps including those that are geological, oceanographic and anthropogenic. This mind map becomes the tool for organizing the presentation of material through the course of the semester.

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I find that when assigning lengthy readings for in-class discussion, it is extremely helpful to guide students' preparation with specific questions, and incorporate these in worksheets that explicitly call for students to write out their responses before entering the classroom. These worksheets can provide some added structure for whole-class discussion, or can provide a specific agenda for review of the readings in small groups. Because these readings are more than a few years old, I have also found it useful to assign small groups of students to give brief reports that expand on and update the issues raised in the readings.

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This lab activity shows students the Law of Conservation of Matter and intermolecular forces by having them dissolve packing peanuts in acetone.

This activity is a field investigation where students find out what makes up soil.

This activity is a field investigation where students find out what makes up soil.