Play-Doh model of a geologic map

Provenance: Carol Ormand Ph.D., Carleton College
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.
Students analyze a geologic map of an angular unconformity that truncates a pair of dikes, with some topography. When students have deciphered the map and constructed a cross-section, I show them a Play-Doh model of the geology and ask them to compare it to their mental model of the area.

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Link the college or university operations with local ecology. In this study, students use a tool from urban ecology, the nitrogen budget, to research the inputs, outputs and subsytem transfers of nitrogen on the college or university campus.

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This activity engages students in the analysis of climate data to first find areas in the southern United States that are now close to having conditions in which the malaria parasite and its mosquito hosts thrive and then attempt to forecast when areas might become climatically suitable.

Students in this course explore designs of a future Carleton College student house. This is a multi-year project where students from the social sciences, humanities / arts, and natural sciences explore parts of the design of an actual house.

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The classic campus-based project is an environmental or sustainability assessment, often referred to as an environmental audit. This course, taught at Carleton in 2001, describes how this type of project can be undertaken. In this scenario, a student, campus environmental group or class researches aspects the envinormental impact of the school.

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Play-Doh model of a fenster

Provenance: Carol Ormand Ph.D., Carleton College
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.
Students use Play-Doh to explore the map patterns created by faulting + erosion. We begin with simple scenarios and progress to more complex possibilities.

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This is Unit 1 of a larger module and centers on the fundamental concepts of major storms and community resilience. In this unit, students acquire a vocabulary related to storm systems and risk, engage in practical exercises on event probability and frequency, and complete written activities and oral presentations that reinforce these concepts, using two case studies as examples.

Students gain experience using a spreadsheet and working with others to decide how to conduct their model 'experiments' with the NASA GEEBITT (Global Equilibrium Energy Balance Interactive Tinker Toy). This activity helps students become more familiar with the physical processes that made Earth's early climate so different from that of today. Students also acquire first-hand experience with a limitation in modeling, specifically, parameterization of critical processes.

Play-Doh model of a plunging syncline

Provenance: Carol Ormand Ph.D., Carleton College
Reuse: This item is offered under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ You may reuse this item for non-commercial purposes as long as you provide attribution and offer any derivative works under a similar license.
Working in small groups, students build Play-Doh models of 3 folds (one upright, one vertical, one plunging). They slice each of their models to create 3D block models, sketch block diagrams of each fold, and sketch structure contour maps.

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In this activity for undergraduate students, learners build a highly simplified computer model of thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean and conduct a set of simulation experiments to understand the complex dynamics inherent in this simple model.

In this activity, students investigate soil erosion and how a changing climate could influence erosion rates in agricultural areas. This activity is part of a larger InTeGrate module called Growing Concern.

This series of activities is designed to introduce students to the role of sediments and sedimentary rocks in the global carbon cycle. Students learn how stable carbon isotopes can be used to reconstruct ancient sedimentary environments. Students will make some simple calculations, formulate hypotheses, and think about the implications of their results. The activity includes an optional demonstration of the density separation of a sediment sample into a light, organic fraction and a heavier, mineral fraction.

Sustainability is a complex term applied to many different contexts in a variety of ways. As a result, it can be challenging to determine how sustainable something really is. In this module, students will use an analytical framework with publicly available data to formulate questions, analyze data, and report metrics of sustainability.

This activity with a lab report instructs students to solve and plot 160,000 years' worth of ice core data from the Vostok ice core using Excel or similar spreadsheets to analyze data. Students learn about ice cores and what they can tell us about past atmospheric conditions and the past atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and CH4.