During this exercise, students compare a series of satellite images taken 3-4 years apart to investigate the effects of human land use and annotate the images using ImageJ software.

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Students in an area remote from igneous and metamorphic rocks wrote papers on the properties of locally used building stones and gave a walking tour in which they presented their results.

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This lesson plan is written around a brief role-play in which students learn about and act out plants and animals in a salt marsh habitat as the tides change.

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In class, have students make a simple sketch of an outcrop shown in a slide (or computer projection) then discuss possible interpretations.

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In this series of inquiry-based exercises about volcanoes and plate tectonics, students will collect, plot, and interpret data and finish with a role-playing activity and a virtual field trip.

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Students are divided into teams, each of which is given a list of instructions and a GPS unit, and sent to find certain locations. At each stop, they identify a particular building stone or a plant.

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This simulation is intended to help students use what they already know (elementary probability) to the concept of radioactive decay and how it can be used to determine the absolute age of an igneous rock. The students will be simulating atoms of a radioactive isotope such as radiocarbon or uranium with M & M's or some other flattish object with differently-marked sides.

They simulate a half-life by shaking the M & M's and dropping them onto a sheet of paper. Roughly half of them will fall with the blank side up, just as half of the radioactive atoms decay into another element during a half-life. The students will remove the blank M & M's, graph the number of undecayed ones, and shake those, simulating another half-life. The students will pool their data, examine the effect of sample size, and assess how many half-lives it takes to run out of countable undecayed atoms. This model explains why real radiometric dating labs require minimal starting sample sizes and cannot give dates beyond a certain range (>40,000 yrs) for radiocarbon.

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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 exercise consists of a relay race in which students must identify specimens or answer questions at various stations.

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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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For this homework assignment, students have to draw two scaled timelines. The first is a personal timeline. They need to come up with the events themselves, an easy task that will build confidence for student who are intimidated by science and math. Following guidelines, they decide on a scale, and draw a linear timeline on which they plot their chosen events. Most students will primarily include recent events. They are asked to identify and explain any patterns in their timeline. Students should note the clustering at the present, and describe the emphasis on the present as resulting from memory, relevance to future hopes and worries, etc.

The second timeline is more traditional. The students are given 16 Earth history events with dates and asked to draw another timeline, using the procedure from the personal timeline, but the line is already drawn for them. They will probably recognize most of the events on the list, and will be keeping them in order and spacing them out on the timeline. They are once again asked to identify and explain patterns and should recognize the emphasis on the present. This time, availability of fossils/rocks and relevance to current conditions and problems are good answers.

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This is an online adventure game in which players prospect for minerals on a virtual geologically realistic world.

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Students work as a team to determine the causes, effects, and solutions to ozone depletion. They work out what they need to know, and split the team up to research different parts of the issue.

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Take students into the field and give each team a list of rocks or mineral types you want found and brought back within the time limit.

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This site has a collection of role-playing exercises that provide the students with equations and data to use in collaborative problem-solving.

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In this exercise, hydrology students role-play expert witnesses in a mock trial dealing with contamination of groundwater.

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In this role-playing scenario, students represent townspeople whose lives and livelihoods are endangered by an active volcano which may or may not erupt in the near future.

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Distribute a blank geologic-history timeline to pairs or small groups of students at the start of an Earth History unit or course and ask them work together to fill it out as best they can.

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In this unit, students will identify mass extinctions as paleontologists have done and recognize and understand the "pull of the recent," that is, the human tendency to know more about events closer to the present. Students prepare by reading an article prior to class that describes mass extinctions. At the beginning of class, students place historical events along a physical model of the geologic timescale. Next, they examine a diagram showing changes in biodiversity across the last 542 million years and identify patterns in those data. Students and the instructor then finish class by discussing that although fossils (and rocks) are critical for explaining the present and predicting the future, their mechanisms of preservation biases our understanding of Earth's past.

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During Unit 2, students will learn about the causes of two past mass extinctions and discuss the controversies surrounding these causes and the evidence upon which the theories in the debates are based. Before class, students will be assigned to read one of a set of different articles about theories for the causes of the end-Cretaceous and the end-Permian mass extinction. During class, students will get in groups with others who read different articles to pool their knowledge about flood-basalt eruptions and catastrophic asteroid impacts. They will re-group to compare and contrast the two proposed causes of the end-Permian and end-Cretaceous mass extinctions and the mass extinctions themselves.

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