In this activity, students explore how the timing of color change and leaf drop of New England's deciduous trees is changing.

Animal Lovers           Every animals have its own way to communicate with human. Likewise human also loves to human . Many peoples not like the animals and they behave crucial with animals.

Read this blog post for background information about the relationship between the biological environment and life processes and systems in Fast Plants. Growing healthy Fast Plants is easy if you understand how the environment can affect growth and development. Three broad categories of environmental factors influence how an individual plant matures through its life cycle:  1) the physical environment, 2) the chemical environment, 3) the biological environment.  Based on this information about standard conditions for optimal Fast Plants growth, one could easily design a wide variety of controlled experiments. Questions naturally arise while reading about optimal conditions that could be investigated by designing an experiment to how varying one condition affects growth, development and/or reproduction. This blog post is part of a series explaining how key environmental factors–physical, chemical, and biological–can impact the growth of Wisconsin Fast Plants.

Read this blog post for background information about the relationship between the physical environment and life processes and systems in Fast Plants. Growing healthy Fast Plants is easy if you understand how the environment can affect growth and development. Three broad categories of environmental factors influence how an individual plant matures through its life cycle:  1) the physical environment, 2) the chemical environment, 3) the biological environment. Based on this information about standard conditions for optimal Fast Plants growth, one could easily design a wide variety of controlled experiments. Questions naturally arise while reading about optimal conditions that could be investigated by designing an experiment to how varying one condition affects growth, development and/or reproduction. This blog post is part of a series explaining how key environmental factors "physical, chemical, and biological" can impact the growth of Wisconsin Fast Plants.

By the end of this course participants will…Understand how local phenomena interact with the Next Generation Science Standards, climate change, ecosystems, and people in a community.Experience how local phenomena and field investigations can build scientific understanding.

This Google Folder leads to an online module that is designed for students to learn concepts of evolution, descent with modification, natural selection, and more. There is both a student guide and a teacher's guide to help navigate through the module. Google forms are also available to support learning throughout the module. Interactive activities and simulations are also included for students to enjoy and learn from. 

The development of systems and network concepts for students can begin with this highly interactive inquiry into cell phone networks. Cell phones serve as a handy knowledge base on which to develop understanding. Each cell phone represents a node, and each phone’s address book represents an edge, or the calling relationships between cell phones. Students conceptualize the entire cell phone network by drawing a graphic that depicts each cell phone in the class as a circle (node) connected by directional lines (edges) to their classmate’s cell phones in their address book. Students are queried on the shortest pathway for calling and calling pathways when selected phones are knocked out using school and classroom scenarios.

Students then use a simulation followed by Cytoscape, visually graphing software, to model and interrogate the structure and properties of the class’s cell phone network. They investigate more advanced calling relationships and perturb the network (knock out cell towers) to reexamine the adjusted network’s properties. Advanced questions about roaming, cell towers and email focus on a deeper understanding of network behavior. Both the paper and software network exercises highlight numerous properties of networks and the activities of scientists with biological networks.

Target Audience:
This is an introductory module that we recommend teaching before each of our other modules to give students a background in systems. This module can be applied easily to any content area and works best as written for students between 6th and 12th grades but can be adapted for other ages. The lessons work best when in-person with students. If you are looking for an Introduction to Systems for remote learning, please use our Systems are Everywhere module.

The purpose of the resource is to investigate changes in the major land cover types of Study Sites by examining Landsat satellite images acquired years apart.

The purpose of the resource is to determine the major land cover type at a Land Cover Sample Site.

In this activity from NOAA's Okeanos Explorer Education Materials Collection, learners investigate how methane hydrates might have been involved with the Cambrian explosion.

In this curriculum module, students in high school life science, marine science, and/or chemistry courses act as interdisciplinary scientists and delegates to investigate how the changing carbon cycle will affect the oceans along with their integral populations.

The oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and play a critical role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide through the interaction of physical, chemical, and biological processes. As a result of anthropogenic activity, a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration (to 760 ppm) is expected to occur by the end of this century. A quarter of the total CO2 emitted has already been absorbed by the surface oceans, changing the marine carbonate system, resulting in a decrease in pH, a change in carbonate-ion concentrations, and a change in the speciation of macro and micronutrients. The shift in the carbonate system is already drastically affecting biological processes in the oceans and is predicted to have major consequences on carbon export to the deep ocean with reverberating effects on atmospheric CO2. Put in simple terms, ocean acidification is a complex phenomenon with complex consequences. Understanding complexity and the impact of ocean acidification requires systems thinking – both in research and in education. Scientific advancement will help us better understand the problem and devise more effective solutions, but executing these solutions will require widespread public participation to mitigate this global problem.

Through these lessons, students closely model what is occurring in laboratories worldwide and at Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) through Monica Orellana’s research to analyze the effect CO2 has on ocean chemistry, ecosystems and human societies. Students experiment, analyze public data, and prepare for a mock summit to address concerns. Student groups represent key “interest groups” and design two experiments to observe the effects of CO2 on seawater pH, diatom growth, algal blooms, nutrient availability, and/or shell dissolution.

Take a breath — where does the oxygen you inhaled come from? In our changing world, will we always have enough oxygen? What is in water that supports life? What is known? How do we know what we know about our vast oceans? These are just a few of the driving questions explored in this interactive STEAM high school curriculum module.

Students in marine science, environmental science, physics, chemistry, biology, integrated science, biotechnology and/or STEAM courses can use this curriculum module in order to use real-world, big data to investigate how our “invisible forest” influences ocean and Earth systems. Students build an art project to represent their new understanding and share this with the broader community.

This 4-week set of lessons is based on the oceanographic research of Dr. Anne Thompson of Portland State University in Oregon, which focuses on the abundant ocean phytoplankton Prochlorococcus. These interdisciplinary STEAM lessons were inspired by Dr. Thompson’s lab and fieldwork as well as many beautiful visualizations of Prochlorococcus, the ocean, and Earth. Students learn about the impact and importance of Prochlorococcus as the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic organism on our planet. Through the lessons, students act as both scientists and artists as they explore where breathable oxygen comes from and consider how to communicate the importance of tiny cells to human survival.

This module is written as a phenomenon-based, Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) three-dimensional learning unit. Each of the lessons below also has an integrated, optional Project-Based Learning component that guides students as they complete the PBL process. Students learn to model a system and also design and evaluate questions to investigate phenomena. Students ultimately learn what is in a drop of ocean water and showcase how their drop contributes to our health and the stability and dynamics of global systems.

This activity introduces students to stratigraphic correlation and the dating of geologic materials, using coastal sediment cores that preserve a record of past hurricane activity.

Patterns Biology is the culminating course in the 3-year high school Patterns Science sequence. Patterns Biology focuses on three-dimensional (3D) learning through culturally responsive, phenomena-based storylines that intertwine the disciplinary core ideas of biology with the scientific and engineering practices and crosscutting concepts as described in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

The Patterns High School Science Sequence (https://hsscience4all.org/) is a three year course pathway and curriculum aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

Each course utilizes:
- Common instructional strategies
- Real world phenomena
- Design challenges to engage students and support their learning.

For more information, contact us at info@pdxstem.org.

The curriculum is a combination of teacher-generated and curated open-content materials. The Teacher-generated materials are shared freely under a Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike Creative Commons License.

This unit includes 5 lessons that culminates in a persuasive argument in the form of letter to congressional member or grant proposal to Duke Energy.

Using inquiry-based reading, students will explore an anchor text and then develop their own supporting questions to guide their research.

This unit includes four lessons and two student working days that culminate in students designing an interactive audio and visual display using emaze. The purpose of this visual display is to document their journey throughout the process of becoming familiar with the traceability (and sometimes lack thereof) of beef, produce, and seafood regulations. With their visual displays, they will be able to educate their family, peers, and the public about food consumption choices and provide background knowledge about its origins.

Using inquiry-based reading and reading apprenticeship strategies, students will explore an anchor text as well as two supplemental texts which they will use to develop their own essential and supporting questions to guide their research. AP Environmental students will explore a variety of texts and resources to increase their knowledge and awareness of where our food (seafood, beef, and produce) in the United States originally is located, how it was obtained, and the laws that govern the process behind the scenes.

Hundreds of scientific articles. Written for middle and high school students. Approved by scientists. Free.