Students experience a simulation of echolation, using the sensory method to walk along a path while blindfolded. This relates to the issue of bycatching by fisheries, which they learned about in the associated lesson. Bycatching affects marine animals, especially dolphins, which use echolocation to identify the location of objects in the water, but have difficulty identifying nets, and thus are often caught accidentally. Students learn how echolocation works, why certain animals use it to determine the size, shape and distance of objects, and how humans can potentially take advantage of dolphins' echolocation ability when developing bycatch avoidance methods.

Students observe and discuss a vacuum cleaner model of a baghouse to better understand how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.

This activity is a active learning activity where students will observe and represent the layers of the Earth from the core to the lithosphere.

Students wear nametags of an ion and find others throughout the school with whom they can create ionic compounds.

With the assistance of a few teacher demonstrations (online animation, using a radiometer and rubbing hands), students review the concept of heat transfer through convection, conduction and radiation. Then they apply an understanding of these ideas as they use wireless temperature probes to investigate the heating capacity of different materials sand and water under heat lamps (or outside in full sunshine). The experiment models how radiant energy drives convection within the atmosphere and oceans, thus producing winds and weather conditions, while giving students the hands-on opportunity to understand the value of remote-sensing capabilities designed by engineers. Students collect and record temperature data on how fast sand and water heat and cool. Then they create multi-line graphs to display and compare their data, and discuss the need for efficient and reliable engineer-designed tools like wireless sensors in real-world applications.

The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate how aircrafts have decreased the amount of time it takes to transport people and cargo. Students will compute the time it takes to travel between two cities for several modes of transportation including trucks, trains and airplanes. Students will also do some critical thinking to determine why airplanes are not always used.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module/Geology of National Parks course. Students use a topographic map and spreadsheet to find how many Big Macs they burned off on a five-mile hike at Catoctin Mountain Park.

This activity is an introduction to the concept of levers, the classes, and their parts using the musculoskeletal system.

Library Carpentry lesson: An introduction to Git. What We Will Try to Do Begin to understand and use Git/GitHub. You will not be an expert by the end of the class. You will probably not even feel very comfortable using Git. This is okay. We want to make a start but, as with any skill, using Git takes practice. Be Excellent to Each Other If you spot someone in the class who is struggling with something and you think you know how to help, please give them a hand. Try not to do the task for them: instead explain the steps they need to take and what these steps will achieve. Be Patient With The Instructor and Yourself This is a big group, with different levels of knowledge, different computer systems. This isn’t your instructor’s full-time job (though if someone wants to pay them to play with computers all day they’d probably accept). They will do their best to make this session useful. This is your session. If you feel we are going too fast, then please put up a pink sticky. We can decide as a group what to cover.

Join us for a 30 minute guest webinar by Brandon Butler, Director of Information Policy at the University of Virginia. This webinar will introduce questions to think about when picking a license for your research. You can signal which license you pick using the License Picker on the Open Science Framework (OSF; https://osf.io). The OSF is a free, open source web application built to help researchers manage their workflows. The OSF is part collaboration tool, part version control software, and part data archive. The OSF connects to popular tools researchers already use, like Dropbox, Box, Github, Mendeley, and now is integrated with JASP, to streamline workflows and increase efficiency.

This activity is a guided inquiry where students will find their own lichen and classify it into one of three categories. They will collect, analyze, and present their finding to the class.

This activity is based on inquiry, guided discovery, observation and discussion to help students learn the objectives in learning more about a fish, labeling its body part and learning about its life cycle.

This unit covers the processes of photosynthesis, extinction, biomimicry and bioremediation. In the first lesson on photosynthesis, students learn how engineers use the natural process of photosynthesis as an exemplary model of a complex yet efficient process for converting solar energy to chemical energy or distributing water throughout a system. In the next lesson on species extinction, students learn that it is happening at an alarming rate. Students discover that the destruction of habitat is the main reason many species are threatened and how engineers are trying to stop this habitat destruction. The third lesson introduces students to the idea of biomimicry or looking to nature for engineering ideas. And, in the fourth and final lesson, students learn about a specialty branch of engineering called bioremediation the use of living organisms to aid in the clean up of pollutant spills.

In this activity on page 1 of the PDF, learners compare the relative sizes of biological objects (like DNA and bacteria) that can't be seen by the naked eye. Learners will be surprised to discover the range of sizes in the microscopic world. This activity can be followed up with a second activity, "What's in a microbe?", located on page 3 in the same resource.

Students plant sunflower seeds in plastic cups, and once germinated, expose them to varying light or soil moisture conditions. They measure growth of the seedlings every few days using non-standard measurement (inch cubes). After a few weeks, they compare the growth of plants exposed to the different conditions and make bar comparative graphs, which they analyze to draw conclusions about the needs of plants.

Drawings and visualizations are used to help participants conceptualize the location and steps involved in the light reactions of photosynthesis. The drawsing include light reactions of photosynthesis including location and steps for non-cyclic and cyclic photophosphorylation.

Students examine various materials to investigate how they interact with light. They use five characteristics—translucency, transparency, opaqueness, reflectivity and refractivity—to describe how light interacts with the objects.

This activity is an experiment where students learn about angles of reflection and use that knowledge to reflect a light beam around obstacles to a target across the classroom.

During a power failure, or when we go outside at night, we grab a flashlight so we can find our way. What happens inside a flashlight that makes the bulb light up? Why do we need a switch to turn on a flashlight? Have you ever noticed that for the flashlight to work you must orient the batteries a certain way as you insert them into the casing? Many people do not know that a flashlight is a simple series circuit. In this hands-on activity, students build this everyday household item and design their own operating series circuit flashlights.