Plant water relations are presented in this learning activity to help participants understand the components of water potential, explain how water moves through plants, provide examples of plant adaptations to water stress, and have a general understanding of how water potential can be measured.

What do plants eat? This unit explores plants and how they make food.

The purpose of this task is to have students add mixed numbers with like denominators. This task illustrates the different kinds of solution approaches students might take to such a task.

After a brief history of plastics, students look more closely as some examples from the abundant types of plastics found in our day-to-day lives. They are introduced to the mechanical properties of plastics, including their stress-strain relationships, which determine their suitability for different industrial and product applications. These physical properties enable plastics to be fabricated into a wide range of products. Students learn about the different roles that plastics play in our lives, Young's modulus, and the effects that plastics have on our environment. Then students act as industrial engineers, conducting tests to compare different plastics and performing a cost-benefit analysis to determine which are the most cost-effective for a given application, based on their costs and measured physical properties.

While working in groups to facilitate peer tutoring, students manipulate a hands-on, physical model to better comprehend the dynamics of plate kinematics.

In this unit, students learn the very basics of navigation, including the different kinds of navigation and their purposes. The concepts of relative and absolute location, latitude, longitude and cardinal directions are explored, as well as the use and principles of maps and a compass. Students discover the history of navigation and learn the importance of math and how it ties into navigational techniques. Understanding how trilateration can determine one's location leads to a lesson on the global positioning system and how to use a GPS receiver. The unit concludes with an overview of orbits and spacecraft trajectories from Earth to other planets.

In this activity, learners work in groups to determine the mass and volume of four samples: glass marbles, steel washers or nuts, pieces of pine wood, and pieces of PVC pipe. Learners then plot the data points on a large class graph of mass vs. volume to discover that data points for a particular material form a straight line, the slope of which gives the density of the material.

This lesson is part of Software Carpentry workshops and teach an introduction to plotting and programming using python. This lesson is an introduction to programming in Python for people with little or no previous programming experience. It uses plotting as its motivating example, and is designed to be used in both Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry workshops. This lesson references JupyterLab, but can be taught using a regular Python interpreter as well. Please note that this lesson uses Python 3 rather than Python 2.

This task is part of a series presenting important foundational geometric results and constructions which are fundamental for more elaborate arguments. They are presented without a real world context so as to see the important hypotheses and logical steps involved as clearly as possible.

This task is designed to get at a common student confusion between the independent and dependent variables. This confusion often arises in situations like (b), where students are asked to solve an equation involving a function, and confuse that operation with evaluating the function.

Calls for the closer integration of science in political decision-making have been commonplace for decades. However, there are serious problems in the application of science to policy "” from energy to health and environment to education. To address these problems this article suggests to improve policy-makers' understanding of the imperfect nature of science through the understanding of 20 key concepts. An understanding of these concepts promotes improving interpretive scientific skills which allow policy makers to intelligently interrogate experts and advisers, and to understand the quality, limitations and biases of evidence. These skills are more accessible than those required to understand the fundamental science itself, and can form part of the broad skill set of most politicians and other professions. These concepts should be part of the education of civil servants, politicians, policy advisers and journalists "” and anyone else who may have to interact with science or scientists. Although this article is geared towards politicians, it provides an outstanding summary of how to talk and inquire about science and technology issues for anyone involved in technology at pretty much any level.

To gain a better understanding of the roles and functions of components of the human respiratory system and our need for clean air, students construct model lungs that include a diaphragm and chest cavity. They see how air moving in and out of the lungs coincides with diaphragm movement. Then student teams design and build a prototype face mask pollution filter. They use their model lungs to evaluate their prototypes to design requirements.

Students learn how a bill becomes law in the U.S. Congress and research legislation related to global warming.

This activity is designed to help students learn common names of pond life in Minnesota. To be most effective students should make a visit to the pond before participating in this activity.

Students design and build paper rockets around film canisters, which serve as engines. An antacid tablet and water are put into each canister, reacting to form carbon dioxide gas, and acting as the pop rocket's propellant. With the lid snapped on, the continuous creation of gas causes pressure to build up until the lid pops off, sending the rocket into the air. The pop rockets demonstrate Newton's third law of motion: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

In this hands-on science lesson, the students will observe (and eat!) cooked popcorn and uncooked popcorn. The students will understand why popcorn pops. The students will weigh cooked and uncooked popcorn to understand why cooked popcorn weighs more.

Students learn about population density within environments and ecosystems. They determine the density of a population and think about why population density and distribution information is useful to engineers for city planning and design as well as for resource allocation.

This lesson is the second of two that explore cellular respiration and population growth in yeasts. In the first lesson, students set up a simple way to indirectly observe and quantify the amount of respiration occurring in yeast-molasses cultures. Based on questions that arose during the first lesson and its associated activity, in this lesson students work in small groups to design experiments that will determine how environmental factors affect yeast population growth.

In this task students construct and compare linear and exponential functions and find where the two functions intersect. One purpose of this task is to demonstrate that exponential functions grow faster than linear functions even if the linear function has a higher initial value and even if we increase the slope of the line. This task could be used as an introduction to this idea.

SSAC Physical Volcanology module. Students build a spreadsheet for an iterative calculation to find volume of bubbles and hence porosity, permeability and gas escape as a function of depth.