A quantitative illustration of how non-renewable resources are depleted while renewable resources continue to provide energy. Students remove beads (units of energy) from a bag (representing a country). A certain number of beads are removed from the bag each "year." At some point, no non-renewable beads remain. Student groups have different ratios of renewable and non-renewable energy beads. A comparison of the remaining beads and time when they ran out of energy shows the value of utilizing a greater proportion of renewable resources as a sustainable energy resources.

Students analyze real-world data for five types of renewable energy, as found on the online Renewable Energy Living Lab. They identify the best and worst locations for production of each form of renewable energy, and then make recommendations for which type that state should pursue.

The purpose of the task is to have students reflect on the meaning of repeating decimal representation through approximation. A formal explanation requires the idea of a limit to be made precise, but 7th graders can start to wrestle with the ideas and get a sense of what we mean by an "infinite decimal."

In this activity, students will mix paints and create a formula to match a muted color. The formula will be tested. Students will discuss their observations and develop new questions about color mixing to pursue.

This task presents students with some creative geometric ways to represent the fraction one half. The goal is both to appeal to students' visual intuition while also providing a hands on activity to decide whether or not two areas are equal.

This task provides a context for indentifying different ways of representing half of a rectangle.

Through this independent research project, students experience the process of doing real economics research using appropriate econometric methods.

This is an Interactive Lecture Demonstration for resolving force vectors using the suspended block demonstration (1J30.10).

The PhET Activities Database is a collection of resources for using PhET sims. It includes hundreds of lesson plans, homework assignments, labs, clicker questions, and more. Some activities have been created by the PhET team and some have been created by teachers.

The purpose, components, and functions of the respiratory system are presented in this learning through disussion and visualizations. Participants learn about the nasal cavity, pharynx, larynx, trachea, bronchi, bronchioles, and alveoli.

The task is intended to address standards regarding sample space, independence, probability distributions and permutations/combinations.

Student pairs reverse engineer objects of their choice, learning what it takes to be an engineer. Groups each make a proposal, create a team work contract, use tools to disassemble a device, and sketch and document their full understanding of how it works. They compile what they learned into a manual and write-up that summarizes the object's purpose, bill of materials and operation procedure with orthographic and isometric sketches. Then they apply some of the steps of the engineering design process to come up with ideas for how the product or device could be improved for the benefit of the end user, manufacturer and/or environment. They describe and sketch their ideas for re-imagined designs (no prototyping or testing is done). To conclude, teams compile full reports and then recap their reverse engineering projects and investigation discoveries in brief class presentations. A PowerPoint(TM) presentation, written report and oral presentation rubrics, and peer evaluation form are provided.

This lesson in part of Software Carpentry workshop and teach novice programmers to write modular code and best practices for using R for data analysis. an introduction to R for non-programmers using gapminder data The goal of this lesson is to teach novice programmers to write modular code and best practices for using R for data analysis. R is commonly used in many scientific disciplines for statistical analysis and its array of third-party packages. We find that many scientists who come to Software Carpentry workshops use R and want to learn more. The emphasis of these materials is to give attendees a strong foundation in the fundamentals of R, and to teach best practices for scientific computing: breaking down analyses into modular units, task automation, and encapsulation. Note that this workshop will focus on teaching the fundamentals of the programming language R, and will not teach statistical analysis. The lesson contains more material than can be taught in a day. The instructor notes page has some suggested lesson plans suitable for a one or half day workshop. A variety of third party packages are used throughout this workshop. These are not necessarily the best, nor are they comprehensive, but they are packages we find useful, and have been chosen primarily for their usability.

In this task students draw the graphs of two functions from verbal descriptions. Both functions describe the same situation but changing the viewpoint of the observer changes where the function has output value zero. This small twist forces the students to think carefully about the interpretation of the dependent variable.

Students write a biographical sketch of an artist or athlete who lives on the edge, riding the gravity wave, to better understand how these artists and athletes work with gravity and manage risk. Note: The literacy activities for the Mechanics unit are based on physical themes that have broad application to our experience in the world concepts of rhythm, balance, spin, gravity, levity, inertia, momentum, friction, stress and tension.

This task provides a good opportunity to use isosceles triangles and their properties to show an interesting and important result about triangles inscribed in a circle: the fact that these triangles are always right triangles is often referred to as Thales' theorem. It does not have a lot of formal prerequisites, just the knowledge that the sum of the three angles in a triangle is 180 degrees.

The result here complements the fact, presented in the task ``Right triangles inscribed in circles I,'' that any triangle inscribed in a circle with one side being a diameter of the circle is a right triangle. A second common proof of this result rotates the triangle by 180 degrees about M and then shows that the quadrilateral, obtained by taking the union of these two triangles, is a rectangle.